DOES A MEDAL BUY ATTENTION? WIKIPEDIA VIEWS OF KAZAKHSTAN'S ATHLETES BEFORE AND AFTER THE PARIS 2024 OLYMPIC

Abstract

This study asks how much public attention an Olympic medal brings to an athlete and how long it lasts, using Kazakhstan's team at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Attention was measured as the number of daily views of each athlete's Wikipedia article in Russian, Kazakh and English. The sample covers 58 athletes who competed, 8 of them medalists. Before the data were analysed, I recorded two predictions: strong attention after a medal lasts about two months, and female medalists receive no less attention than male medalists, although this may depend on the sport and on how visible the athlete is in the media. On the peak day, the median medalist received 12,268 views, almost ten times as many as the median of the other athletes (1,275; Mann-Whitney p = 0.001). The peak itself was short: daily views fell to a tenth of the peak within about five days for medalists and four days for the other athletes. In the second month after the medal, however, medalists still received about five times their pre-Games level and in months four to six about three times, and their attention took a median of five months to fall to twice the pre-Games level, compared with about two and a half weeks for the other athletes. The second prediction could not be tested, because only two of the eight medalists were women and their Russian articles did not yet exist during their medal week. The boxer Karina Ibragimova, who did not win a medal, had a higher peak than five of the eight medalists, although several of those medalists were measured without Russian views. A medal increased attention strongly, but the results suggest that it is not the only thing that decides who is noticed.

Keywords: Olympic Games, public attention, Wikipedia page views, athletes, Kazakhstan, sports media, gender

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How to cite

Abdrakhmanova M. DOES A MEDAL BUY ATTENTION? WIKIPEDIA VIEWS OF KAZAKHSTAN'S ATHLETES BEFORE AND AFTER THE PARIS 2024 OLYMPIC // Central Asian Scientific Journal. – 2026. – No. 4(32), Vol. 1. – Pp. 308–315.