gymEvery gym on the map

ทุกยิมบนแผนที่ · thuk yim bon phaenthi

527 places in 58 countries. The sport's own OpenStreetMap tag found fewer than half of them.

Wonmerome · CC BY-SA 4.0

What it is

A census of everywhere OpenStreetMap knows muay thai is trained, worldwide, taken two ways at once and then compared.

The long version

527 rows, 58 countries. Thailand 113, the United States 67, Brazil 64, the United Kingdom 31, Germany 30, Canada 28, Spain 16.

The tag found 275 and the names found 252 more. Only 53 rows carry both. The sport's own key, `sport=muay_thai`, is used 49 times in the whole database according to taginfo — so more than half of what is on the map is there because a gym put the word in its own name, not because a mapper reached for the right key.

And the floor is far below the number. The English article records more than 3,800 muay thai gyms overseas in 2020. The map has 414 outside Thailand. This is a census of OpenStreetMap, not of the sport, and it is short by an order of magnitude.

Inference — the shape is still worth having. Brazil with 64 and the Netherlands and France between them with dozens is the K-1 and Chute Boxe inheritance showing up in a volunteer map twenty years later.

How

Two Overpass queries. One asks for the tag — `sport=muay_thai` and its spellings. One asks for the name — anything carrying muay, มวย, ムエタイ, 무에타이, муай, 泰拳, thaibox or boxe thaï. Country comes from point-in-polygon against Natural Earth at 1:50m, not from a geocoder.

Notes

Three traps, all found and all kept out of the count. Thai is written without spaces, so มวย matches inside หมวย — Muay, a nickname — and inside มวยผม, a bun of hair: twenty of the first Thai matches were noodle shops, a butcher, a beauty salon and two statues of the earth goddess wringing out her hair. In Latin script muay matches inside Turkish muayene, a medical or vehicle inspection, forty times over, and inside Filipino Pamuayan and Indonesian Mamuaya. Matching at word level and requiring a facility tag clears all three; 209 rows were dropped and every reason is in the harvest file.

Connected to

• Chiang Mai Fourteen of them.
• Who the record remembers The same exercise on people.
• Buakaw Banchamek One reason for the shape.
• The ring at Mae Sariang One of the eighteen stadiums.

Named here by

• Changpuek and Rick Roufus, Las Vegas 1988 What followed abroad.
• Buakaw Banchamek The export, counted.
• Who the record remembers The same exercise, on the map.
• The ring at Mae Sariang Where the count comes from.
• What to ask before paying a month Where the places are.
• What this site does not have The count that is short.
• Thai troops in France, 1914–18 Where it ended up.
• Chiang Mai Where the count comes from.
• Ong-Bak What it did to the count abroad.

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