The past 17 days have been the most intense of my “SportsBall career”.
In 2024 for the Paris Olympics, we started drawing graphs to explain sports that only come around once every four years. It’s what first put SportsBall on the map. So 18 months later, I cleared the calendar and went all in on Winter Olympics coverage, knowing the timing was right for sports education.
Eight videos later, I’m exhausted. But it’s been more fun than I could have imagined, and the thesis was proven, with more than 20 million views on explainer videos.
Back to the normal sports, I guess.
Now for this newsletter 🗞️
This email is the “catchall of the week”. On Sundays, we round up all the things we drew, what you may have missed, and a deep dive of the thinking and process behind one of our favorite projects of the week.
Drawings first. Explanation second. Always with the goal of making sports a little easier to understand.
What we did this week 📅
We’ll extend this to all Olympics videos, which go back to February 6th (all IG links)
Intro to the Winter Games
Figure Skating Explained
Olympic Hockey Revitalized
Biathlon Explained
Curling Explained
Skimo Explained
Aerial Freestyle Skiing Explained
Medal Counts
They say the devil works hard but graph guy works harder
Spotlight: How Figure Skating Works ⛸️
We’re spotlighting the figure skating project because it perfectly captures what SportsBall is about: a sport that’s beautiful to watch and confusing to understand.
Before the Olympics, I got a DM from US Figure Skating hoping to get a breakdown of their sport. I knew nothing of figure skating at the time other than they skate, they jump, they spin, and they get a seemingly arbitrary score for it.
These are the perfect projects, though. Ones where I know the sport but I don’t know it really. Where watching is captivating but simultaneously confusing. Thats our bread and butter.
It’s also one of those projects where I need to learn it all myself before I can explain it. A 90 minute call with the USFS team for initiation to the topic, 463 stupid questions from me, and an amount of information that could have been turned into a documentary let alone a 150 second video.
Figure Skating Scoring Guide
There’s really one core data element in this video and that’s how they score points visualised in the points chart at the bottom, explaining how each jump carries a base value with a dot then scales up or down on grade of execution or GOE. The data itself came from this official scoring sheet from USFS, which certainly was in need of some visualization, and the video hopefully de-mystifies the entire scoring process.
For those of you who are in the data visualization space, you might know the feeling where a chart fits a data set so perfectly it makes you warm and fuzzy inside. A happy marriage between a downtrodden table and a beautiful graph.
This felt like one of those times.
In the end, the video became our most popular ever on TikTok, and top 3 on Instagram, meaning I’d like to think we helped more a few people watch figure skating more effectively over the past two weeks.
That’s it for this week.
We’re excited to have this newsletter back up and running after a hiatus of sorts, and genuinely grateful to everyone who’s been watching, sharing, replying, and supporting SportsBall along the way. It’s what makes projects like this possible.
If there’s a sport, chart, or concept you’d love to see broken down next, just reply to this email. We (try to) read everything.
More drawings soon.
— Riley & Claire
