Who is competing in the London 2012 Olympics? There are nearly 11,000 athletes here for the games, starting today - where are they from?

Having a full list of Olympic athletes would give us an unrivaled glimpse into different countries' Olympic priorities, which sports they entered and how women compete from different countries. It's a key dataset we have never had - before now, that is.

You can find the athletes on the London 2012 site, but not all in one place. So, we've scraped that data to bring you the the full list of every athlete competing, the country they are are from, their gender and the sport they are registered to compete in. Collectively, they represent over 7bn people across the world.

It shows how each country competes in the games and their priorities.

This is how the big numbers split.

Olympic athletes interactive. Click image to explore the data

Where do athletes come from?

The data shows how the games are still dominated by the Olympic superpowers of the US, UK, Russia, China, Germany and Australia. Together, the countries account for 2,720 athletes - one in four of all the athletes in the games.

Team GB, as the host nation, has more athletes than any other country on this database: 557 registered (which is a few more than the official list published here), followed by the US (534), Russia (441), Australia (414), Germany (395). China has 379. Some 5% of all the athletes at the games are part of Team GB.

Although the games are dominated by the big six, most countries only field a few athletes - the biggest number bringing ten or less to the games.

Four athletes are competing without a country as Individual Olympic Athletes, three from Curacao and one from South Sudan:

• Liemarvin Bonevacia, 400m runner

• Reginald de Windt, Judo

• Philipine van Aanholt

and

• Marial Guor, men's marathon

The Cook Islands' eight athletes represent a rate of 40 per 100,000 inhabitants - the highest rate in the world. Of the major countries, the highest rate is the UK with almost 1 for every 100,000 people here - a rate of 0.889.

Sex and sport

Track and field athletics dominates with 2,242 athletes, but after that (and excluding team games), there's swimming (948), then shooting with 391 and Judo with 390.

Some 44% of all athletes are women (highest numbers from the UK). In terms of percentage of the major teams are: Japan (53%), Russia (52%), the US (51%), the UK is further down the list with 48%, behind Ethiopia

The priorities of each team are interesting - for the Olympic superpowers, these are some of the key facts:

• China - 6% of the team are competing in shooting (as many as are basketball players), another 4% are badminton players - higher than any other major country

• Germany - 3% are equestrians, higher than the UK, China and the US

• Russia - 4% are wrestlers, higher than any other superpower (the UK has a tiny percentage, 0.2%)

• UK - 5% of Team GB are taking part in cycling event, which although high is behind Germany (6.3%) and a host of other smaller countries, including France, Spain, Ecuador - and Iran

US - 23.4% of the US team are competing in athletics, compared to just 14% of the Chinese

We've just scratched the surface of this dataset - you can download it below. What can you do with it?

Data summary

Use our dynamic table to explore the full list of Olympic athletes - use a filter to sort and search the list

• DATA: download the full spreadsheet

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