98 Fun Facts About 2021

Which container ship blocked the Suez Canal for six days in March 2021?

Ever Given: it held up an estimated $9.6bn of goods a day, and at least 369 ships were queuing by the time it was refloated.

Which NASA rover landed in Mars's Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021?

Perseverance: it is collecting cores of Martian rock and soil so that a future mission could bring them back to Earth for study.

NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity carried a tiny swatch of fabric from which pioneering aircraft?

The Wright Flyer: Ingenuity made the first powered, controlled flight on another planet, and though planned for five flights it made 72.

Which space telescope launched on Christmas Day 2021 aboard an Ariane 5?

James Webb: it was too big to launch whole, so it flew folded up origami-style and then unfolded itself in space.

The infrared telescope launched on Christmas Day 2021 coats its mirror segments in which metal?

Gold: it boosts how well the mirrors reflect infrared light, the kind of light the telescope gathers from very distant galaxies.

Which September 2021 SpaceX flight was the first orbital mission with only private citizens aboard?

Inspiration4: its commander paid for the flight himself and used it to raise millions of dollars for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

Which billionaire flew to space in July 2021 alongside his own brother?

Jeff Bezos: he took along 82-year-old Wally Funk, who had passed astronaut tests in 1961 but waited 60 years to reach space.

Which US senator's bundled-up pose and big mittens became a meme at the 2021 presidential inauguration?

Bernie Sanders: he put the meme photo on sweatshirts and gave the proceeds to charities in Vermont, including Meals on Wheels.

Which 22-year-old recited 'The Hill We Climb' at the 2021 inauguration?

Amanda Gorman: she grew up with a speech impediment that made the letter R especially hard for her to say.

Rioters attacked the US Capitol during election certification on which day of January 2021?

6th: a week later the House impeached Donald Trump for a second time, on a charge of incitement of insurrection.

A February 2021 coup in which country removed Aung San Suu Kyi from power?

Myanmar: the junta's crackdown on nationwide protests drove civilians to take up arms, turning an uprising into a civil war.

Which group captured Kabul on August 15, 2021?

The Taliban: President Ashraf Ghani quietly fled the country as they reached Kabul, then said in a statement that the Taliban had won.

Which country became the first to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021?

El Salvador: its 2021 law made businesses accept Bitcoin, but in 2025, under pressure from the IMF, the country dropped Bitcoin's legal-tender status.

Which Caribbean nation became a republic on November 30, 2021?

Barbados: at the midnight ceremony that removed Queen Elizabeth II as head of state, the singer Rihanna was named a national hero.

Which Caribbean president was assassinated at his home in July 2021?

Jovenel Moïse of Haiti: police said the hit squad was largely made up of former Colombian soldiers, recruited through private companies.

Who was sentenced in June 2021 to 22 and a half years for the murder of George Floyd?

Derek Chauvin: Floyd's death under his knee set off nationwide protests, and all four officers at the scene were fired.

Which candidate and party came first in Germany's 2021 federal election?

Olaf Scholz and the SPD: though they ran against Merkel's party, Scholz had been serving in her coalition as finance minister and her deputy.

Which COVID-19 variant did the WHO flag as of concern in November 2021?

Omicron: first reported from South Africa on 24 November, it was flagged two days later amid a steep rise in cases and signs of reinfection risk.

In which city was the COP26 climate conference held in 2021?

Glasgow: a last-minute intervention by India watered down the pact's coal pledge from 'phasing out' to merely 'phasing down'.

Which city hosted the delayed Expo 2020, opening October 1, 2021?

Dubai: after the fair closed, the site became Expo City Dubai, a new business and residential district that went on to host the COP28 climate summit.

What did the WHO endorse for the first time in October 2021?

A malaria vaccine: the WHO backed it for young children across sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria remains a primary cause of childhood illness and death.

Which pair shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize?

Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov: Muratov later auctioned his Nobel medal for a record $103.5 million to help Ukrainian children displaced by the war.

Which band won Eurovision 2021 in Rotterdam?

Måneskin: after viewers accused their singer of taking cocaine on live TV, he took a drug test, which came back negative.

What do gymnasts call the mid-air disorientation that sidelined Simone Biles at Tokyo?

The twisties: Biles pulled out of four individual finals, then returned for the last one and won bronze on the balance beam.

Which country topped the Tokyo 2020 medal table with 39 golds?

