78
Height Distribution of 5,148 Olympians Across 12 Disciplines by Gender, Paris 2024
(files.catbox.moe)
From the creator (not me)
!! ATTENTION !! Not all disciplines are shown, as only 5,148 out of 11,000+ athletes have their height information available on the official Olympics website. Hopefully, they will update the info eventually, as height plays a major role in disciplines such as rowing, weightlifting, and gymnastics. Data is from Kaggle, which seems webscraped from the official olympics website. Done in R, code can be found on my github. The y axis has been sorted by MEDIAN height, men and women combined.
Volleyball makes sense. The higher you are, the better you can spike or block. So unless you're the libero, you want to be as tall as possible usually.
Surely it also makes a difference which countries teams compete in each sport, for example the Japanese men volleyball team has smaller players than that of the USA.