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In 2012 the IOC released a database of height, weight, birth date, sport and country containing data from most of the London Olympic Games participants. I have analyzed the anthropometric data of the 10,384 participants using data for height, weight, birth date, sport and country. Here are some of my summary and analysis of the data.

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Heights of 2012 Olympic Athletes

The tallest male athlete stood at 2.21m, the Chinese basketball player Zhaoxu Zhang, a close second was Russian volleyball player, Dmitriy Muserskiy at 2.18m. The shortest was a 21-year-old Tuvaluan weight lifter standing only 1.40m tall, Lapua Lapua.

For the women, the tallest was Chinese basketball player Wei Wei at 2.07m, he shortest was Japanese gymnast Asuka Teramoto at 1.36 m (4 ft 6 in)

notes: The large athlete database has some errors, listing other athletes shorter than Asuka Teramoto but further investigation has shown that these figures are incorrect. e.g. Jamaica's 4x100m relay runner Schillonie Calvert is listed as just 1.35m / 4' 5", but photos online of her show she is clearly not that short.

Weights of 2012 Olympic Athletes

The heaviest male athlete was Ricardo Blas Jr, a Judo competitor from Guam. The lightest was China's Yuan Cao who won a gold in the Men's Synchronized 10m Diving.

BMIs of 2012 Olympic Athletes

Body Mass Index (BMI) is a commonly used measure of fatness, calculated by dividing body mass (in kg) by the height (in meters) squared.

Age (Years) of 2012 Olympic Athletes

Rhythmic gymnasts had an average age of 19 – while for the equestrian events the average age of the participants was 38 years.

Breakdown Per Sport

Here are the averages for each sport. Weight data was not supplied for the sports of boxing, gymnastics, synchronized swimming, taekwondo and trampoline. The results below are for both male and female athletes for each sport combined - for more detailed results and analysis of the anthropometric scores for each sport, follow the links.

The sport with the oldest competitors was equestrian with an average age of 37.9 years, and the youngest was rhymic gymnastics at 19.5 years. Basketball was the sport with the greatest average height, the next was volleyball.

The Database

There were 10,384 names, from 205 countries and representing 38 sports or events. Here is the original database. The data supplied was name, country, sport, event, sex, height, weight, age, birth date, and birth place. I also calculated BMI. Not all data was complete. The sports of boxing, gymnastics, synchronized swimming, taekwondo and trampoline did not supply any body weight data, and there were also some height measurements missing. There were 9823 data points for height, 9104 for weight, and we were able to calculate BMI for 9038 competitors. There were a few obvious errors that were fixed - a few athletes had body weight listed in lbs instead of kgs - a 150kg 100m sprinter? There is undoubtedly many more errors or inaccuracies, but that was the information supplied.

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Related Pages

• Anthropometry at the Summer Olympics
• Athlete data from the 2014 Sochi Olympics and 2016 Rio Olympics
• The Tallest Athletes at the Olympic Games
• Anthropometry at the Winter Olympics
• Sport Specific Anthropometry
• Science and the Olympics
• Olympics Anthropology Days
• Link to the original database