United States: it began the final day two golds behind, then won three more (the women's omnium, basketball and volleyball titles) to finish top.

Which sports made their Olympic debut at Tokyo 2020?

Karate, climbing, surfing, skateboarding: karate was then left out of Paris 2024, while the other three returned there.

Who won UEFA Euro 2020, played in 2021, beating England on penalties at Wembley?

Italy: they had failed even to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, their first miss since 1958, before Roberto Mancini rebuilt the side.

Which Denmark player suffered a cardiac arrest at Euro 2020?

Eriksen: his teammates formed a protective ring around him while medics revived him, and within a year he had returned to football with Brentford.

Which country won the 2021 Copa América, played in Brazil?

Argentina: removed as host amid a Covid surge two weeks before kick-off, they went on to beat the hosts Brazil 1–0 in the final.

Which team won Super Bowl LV in February 2021 at its own home stadium?

Tampa Bay Buccaneers: quarterback Tom Brady had left the New England Patriots after two decades, and won a seventh Super Bowl at 43.

Who won his first Formula One title at the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix?

Max Verstappen: a disputed safety-car call let him pass his rival on the final lap, and the FIA later removed race director Michael Masi from his post.

Which F1 driver became the first to win 100 Grands Prix in 2021?

Lewis Hamilton: the 100th win came in Sochi when late rain caught out race leader Lando Norris, who refused to pit for wet-weather tyres.

Which Netflix survival drama about 456 indebted players became its most-watched series in 2021?

Squid Game: its creator came up with it in 2009, when his family had to take out loans, and asked himself whether he would enter such a game for money.

Which TV host interviewed Prince Harry and Meghan in March 2021?

Oprah Winfrey: Buckingham Palace answered the couple's claims with a statement that 'some recollections may vary', promising to handle them privately.

Which 2021 film grossed $1.921 billion, the first billion-dollar film since 2019?

Spider-Man: No Way Home: it brought back earlier Spider-Men Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, after Garfield had spent months denying he was in it.

Which Disney animated film about the Madrigal family of Colombia came out in November 2021?

Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the songs; 'We Don't Talk About Bruno' topped the charts.

Who directed the 2021 adaptation of Dune, premiering at Venice?

Denis Villeneuve: Dune won six Oscars, more than any other film that night, yet he wasn't nominated for best director.

Which country was the world's biggest box-office market in 2021?

China: home-grown films took over four-fifths of its takings, as pandemic delays and withheld release dates kept many big Hollywood films off its screens.

Which web game, released publicly in October 2021, went viral with its emoji grids?

Wordle: Josh Wardle made it for his partner, who sorted all 13,000 five-letter words by whether she knew them, so the answers would never be obscure.

Whose single 'Drivers License' topped the Hot 100 in January 2021?

Olivia Rodrigo: that July the White House enlisted her to urge young people to get vaccinated against Covid, and she met President Biden and Dr Fauci.

Which pop star's conservatorship, run for years by her father, was ended by a judge in November 2021?

Britney Spears: she had told the court that June that the arrangement was abusive, and in September the judge suspended her father as conservator.

Which BTS single, released in May 2021, spent seven straight weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100?

Butter: when the band's next single, Permission to Dance, knocked it to seventh, fans switched their buying back and it returned to number one a week later.

What was the title of Billie Eilish's second album, released July 30, 2021?

Happier Than Ever: it and its title track were up for Grammys including Album of the Year and Record of the Year, but won none of them.

Ted Lasso coaches which fictional English club?

AFC Richmond: its new owner hired an American college football coach with no soccer experience, secretly hoping he would wreck the club her cheating ex-husband loved.

In 2021, Facebook's parent rebranded as what?

Meta Platforms: a year later it cut 11,000 jobs, and Zuckerberg admitted he had got it wrong by betting the pandemic online boom would last.

Which music festival saw a fatal crowd crush during its headliner's set in November 2021?

Astroworld: Travis Scott kept performing for over half an hour after officials had declared a mass-casualty incident in the crowd.

Which Florida condominium partially collapsed in June 2021, killing 98 people?

Champlain Towers South: in 2018 an engineer warned of 'major structural damage', yet later that year a town building official told residents it was in good shape.

Which company's COVID-19 vaccine did several European countries pause in March 2021 over reports of rare blood clots?

AstraZeneca: many countries resumed it once Europe's regulator said its benefits outweighed the risks, but Denmark dropped it altogether.

