The data used to create the web site that you are accessing is the product of years of work by a group of dedicated Olympic historians and statisticians. The group that has compiled the database refers to itself as MADmen — MAD being an acronym for several of the early members of the group, but also signifies their commitment to the project in another sense. The group consists of:
| Andrey Chilikin |  |
| Hilary Evans |
|
| Francisco Fernández |  |
| David Foster | |
| Arild Gjerde |  |
| Jeroen Heijmans |  |
| Carl-Johan Johansson |  |
| Taavi Kalju |  |
| Martin Kellner |  |
| Rudolf Laky |  |
| Kristof Linke |  |
| Bill Mallon |  |
| George Masin | |
| Ian Morrison |
|
| Stein Opdahl | |
| Wolf Reinhardt | |
| Ralf Regnitter | |
| Ralph Schlüter | |
| David Tarbotton |  |
| Magne Teigen † | |
| Morten Aarlia Torp | |
| Paul Tchir |
|
| Michele Walker | |
Most of them are members of the International Society of Olympic Historians (ISOH), with Mallon a past-President, and have been working on compiling databases of complete Olympic results and a database of all Olympians for many years.
In the late 1990s, they found each other via e-mail and discovered that they were independently working on the same, or at least very similar, projects. Since about 1998, they have worked together, and the database used to create the web site you see now is probably the product of about 100 man-years of work.
Since 1998, the method of their work has been for each of them to work on various aspects of the database and then send the work out for editing to all of the others. In this way, they believe they have compiled the most complete and most accurate database of Olympic athletes yet known.
We would like to thank the following people who have provided large numbers of corrections and additions to the data on this site:
| Fernando Arrechea | |
| Ton Bijkerk † | |
| Ian Buchanan † | |
| Adriano Brunelli |  |
| Sven Buren | |
| Herman De Wael |  |
| Martin Frank | |
| Richard Hymans | |
| Georges Klepper |  |
| Christian Jansky | |
| Ove Karlsson | |
| Leif Kvist | |
| Børre Lilloe | |
| Peter Matthews | |
| Mémoire du Cyclisme (notably Pascal Faivre, Philippe Fetter and Florian Mignerey) |
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| Beppe Odello | |
| Ron Palenski |  |
| Jorge Torres |  |
| Elio Trifari | |
| Christian Tugnoli | |
| Aleksandar Vangelov |  |
| Paweł Wudarski |  |
Also, we would like to thank the many Olympians and relatives of Olympians who have taken the trouble to notify us of errors or omissions in the athlete profiles.
