Mapping the Olympic refugee team's journeys

Yunjie Li
Mon, 26 Sep 2016 09:30:00 -0400

At Rio 2016, a team of refugee athletes competed for the first time in Olympic history. Originally from South Sudan, Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, and Iran, they represent the millions of men and women worldwide who have left their countries in search of safety. The Olympics is over, but the global refugee crisis is ongoing.

In the interactive map below, I show the 12 athletes’ personal journeys to the Olympics.

View full-screen demo

To create the map I drafted the dataset with the Mapbox Studio dataset editor, where I located important places using the built-in geocoder, revised features’ properties and geometry, and then updated the data in my Studio tileset and custom style.

After I had finished the dataset, I added the animation by redrawing the lines using Turf.js and following the Mapbox GL JS example to animate a point along a route.

Have your own story to map?

Read our guide on how to get started with the Mapbox Studio dataset editor and share your work by tweeting at @Mapbox!