British diver Tom Daley went viral at the Tokyo Olympics for doing which hobby in the stands?

Knitting was a lockdown hobby for Tom Daley, and television cameras caught him at it again in the stands at the Paris Olympics three years later.

The beds in the athletes' village at the Tokyo Olympics, held in 2021, had frames made of which material?

Cardboard beds furnished the athletes' rooms in Tokyo, setting off a media debate over whether they had been designed to stop competitors sharing them.

Prince Philip helped design a custom Land Rover Defender, used for the first time in April 2021, as what?

A hearse with an open-topped rear made to his own specification, it carried the Duke's coffin through Windsor Castle to the West Steps of St George's Chapel.

Which insects of Brood X emerged from Georgia to New York in spring 2021 after 17 years underground?

Cicadas of Brood X tunnel up together as nymphs and shed their shells on trees, and the next mass emergence after 2021 is not expected until 2038.

Which doughnut chain offered vaccinated Americans a free glazed doughnut every day for the rest of 2021?

Krispy Kreme made the offer in March 2021 to anyone who could prove they had been vaccinated, leaving out only Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.

The World Health Organization began naming coronavirus variants in May 2021 after the letters of which alphabet?

Greek letters such as Alpha and Delta replaced place names so that no country would be stigmatised, and the organization later skipped Nu and Xi.

Which sitcom's six stars went back to their old Burbank soundstage for an HBO Max reunion special in May 2021?

Friends brought its cast back to Stage 24, known as The Friends Stage, to revisit the apartments, the Central Perk coffee shop and the fountain.

Scottish postman Nathan Evans set off a TikTok craze in early 2021 by singing which kind of traditional song?

Sea shanties boomed after his cover of Wellerman, a folk song from New Zealand named after the Weller brothers, who sold provisions to the whalers working there.

At a Euro 2020 press conference in June 2021, Cristiano Ronaldo moved aside bottles of which sponsor's drink?

Coca-Cola bottles gave way to a bottle of water, which Ronaldo held up to the cameras, and France's Paul Pogba soon did the same with a Heineken.

Which cheese was baked in a block with cherry tomatoes in the pasta recipe that swept TikTok in early 2021?

Feta ran short in some shops as the trend peaked, and one Rhode Island cheese seller used to shifting 2,000 pounds of cheese a week sold out of it.

Which former senator from California was sworn in as the first female US vice president in January 2021?

Kamala Harris was also the first African American and first Asian American vice president, having earlier been California's first female attorney general.

Which holiday, marking the end of slavery in Texas in 1865, became a US federal holiday in 2021?

Juneteenth blends June and nineteenth, the date of General Gordon Granger's order, and it was the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Which chancellor of Germany, a trained quantum chemist, left office in December 2021 after 16 years in power?

Angela Merkel was the first woman elected chancellor and the first raised in the former East Germany, and she chose not to seek a fifth term.

Which Canary Island saw lava from the Cumbre Vieja ridge destroy more than 3,000 buildings in late 2021?

La Palma endured 85 days of eruption, the longest in its recorded history, and the lava reached the sea to form a new peninsula.

The GameStop share frenzy of January 2021 was driven by traders on which website's WallStreetBets forum?

Reddit users sent the retailer's shares above $500 in pre-market trading on January 28, nearly 30 times the $17.25 price at the start of the month.

What first name did Prince Harry and Meghan give their daughter, born in California in June 2021?

Lilibet was the family nickname of her great-grandmother Queen Elizabeth II, and her middle name honours her grandmother Diana, Princess of Wales.

Which hurricane struck Louisiana in August 2021 with 150 mph winds, tying the state's strongest landfall on record?

Ida came ashore near Port Fourchon on August 29 and devastated the town of Grand Isle, yet the levees of New Orleans held, unlike during Katrina.

National Geographic began recognising a fifth ocean in June 2021, made up of the waters around which continent?

Antarctica is ringed by the Southern Ocean, generally taken as the waters south of 60 degrees latitude, which is bigger than only the Arctic among the five.

Who took office as Israel's prime minister in June 2021, ending Benjamin Netanyahu's twelve straight years in power?

Naftali Bennett led Yamina, a party with only seven seats, and got the job through a rotation deal under which Yair Lapid was to take over in 2023.

Which Zanzibar-born novelist, author of Paradise and By the Sea, won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature?

