World Nomad Games 2026: Analyzing Kyrgyz Media Coverage with Python

What did Kyrgyz media talk about during the World Nomad Games 2026?

In this project, we used Python, Pandas and BeautifulSoup to analyze news coverage published by Kabar, the Kyrgyz national news agency. The goal was to understand how the Games were covered from a Kyrgyz media perspective.

Instead of looking only at individual articles, we transformed the news headlines into data and created visualizations to answer three questions:

• When did Kabar publish the most World Nomad Games stories?
• Which countries were mentioned most often?
• What type of topics dominated the coverage?

Data Source

The analysis is based on 51 Kabar news headlines published between August 31 and September 6, 2026.

Kabar provides an RSS feed, which can be accessed programmatically with Python. However, the current RSS feed mainly contains recent stories. To reconstruct the World Nomad Games coverage for the event dates, we used Kabar's historical World Nomad Games tag pages.

This allowed us to collect the headlines published during the seven days of the event and build our own dataset.

1. Collecting the News with Python

We used Requests to download the Kabar pages and BeautifulSoup to extract the news headlines.

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import pandas as pd

noticias = []

for fecha in fechas:

    url = f"https://en.kabar.kg/tags/world-nomad-games/{fecha}/"

    response = requests.get(
        url,
        headers={"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0"},
        timeout=20
    )

    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, "html.parser")

    titulos = soup.find_all(
        "h2",
        class_="news-info-title"
    )

    for titulo in titulos:
        noticias.append({
            "fecha": fecha,
            "titulo": titulo.get_text(" ", strip=True)
        })

kabar_news = pd.DataFrame(noticias)

The resulting dataset contained 51 news stories.

2. When Did Kabar Publish the Most Stories?

The number of stories varied considerably during the seven days analyzed. Coverage increased sharply in the middle of the Games.

Figure 1. Kabar coverage of the World Nomad Games 2026 by date.

The dataset contains:

• August 31: 1 story
• September 1: 1 story
• September 2: 3 stories
• September 3: 16 stories
• September 4: 28 stories
• September 5: 1 story
• September 6: 1 story

The highest number of headlines appeared on September 4, with 28 stories. This represents the peak of Kabar's coverage during the period analyzed.

3. Which Countries Were Mentioned Most Often?

Next, we searched the headlines for country names and related demonyms. The counts represent mentions in headlines, not the number of participating countries or athletes.

Figure 2. Countries mentioned in Kabar's World Nomad Games 2026 headlines.

Kyrgyzstan was mentioned in 17 of the 51 headlines. Kazakhstan appeared in 3 headlines and Russia in 2. Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Iran and the USA appeared once each.

Interestingly, Mexico did not appear in any of the 51 headlines analyzed. This does not mean that Mexico did not participate in the Games. It only means that Mexico was not mentioned in these Kabar headlines.

4. What Did Kyrgyz Media Talk About?

We also classified the headlines into several broad coverage categories using keyword matching.

The categories were:

• Sports & competitions
• Medals & results
• Culture & traditions
• Tourism & visitors
• Intellectual games
• Events & ceremonies

Figure 3. Main topics found in Kabar's World Nomad Games headlines.

Sports & competitions was the largest category, with 19 headlines. Medals and results appeared in 12 headlines, while culture and traditions appeared in 10.

Tourism and visitors appeared in 7 headlines, while intellectual games and events and ceremonies appeared in 3 headlines each.

5. Sports Mentioned in the Headlines

We also searched specifically for sports and traditional disciplines. Among the terms detected in the headlines:

• Kok-Boru: 5 mentions
• Wrestling: 5 mentions
• Alysh: 1 mention

This provides another perspective on the coverage: some individual disciplines received repeated attention in the headlines, particularly Kok-Boru and wrestling.

6. What Can We Learn from the Data?

The analysis shows that Kabar's coverage was strongly connected to the sporting competitions themselves, but the coverage was not limited to sport.

The headlines also included stories about Kyrgyz culture, traditional food, tourism, visitors, music, horse racing, intellectual games and events surrounding the Games.

The sharp increase in stories on September 3 and September 4 also shows how media coverage concentrated around the central days of the event.

7. Important Limitation

This analysis is based on 51 Kabar headlines collected from the historical World Nomad Games tag pages. It should therefore be interpreted as an analysis of this specific Kabar dataset, not as a complete measurement of all Kyrgyz media coverage.

Country counts represent headline mentions. A single headline can mention more than one country, and the absence of a country from the headlines does not mean that athletes from that country were absent from the Games.

The topic categories were also created using keyword matching, so a headline can belong to more than one category.

Conclusion

Using Python, we transformed a collection of Kabar news headlines into a small data-analysis project.

The workflow was:

Kabar → Web scraping → BeautifulSoup → Pandas → Keyword analysis → Data visualization

This type of analysis demonstrates how publicly available news data can be used to study media coverage of an international sporting and cultural event.

It also provides an interesting opportunity for a second analysis: comparing international Google News coverage with the coverage published by Kyrgyz media.

That comparison could help us explore whether international and local media focused on the same countries, sports and topics during the World Nomad Games 2026.

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Data analysis with Python
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