The data used to create the website that you are accessing is the product of years of work by a group of dedicated Olympic historians and statisticians. The group that has compiled the database refers to itself as MADmen — MAD being an acronym for several of the early members of the group, but also signifies their commitment to the project in another sense. The group consists of:

Adriano Brunelli
Sven Buren
Andrey Chilikin
Hilary Evans
José Daniel Faria
David Foster
Rob Gilmore
Arild Gjerde
Jeroen Heijmans
Carl-Johan Johansson
Taavi Kalju
Martin Kellner
Rudolf Laky
Kristof Linke
Connor Mah
Bill Mallon
George Masin
Ian Morrison
Jason Moulton
Stein Opdahl
Ralf Regnitter
Wolf Reinhardt
Diego Rossetti
Ralph Schlüter
Patrick Secchi
David Tarbotton
Paul Tchir
Magne Teigen †
Morten Aarlia Torp
Michele Walker

Most of them are members of the International Society of Olympic Historians (ISOH), with Mallon a past-President, and have been working on compiling databases of complete Olympic results and a database of all Olympians for many years.

In the late 1990s, they found each other via e-mail and discovered that they were independently working on the same, or at least very similar, projects. Since about 1998, they have worked together, and the database used to create the website you see now is probably the product of about 250 person-years of work.

Since 1998, the method of their work has been for each of them to work on various aspects of the database and then send the work out for editing to all of the others. In this way, they believe they have compiled the most complete and most accurate database of Olympic athletes yet known.

Other Contributors

We would like to thank the following people who have provided large numbers of corrections and additions to the data on this site:

Fernando Arrechea
Ton Bijkerk †
Russell Boxshall
David Clark
Ian Buchanan †
Peter De Block
Herman De Wael
Martin Frank
Vincent Guignard
Patrick Houda
Richard Hymans
Christian Jansky
Ove Karlsson †
Georges Klepper
Leif Kvist
Jarno Liimatainen
Børre Lilloe †
Horacio Hernán Macchiavello
Peter Matthews †
Andy Mitchell
Mémoire du Cyclisme (notably Pascal Faivre, Philippe Fetter and Florian Mignerey)
Beppe Odello
Michael O'Dwyer
Ron Palenski †
Harri Piironen
Enric Pla
Alex Pussieldi
Griffin Seannery
Jean Michel Serrurier
Regys Silva
Markku Siukonen †
Jorge Torres
Elio Trifari †
Christian Tugnoli
Aleksandar Vangelov
PJ Vazel
Paweł Wudarski

Also, we would like to thank the many Olympians and relatives of Olympians who have taken the trouble to notify us of errors or omissions in the athlete profiles.