Ep. #16 Women Won the 2020 Olympics (And the Data Proves It)

by Caroline Fitzgerald September 21, 2021

In Ep. #16, Caroline and Amir Zonozi, the CEO & Co-Founder of Zoomph, reflect on the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and how women athletes dominated both in athletic competition - and when it came to social media reach & impact.

Zoomph is a leader in digital intelligence at the intersection of sports and sponsorship analysis. During the 2020 Olympics, Amir and his team measured the power of influence of Team USA's women athletes by analyzing the data around social media reach, impact and generated value. What they found was that women athletes largely preoccupied the online conversations during Tokyo 2020. The top moments included:

Suni Lee generating $6M in social value from 9 Instagram posts with an unprecedented 47% follower interaction rate.
Simone Biles' tweet thanking fans for supporting her decision to withdraw that generated over 100 million organic impressions and $2.7 million in social value.
Allyson Felix's name being mentioned on social more than 10K times with 52M impressions worth almost $900k in social value.
Katie Ledecky generated 8.5 million organic impressions from her Instagram, with an engagement rate of 12.83% - which was a full 2 points higher than the official @TeamUSA's Instagram engagement rate.

Even beyond the digital space, Tokyo 2020 was a glass-shattering Olympics for women athletes. Looking specifically at Team USA, 53.6% of American Olympians were women, and women won 66 of Team USA’s 113 medals - accounting for 58.4% of the medals won.

Women’s sports also received 59.1% of primetime coverage from NBC in the U.S., which was the highest percentage that women's sports have ever received in the history of NBC’s Olympic broadcasts.

In this episode, listen to Amir and Caroline discuss all of the ways in which women athletes won at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Listen to the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Amazon Music.

This episode was recorded on August 17, 2021. Click here to ready more about the data & insights from Zoomph.