The Olympic Sportsmen's Factors of Success

Many studies attempted to explain why some countries outperform others during the Olympic Games. The primary aspect of the literature on Olympic performance is country-level factors, while the sportsmen’s individual features are mostly analyzed in one particular sport. The key purpose of this research is to get a more profound explanation of the Olympic success by combining characteristics of the sportsmen and the country. Special attention has been paid to the importance of such features as sex, age, height and weight and to the differences in the main factors contributing to the success across various groups of sports. The research was based on the data on Olympiads 2000 - 2016. The dataset contains 65 917 observations. After conducting the research with the help of 3 different methods (logit, classification tree and random forest) some common conclusions have been made. The individual characteristics are important for Olympic success explanation and the main success factors across groups of Olympic disciplines can differ.