Fantasy Olympics 2026

Predict the podium. Climb the leaderboard. Or remix the build.

A community prediction game for the Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, built entirely on Airtable. Pick which countries win Gold, Silver, and Bronze across all 116 events — earn points as medals are awarded live. Play along, or sync the data and build something of your own.

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Two Ways to Engage

1. Make Your Picks

Predict the full podium for every event. As results come in, your picks are automatically scored and the leaderboard updates in real time. No login required — just register with a display name and start picking.

2. Remix the Build

All the data is clean, structured, and available via Airtable Sync. Athletes, events, countries, historical results — ready to go. We did the data cleanup so you can focus on creating.

Build ideas:

• Slack alerts when your country medals
• Watch party dashboard with live scores
• Country head-to-head comparison tracker
• Prediction accuracy visualizations

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How It Works

The Game

Each player predicts Gold, Silver, and Bronze for all 116 medal events across 16 Winter Olympic sports. Points are awarded after each event is finalized:

Your Pick	Result	Points
Exact position match (e.g., picked Gold, won Gold)	Nailed it	3 pts
Country on podium, wrong position	Close	2 pts
Country missed podium	Nope	0 pts

Maximum possible score: 1,044 points (116 events x 3 picks x 3 pts each)

Live Results

Results are powered by Airtable's Deep Match AI fields. Every 15 minutes, a scheduled automation checks for completed events. Three independent AI agents search the web for the Gold, Silver, and Bronze medalist country for each event and link directly to the correct record — no scripts, no external APIs.

  Scheduled Automation (every 15 min)
    → Finds today's events not yet finalized
    → Triggers Deep Match AI fields

  Three Deep Match Fields (independent web search)
    → Gold Country  → links to Countries table
    → Silver Country → links to Countries table
    → Bronze Country → links to Countries table

  Next automation cycle
    → Detects all 3 countries populated
    → Marks event as "Final"
    → Scoring formulas fire automatically

Scoring Pipeline

Once an event is marked Final, scoring is fully automatic:

1. Each pick's Gold/Silver/Bronze countries are compared against the event's actual results via lookup fields
2. Points are computed by formula (3 for exact position, 2 for right country wrong position)
3. Player total scores are rollups that update in real time
4. The leaderboard re-sorts automatically

No scripts involved in scoring — it's formulas and rollups all the way down.

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The Interface

The custom interface is an Airtable Interface Extension — a React app that runs natively inside Airtable's Interface environment with direct access to the underlying data.

What you see:

• Countdown Timer — Live countdown to the Opening Ceremony (Feb 6, 2026, 20:00 CET), switches to "The Games Have Begun!" when it starts
• Medal Count — Top 10 countries by 2026 medal count, updated as events finalize
• Fantasy Leaderboard — Top 10 players ranked by prediction score, click any player to see their full bracket
• Olympic News Feed — AI-generated daily updates with category badges (Results Recap, Athlete Spotlight, Upset Alert, etc.)
• Events Board — All 116 events grouped by sport, with status indicators (Upcoming, Live, Final)
• Beijing 2022 Recap — Historical medal data for context and scouting
• Bulk Picks Editor — Full-screen interface to predict all 116 events at once, grouped by sport
• Builder Section — Sync links, repo link, and build inspiration for developers

Auto-detection: If you're logged into Airtable, the app matches your email to a registered player — no manual selection needed.

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Data Model

The Airtable base contains structured, clean data across these core tables:

Table	Records	What's In It
Events	116+	Every medal event — sport, date, venue, status, medal results (2026) + full 2022 data
Countries	90	All participating nations with NOC codes
Athletes	2,470+	Competitor bios from Beijing 2022
Sports	16	Alpine Skiing through Speed Skating, with icons
Players	—	Fantasy game participants with display names and total scores
Picks	—	Every player's podium predictions (Gold/Silver/Bronze per event)
Olympic News	—	AI-generated daily updates, 3x per day during the Games

Historical Data

Full Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics data is included:

• 2,470 athletes with biographical data
• 4,744 competition results across all events
• Medal counts verified against official records
• Linked to the same Countries table used for 2026

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Sync the Data

One-click sync links to add live Olympic data to your own Airtable base. Data refreshes automatically every 15 minutes — no setup, no maintenance.

Table	Sync Link
Countries	Sync to your base
Athletes	Sync to your base
Sports	Sync to your base
Events	Sync to your base
Players	Sync to your base
Picks	Sync to your base

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Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
Runtime	Airtable Interface Extensions (@airtable/blocks SDK)
Frontend	React 19, Tailwind CSS 3.4 with custom Airtable design tokens
Data	Airtable (7 tables, no external database)
Live Results	Deep Match AI fields + scheduled automations
Scoring	Airtable formulas + rollups (no scripts)
News Feed	AI text fields with web search, 3x daily generation
Linting	ESLint 9 with React plugins

No server. No external APIs. No authentication flow. Everything runs inside Airtable.

