For the past few years it has happened that around mid-December we have all been frantically waiting: no, not for Christmas-what a platitude-but for Strava’s annual Year in Sport report.
If you know what I am talking about, chances are you have already spent the weekend sifting through and sharing your very personal report. If, on the other hand, you don’t know what I’m talking about – okay – brief summary. Every year Strava publishes a beautiful report of the (sports) activities that each of us has recorded on the platform: how many kilometers you rode, how much elevation gain, hours of activity, how many times you picked your nose while cycling, etc. Big data in itself, however, is interesting up to a point; what Strava does (very) well is turn it into simple but high-impact infographics that are immediately understandable and shareable. All with animations that create a coherent and visually intelligent narrative flow.
You can find all this information only in the Strava app, on your home or profile.
What hurts me a little bit is. if you have the premium subscription you have the display of some more specific data, such as the activity with the most elevation gain or other such amenities: it fits, on the other hand the ability to have more in-depth metrics is precisely one of the hooks with which Strava encourages you to abandon the free subscription.
All of this of course feeds our outsized egos, although so much then my mom when she sees that in 2021 I have done 46,844 meters of elevation gain (a good 780 m more than last year) compliments me as much as if I had done 4k or 400k.
The community
But if we step a little bit outside our own backyard we can appreciate instead the global report, that is, the one that covers the data of the whole community and not just our own. In this case, however, the data collected covers the 12 months elapsed from November 1 to October 31 of the following year. Although I’m also quite egoriferous, I have to say that I’m much more fascinated to see how — together — the 95 million Strava users performed.
Thus we find that this year we loaded 38 percent more assets than in 2020, or we can see that Americans gave a lot of Kudos to the British, Canadians and Brazilians: they snubbed the French and Spanish instead. Italians not to be found.
If you are a real nerd like me, you can download the pdf with all the available infographics here.
