Athletes vs actors vs reality stars

Actors slightly outscore athletes on judges, but athletes convert Mirrorballs at a higher rate (11.8%).

Ballroom Data · Artometrics-style report · Nov 3, 2026 (America/Los_Angeles)

Headline

Actors edge athletes on mean judge score (8.162 vs 8.128), but athletes win Mirrorballs more often — 11 wins in 93 celeb-seasons (11.8%) versus actors at 6.6%.

Findings

1. Comedians sit lowest on mean score (7.049) with 0 Mirrorballs in-sample.
2. TV/media personalities are mid-pack on scores but convert wins at 7.6%.
3. Industry tags are Kaggle-based; some celebs are miscategorized and S33–35 are sparse.

Methods & caveats

Industry buckets collapse Kaggle celebrity_industry values. Win rates use Mirrorball winners joined to industry on celebrity+season.

Coverage: seasons 1–35; 3,602 performances; 11,027 individual judge marks in the cleaned Ballroom Data SQLite build (Nov 3, 2026, America/Los_Angeles).

Known gaps: Season 31 Mirrorball winner is not tagged as Winners in the performance table (Charli D’Amelio / Mark Ballas is missing from our winners extract). Seasons 33–35 largely lack Kaggle ages/hometowns. Season 35 celebrity names in the wiki scrape are often first-name-only or garbled. Dance-style strings still include some unclean variants. We never impute missing values.

Sources: howisonlab/dwts_dataset (GitHub); Kaggle brupley/dancing-with-the-stars-dataset (CC BY-SA 4.0); Wikipedia DWTS season pages for seasons 32–35 (CC BY-SA 4.0). Scores are per-judge means on a 0–10 scale so 3-judge and 4-judge weeks are comparable. Marathons/relays/megamixes are excluded from style averages unless noted.

Disclaimer: Unofficial fan analysis. Not affiliated with BBC Worldwide, Disney, or ABC.

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