The Summer Olympics Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

At which sanctuary in the western Peloponnese were the ancient Games held every four years, traditionally from 776 BC, in honour of Zeus, whose gold-and-ivory statue there was one of the Seven Wonders?

Question 2

Which American track-and-field athlete won nine Olympic golds between 1984 and 1996, including the long jump at four straight Games and a sprint sweep in Los Angeles that deliberately echoed Jesse Owens 48 years earlier?

Question 3

Which city has hosted the Summer Games three times, in 1908, 1948 and 2012, more than any other, the middle occasion being the rationed, make-do 'Austerity Games' held amid post-war rubble with no new venues and athletes housed in army camps?

Question 4

Which Jamaican sprinter set world records of 9.58 seconds for 100 metres and 19.19 for 200 metres at the 2009 World Championships, and won the sprint double at three consecutive Olympic Games, celebrating with a pose miming a bolt of lightning?

Question 5

What is kept burning in a cauldron for the whole duration of a Games, having been kindled months earlier at Olympia in Greece by the sun's rays focused through a curved mirror, in a ceremony performed by women dressed as ancient priestesses?

Question 6

Which practice, applied to female Olympic competitors from the 1960s, began with humiliating physical examinations, moved to chromosome tests, and was largely abandoned as unreliable and unfair before controversy revived around athletes with natural differences of sex development?

Question 7

At which Games did a Paralympic archer light the distant cauldron with a flaming arrow fired over it, and did professional National Basketball Association players first compete, as the United States 'Dream Team' of Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird?

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About The Summer Olympics

The modern Olympic Games began in Athens in 1896 and have grown into the biggest recurring event on Earth. This quiz covers the Summer Games in eighty questions. Each describes an athlete, a host city, an event, a rule, a symbol, a moment or an official, and asks you to name it from four choices, then explains the background, the records and the controversy where there is one.

The first pack is the foundations and the biggest names: the founder Pierre de Coubertin and the first Games; the rings, the flame, the motto and the marathon; the International Olympic Committee and ancient Olympia; the parade of nations and the Paralympics; the Fosbury flop and the 1968 podium protest; and the towering champions Jesse Owens, Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Nadia Comaneci, Carl Lewis and Spyridon Louis.

The second pack widens out. More great Olympians: Paavo Nurmi, Emil Zatopek, Mark Spitz, Abebe Bikila, Bob Beamon, Muhammad Ali, Simone Biles, Steve Redgrave, Jim Thorpe, Cathy Freeman, Wilma Rudolph, Fanny Blankers-Koen, Vera Caslavska, Kip Keino, and India's field-hockey dynasty and its javelin champion Neeraj Chopra. The multi-event contests, the decathlon, the modern pentathlon, the triathlon, the steeplechase and the pole vault. And the host cities and their moments: the Munich massacre, the Mexico City altitude, the Nazi Games of 1936, the Barcelona Dream Team, three-time host London, the pandemic Games of Tokyo, the twin boycotts of 1980 and 1984, the Atlanta bombing, and Rio's refugee team, plus the Olympic mascot and the long, doomed rule of amateurism.

The third pack is the institution and its troubles: the presidents Brundage and Samaranch; the Salt Lake City bribery scandal; the doping sagas of Ben Johnson, East Germany and Russia, and the anti-doping agency that grew from them; the blade-runner Oscar Pistorius and the long fight over sex testing; how women went from banned to equal; the medal table and its two ways of counting; the refugee team; the little Shropshire festival at Much Wenlock that helped inspire the whole thing; the 1906 Games struck from the record; the flag, the pictograms and the host-city vote; and the recent editions from Tokyo 1964 to the river-borne opening of Paris 2024. Because a photograph of a champion or a host stadium usually gives the answer away, images are used only where a neutral site photo or artefact does not, and every figure has been checked. Along the way the quiz clears up a few things people half-remember wrong: that Athens 1896 gave winners silver, not gold; that the marathon's odd 42.195 kilometres was fixed by a royal box in London, not by ancient tradition; that the five rings are not colour-coded to particular continents; and that Jim Thorpe, Paavo Nurmi and others lost medals to an amateurism rule that no longer exists.