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Forking This Project

Want to run your own version of Fantasy Olympics? Here's how to set up the extension against your own Airtable base.

The fork-friendly setup script was inspired by a suggestion from Dan Fellars of On2Air, who pointed out that forking didn't work out of the box because of all the hardcoded Airtable IDs.

Prerequisites

• Node 18+
• An Airtable base with tables that match this project's structure (same table and field names)
• A Personal Access Token with the schema.bases:read scope

Setup

git clone https://github.com/robweidner/airtable-olympics-2026.git
cd airtable-olympics-2026
npm install
node scripts/setup.js

The setup script will prompt for your Base ID and Personal Access Token, then automatically rewrite all table and field IDs in frontend/constants.js and component files to match your base's schema.

You can also pass credentials as environment variables:

AIRTABLE_PAT=patXXX AIRTABLE_BASE_ID=appXXX node scripts/setup.js

Manual Steps After Setup

The script handles table/field IDs and base IDs automatically, but a few values are unique to your Airtable installation:

1. Share link tokens (shr...) in frontend/components/BuilderSection.js — create shared views for each table, then replace the 7 tokens in the ALL_TABLES array
2. Form page IDs (pag...) in frontend/constants.js — create Interface forms for picks, registration, and community builds, then update PICKS_FORM_URL, REGISTRATION_FORM_URL, and COMMUNITY_BUILDS_FORM_URL
3. Interface share link (shr...) — update INTERFACE_URL in frontend/constants.js and shareUrl in frontend/components/ShareBanner.js
4. PostHog API key (optional) — the setup script prompts for this. You can also manually replace the placeholder in frontend/analytics.js

Test It

npx block run --port 9000    # Start dev server

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Development

This is an Airtable Interface Extension built with the @airtable/blocks SDK.

npm install                  # Install dependencies
npx block run --port 9000   # Start local dev server
npm run lint                 # ESLint across frontend/

Airtable Skills for Claude Code

If you're using Claude Code, the Airtable Skills plugin turns Claude into an Airtable specialist — schema design, scripting, automations, and custom extension development with the Blocks SDK and Interface Extensions SDK. Useful for working on this project or building on Airtable in general.

claude install-skill https://github.com/robweidner/airtable-skills

Project Structure

frontend/
├── index.js                 # Entry point → initializeBlock()
├── components/              # 13 React components
├── constants.js             # All table/field IDs
├── helpers.js               # Record mappers, medal computation
└── style.css                # Tailwind directives

Key Conventions

• Field/table IDs over names — All Airtable references use stable IDs (tbl*, fld*) defined in constants.js. Run node scripts/setup.js to remap IDs to your own base.
• SDK import paths — Only @airtable/blocks/interface/ui and @airtable/blocks/interface/models. Other paths will break.
• No UI library — All components are custom-built with Tailwind. Airtable Blocks UI components (Box, etc.) aren't supported in Interface Extensions.
• React 19 — Use --legacy-peer-deps when adding new packages.

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How this was built

This is the first custom Airtable Interface Extension I've built. The data model, automations, scoring pipeline, and a 2,700-line React interface came together over a weekend using two AI tools working at different layers.

Airtable AI powers the data side. Three Deep Match fields search the web every 15 minutes for medal results and link them to the correct country record automatically. An AI text field with web search generates a daily Olympic news feed. Scoring is pure formulas and rollups that update the moment results land. No scripts, no external APIs. It matched every result correctly in testing, though I'll be watching it closely during the actual Games.

Claude Code built the interface. Every component, style, and SDK call was pair-programmed with Claude Code. I'd never built a custom extension before. The 13 components, live countdown, bulk picks editor, dark mode, leaderboard, and events board all came out of that one sprint.

Airtable handles data, logic, and AI at the platform layer. Claude Code handles UI at the code layer. Between the two, I didn't need a team.

Key design decisions:

• Picks-based game over draft-based (simpler, more accessible, no coordination needed)
• Country predictions over athlete predictions (116 events x 3 picks = manageable; athlete-level would be overwhelming)
• Deep Match for live results over script-based web scraping (zero maintenance)
• Client-side medal computation over rollup fields (workaround for UI conversion issues with Airtable rollups)
• Public interface with no login barrier (Airtable handles auth for builders; forms handle it for players)

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License

MIT No Attribution — use it however you want, no attribution required.

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Built with Airtable + Claude Code