Paris 2024: who actually struck gold
Welcome to Mapped — one dataset turned into one map, every week. This week: the Paris 2024 medal table.
The headline from Paris 2024 was a photo finish you could see from space: the United States and China finished level at 40 gold medals each. It was the first time in Summer Olympic history the two superpowers ended a Games tied for gold at the top of the table, with the US edging ahead only on total medals.
Here’s the whole gold-medal map:
What you’re looking at
Behind the two leaders, the drop is steep. Japan took 20 golds, hosts France a strong 16 on home soil, and Australia 18 — a remarkable haul for a country of 27 million. The Netherlands (15) and Great Britain (14) kept Europe well represented near the top.
The best stories, as always, are in the pale corners of the map. New Zealand won 10 golds — extraordinary per-capita output. Uzbekistan took eight, mostly in boxing and judo. And a long tail of nations — Kenya, Ireland, Georgia, Romania and dozens more — turned a single event into a moment of national history.
In total, 64 nations won at least one gold, and just over 90 countries medalled at all. Roughly two-thirds of the teams that showed up went home with nothing on the board — a reminder of how concentrated Olympic success really is.
The takeaway
For all the talk of a level playing field, Olympic gold pools at the top: two countries won 80 golds between them, while most of the world won none.
Make this map yourself
Every map in this series is a live maproll URL — no design tool, no export. This one is just:
https://api.maproll.io/map.svg?scope=world
&data=US:40,CN:40,JP:20,AU:18,FR:16...
&theme=light-blue&legendTitle=Gold%20medals
Swap in your own numbers, change the theme, add a title — and embed it anywhere an image tag works. Build one in 60 seconds →
Source: 2024 Summer Olympics medal table (official IOC results). Next week on Mapped: a century of Nobel Prizes.