Athletes Banned for Doping

Introduction

I came across this web site earlier today and initially from an Excel point of view, I was interested to analyse the data. A total of 532 Athletes and Associated Staff are currently banned from competition, mainly for doping offences. Here are some screenshots of my findings. Firstly, not everyone who is banned is an athlete, a small number of the people on the list are associated with athletes, such as their coaches.

Age Distribution

I created a histogram to show the distribution of ages of athletes and their associates.

What came as a big surprise to me was that some of the people who have been banned are in the 50s, some in their 60s and some are even in their 70s.

Sex and Whether an Athlete

We can see that around 62% of those banned are male, therefore around 38% are female.

33 of those banned, 6.20%, out of a total of 532 people who have been banned are associates

Descriptive Statistics

Having been surprised by the extreme age of some of those on the list, I evaluated some descriptive statistics for everyone, for athletes only and then for anyone over 50 years of age.

Country of Origin or Affiliation

Given the history of widespread cheating known to have occurred in the former Soviet Union, I analysed the list by country: Russia came top with 79 banned people.

The main cheating countries are:

I also assigned every country to its world region and here is the distribution of cases by region

Conclusions

In the grand scheme of things, 532 banned athletes and their associates is not such a large list of people. However, one has to remember that these cheats line up against and often beat, athletes who do not and who have never cheated. Moreover, athletes who cheat and win deprive honest athletes of the reward for their hard work and perseverance.

That Russia is still top of such a list speaks volumes about their cynicism and scant regard for fair play.

Duncan Williamson

1st May 2021