For the past two weeks we’ve been glued to our television set all night long watching the Olympic Games. Of course our favourite sport was swimming and we didn’t miss any of it.

It’s always fun to see the different athletes from around the world and how many different names the announcers end up struggling with. While watching the final of the woman’s 50 free Dan Hicks and Rowdy Gains were all excited commenting and they kept having to say “Kromowidjojo” over and over again. Ranomi Kromowidjojo is a sprinter for the Netherlands and besides giving us a good laugh that they had to keep saying it I thought, wow, what a cool name.

I’ve always liked the names of the Scandinavian athletes. A couple of years ago there was a skier from Norway called Lasse Kjus that I cheered for because I liked his name. I think it has something to do with all the consonants in row that just seem to make the name almost completely impossible to pronounce.

I found a list of all athletes from the London 2012 games and I figured I would go through the list and see what other tidbits I could find.

There were a total of 10902 Olympic Athletes from 205 different countries listed in the roster. To be honest that kind of surprised me sinceI didn’t expect there to be that many competitors.

Fun Facts:

• Length – Both first and last name.
  • The shortest names came in at just 4 characters. It’s probably cheating but “Deni”, a weight lifter from Indonesia, had only one name listed. There were a total of 12 people who were listed at having just 4 characters in there name but I have to believe that some of them were incorrect. “Joel” a footballer from Spain was probably “Joel Robles Blazquez” the keeper.
  • The longest name goes to “Aleksandra J Klejnowska-Krzywanska” coming in at a whopping 32 characters long. Aleksandra was a weight lifter from Poland. (What is it with these weight lifters.)
• Length – Just last name.
  • There was a tie for shortest last name between “Lamusi A” a judo competitor from China and to “Diju V’ a Badminton playing from India.
  • The longest last name goes to “Elena Danilyuk-Nevmerzhytskaya” from Belarus at 25 characters. You can really stack it up with those hyphenated names.

• Frequencies
  • By far and away “Kim” was the most popular surname with 82 different competitors. 61 were from South Korea, 19 from North Korea, 1 from Russia, and 1 from Uzbekistan.
  • The next closest last name wasn’t even a last name but the suffix “van”, as in “Elco van der Geest” at 61 followed by the suffix “de” at 50.
  • There was a tie for next most frequent proper last name of Li and Wang with 39 people.
• Family Competition – Andrew won the family competition and I didn’t even make it into double digits. Athletes with the first name:
  • Andrew – 30
  • Alex – 20 (I’ve excluded all the Alexander, Alexandre, Alexey, etc.)
  • Jennifer – 18
  • Caroline – 13
  • Derek – 7

Alas, there were no McEachern’s in this years Games.