Playground →
Two Olympic-branded organizations sit at the top of Michael Phelps's similarity graph, and together they define the first of two distinct audience neighborhoods. NBC Olympics scores 0.87 and Team USA scores 0.87 as well — the closest pair in the set, and both rooted in the Olympic ecosystem rather than in swimming or any single sport. That cluster establishes one peak of a two-peak shape.
The second neighborhood is built around fellow athletes, particularly those with U.S. national-team associations. Ryan Lochte (0.83), Abby Wambach (0.82), Ali Krieger (0.82), and Alexandra Raisman (0.81) all share the Athletes subcategory with Phelps and cluster tightly below the Olympic-org pair. That makes five of the top 10 neighbors fellow athletes — the dominant subcategory in the set. The remaining five cross into different kinds: The Athletic MLB (0.84, News Publishers) sits just behind Team USA, making it the highest-scoring non-athlete, non-Olympic-org neighbor; Gov. Gary Johnson (0.81, Politicians) is the lone political figure in the top 10; and Peter King (0.80, Journalists) and Julie Johnston Ertz (0.80, Athletes) round out the set alongside Fitbit (0.79, Fitness), the only brand in the top 10.
The two-peak structure — Olympic institutions on one side, U.S. national-team athletes on the other — suggests an audience organized around patriotic sports spectatorship rather than any single discipline.
