PHIL SIMON
Rafa did it again.
The man won his twelfth freaking French Open.
Twelve. Let that sink in a moment.
Put that gawdy number into context: Nadal has won more French Opens alone than total majors of all but three men: Pete Sampras, Roger Federer, and Novak Djokovic.
Photo credit: ESPN
No, I don’t have a photographic memory. I just like to noodle with data and data visualizations. I have for my whole career. While researching The Visual Organization,I became a Tableau fan.1
It took me all of ten minutes to create the simple dataviz below. I grabbed the data from Kaggle, made a few tweaks in Excel,2 and went to work in Tableau Desktop. A few clicks later, I published my dataviz on Tableau Public. (It’s much easier to view there than on my site.)
Fun fact: Only nine men have won Grand Slams in the past fifteen years, and four of those men only won a single Slam:
Tennis has never been more top-heavy on the mens’ side. Yes, we live in an era that the Big Four dominates.
Tableau lets you easily create animations as well:
Play with the data yourself and you can easily discover interesting things. It doesn’t take long to discover interesting nuggets. Exhibit A: William Larned won eight U.S. Open victories but struck out with the other Grand Slams. His clay counterpart is Max Decugis who won all of his eight majors at Roland Garros.
Simon Says: Get interactive. Now.
There’s just no excuse for building static charts and graphs these days. Adding basic interactivity lets everyday users discover interesting things in datasets. What’s more, it obviates the need to ask IT for reports. That’s so 1998.
And if you missed the match, watch some highlights below:
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