Olympic Athletes Are Getting Bigger

Every four years the Summer Olympics come around and athletes vie for medals, sporting glory, and the success of their country.

Athletes in peak condition stun crowds, create new records, and push the limits of the human body. And over time, those bodies have gotten noticeably bigger.

Using data from Sports Reference (via Kaggle), Visual Capitalist’s Georgios Karamanis plotted the average height and weight of Olympic athletes by sport to show how their body dimensions have changed over the years.

Sports Where Olympic Athletes are Getting Bigger

At first glance, all sports seemed to have moved to the right and ascended up the chart (a higher average weight and height) over the last 50 years.

Here’s a table of the average weight of male Olympians, in kilograms, categorized by sport. Only sports where a direct comparison could be made between 1960 and 2016 were included:

Sport
1960 (Kg)
2016 (Kg)
% Change
Athletics
72.4
74.6
+3.04%
Basketball
83.9
100.2
+19.43%
Boxing
65.9
67.8
+2.88%
Canoeing
75.1
82.8
+10.25%
Cycling
69.9
73.6
+5.29%
Diving
66.2
66.9
+1.06%
Equestrianism
68.5
73.4
+7.15%
Fencing
72.5
79.5
+9.66%
Football
70.2
74.1
+5.56%
Gymnastics
65.1
63.1
-3.07%
Hockey
69.8
77.3
+10.74%
Modern Pentathlon
71.0
74.2
+4.51%
Rowing
79.2
86.7
+9.47%
Sailing
76.6
77.3
+0.91%
Shooting
75.8
80.2
+5.80%
Swimming
75.2
81.3
+8.11%
Water Polo
82.4
94.6
+14.81%
Weightlifting
76.3
87.8
+15.07%
Wrestling
72.2
85.9
+18.98%

The biggest example of the phenomenon is in basketball, where the average weight for men has gone up by more than 16 kilograms (35 lbs). The average height has also increased by 12 centimeters (5 in) as seen in the next table.

Sport
1960 (Cm)
2016 (Cm)
% Change
Athletics
178.40
181.00
+1.46%
Basketball
188.20
200.50
+6.54%
Boxing
171.50
175.60
+2.39%
Canoeing
177.50
182.40
+2.76%
Cycling
174.70
179.60
+2.80%
Diving
170.60
172.20
+0.94%
Equestrianism
174.10
179.50
+3.10%
Fencing
177.30
183.90
+3.72%
Football (Soccer)
174.10
179.60
+3.16%
Gymnastics
168.70
167.40
-0.77%
Hockey
174.50
179.90
+3.09%
Modern Pentathlon
176.80
182.80
+3.39%
Rowing
182.70
189.90
+3.94%
Sailing
176.60
181.30
+2.66%
Shooting
173.90
177.80
+2.24%
Swimming
179.30
187.60
+4.63%
Water Polo
182.00
191.20
+5.05%
Weightlifting
167.90
170.80
+1.73%
Wrestling
171.20
176.10
+2.86%

Wrestling, weightlifting, and water polo have also seen significant increases in weight and height for men. Under the Body Mass Index (BMI), all three have pushed clearly into overweight classification, with weightlifting especially close to obese.

On the women’s side, though more sports have been included in the Olympics since 1960, the sport-by-sport differences in average weight and height are less meteoric. Swimming, canoeing and diving saw the most change, though all three still fall well within normal BMI classification.

Does that mean athletes are becoming unhealthier? Not necessarily. Muscular athletes often have a high BMI because the index doesn’t differentiate between weight from fat, muscle, or bone. BMI also tends to exaggerate obesity in tall people, and thin-ness in short people.

The Outliers

Again, though most sports have seen athletes get bigger over time, there are some outliers.

Notably, gymnastics bucks the trend for both men and women in the chart. The average gymnast in 2016 was both lighter and shorter than their counterparts in 1960. Women gymnasts in particular weighed 4 kilograms (9 lbs) less and were nearly 3 centimeters (1 in) shorter.

Here’s a table of all the changes in weight for female Olympians:

Sport
1960 (Kg)
2016 (Kg)
% Change
Athletics
63.2
60.0
-5.06%
Canoeing
63.4
66.8
+5.36%
Diving
52.9
55.1
+4.16%
Equestrianism
57.2
58.6
+2.45%
Fencing
58.7
63.5
+8.18%
Gymnastics
54.1
49.7
-8.13%
Sailing
65.0
63.1
-2.92%
Swimming
60.3
63.9
+5.97%

In gymnastics, studies have shown that “smaller gymnasts with a high strength-to-mass ratio” have greater potential for performing rotations. One notable example is American gymnast Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast in history, who measures 142 centimeters (4’8″) or a full 14 centimeters shorter than the average female gymnast at the 2016 Olympic games.

Here’s a table of the height changes for women Olympians.

Sport
1960 (Cm)
2016 (Cm)
% Change
Athletics
168.6
169.2
+0.36%
Canoeing
166.6
170.0
+2.04%
Diving
159.0
161.2
+1.38%
Equestrianism
167.0
168.2
+0.72%
Fencing
164.8
171.7
+4.19%
Gymnastics
159.2
156.4
-1.76%
Sailing
168.0
169.4
+0.83%
Swimming
165.9
174.2
+5.00%

Female Olympians also saw weight decreases in athletics and sailing, even as they logged height increases in the same sports.

However, as the Olympics have added and removed categories from the games over the years, several sports don’t have direct comparisons available. For women in particular, only eight categories of sport from the 1960s were still present in the Rio Olympics. For men, that number goes up to 19 sports.

We’ll have to wait for the next few Olympics to see if this trend continues or starts to plateau at an ideal height and weight combination for athletes competing at the highest levels of sport.