Abdulrazak Gurnah reached Britain in the 1960s as a refugee from the Zanzibar Revolution, and the Nobel citation praised his writing on colonialism and the fate of refugees.

Which film, starring Frances McDormand as a woman living out of her van, won Best Picture in April 2021?

Nomadland made Chloé Zhao the first woman of colour, and only the second woman after Kathryn Bigelow, to win the Oscar for Best Director.

Which actor, at 83, became the oldest winner of a competitive acting Oscar in April 2021 for The Father?

Anthony Hopkins played a man with dementia, almost three decades after his first Best Actor win as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs.

Which 2021 film, delayed by the pandemic, was Daniel Craig's fifth and final outing as agent 007?

No Time to Die is the twenty-fifth film in the Eon series, and it finally had its premiere at the Royal Albert Hall in London in September 2021.

Scarlett Johansson sued Disney in July 2021 over the simultaneous streaming release of which Marvel film?

Black Widow reached cinemas and Disney+ Premier Access on the same day, July 9, and the lawsuit was settled two months later.

Which Marvel Studios series premiered on Disney+ in January 2021, with episodes imitating sitcoms of different decades?

WandaVision was the first television series Marvel Studios produced, and it follows two Avengers living an idyllic suburban life in Westview, New Jersey.

Kate Winslet won an Emmy as a Pennsylvania police detective in which HBO miniseries of spring 2021?

Mare of Easttown is set in a fictional Philadelphia suburb, and its cast won two more acting Emmys, for Julianne Nicholson and Evan Peters.

Which former Saturday Night Live star won an Emmy in September 2021 for playing the title role in Ted Lasso?

Jason Sudeikis first played the coach in NBC Sports promos in 2013, and the comedy's first season drew 20 Emmy nominations, then a record for a new comedy.

Which pop star joined Steve Martin and Martin Short as amateur sleuths in 2021's Only Murders in the Building?

Selena Gomez plays one of three strangers who look into deaths at the Arconia, their Upper West Side apartment block, and make a podcast about the cases.

Which Spanish Netflix drama about robbers in red jumpsuits and Dalí masks released its final episodes in December 2021?

Money Heist put the painter's face on its masks as an instantly Spanish symbol, after a Don Quixote design was considered and discarded.

Youn Yuh-jung won an Oscar in April 2021 as the grandmother in which film about a Korean family in Arkansas?

Minari made her the first Korean actor to win an Oscar, and its story draws on director Lee Isaac Chung's own upbringing in the 1980s.

Which album did Taylor Swift re-release in April 2021 as the first of her re-recorded 'Taylor's Version' records?

Fearless was her second studio album, from 2008, and she remade it after a 2019 dispute over the master recordings of her back catalogue.

Peter Jackson's 2021 Disney+ documentary Get Back spends nearly eight hours watching which band record an album?

The Beatles are seen over 21 days of studio time making Let It Be, and the series challenged the belief that those sessions were nothing but tension.

Which actor rekindled a romance with Jennifer Lopez in 2021, seventeen years after their first engagement ended?

Ben Affleck and Lopez had made the films Gigli and Jersey Girl together during their first romance, and the pair nicknamed Bennifer married in 2022, only for Lopez to file for divorce two years later.

Which star of The Mary Tyler Moore Show died on New Year's Eve 2021, weeks short of her 100th birthday?

Betty White died 17 days before the milestone, and a tribute film had already been booked into American cinemas for January 17, 2022, her birthday.

Which messaging app went dark worldwide with Facebook and Instagram for about six hours on October 4, 2021?

WhatsApp and its sister apps were unreachable for six to seven hours, and so many users fled to Signal and Telegram that those services faltered too.

Which three-letter word, 72 times more common by September than a year earlier, was Oxford's Word of the Year for 2021?

Vax had been a rare word until 2021, then spawned a whole family of offshoots, from vax sites and vax cards to getting vaxxed.

Which new name did Cleveland's baseball team announce in July 2021 to replace Indians from the following season?

Guardians honours the Guardians of Traffic, eight large Art Deco statues on the Hope Memorial Bridge, close to the team's ballpark.

Which auction house sold the digital artist Beeple's collage Everydays as an NFT for $69.3 million in March 2021?

Christie's sold a collage of 5,000 daily images to Vignesh Sundaresan, a Singapore-based programmer and cryptocurrency investor.

Which American designer, artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear from 2018, died in November 2021 aged 41?

Virgil Abloh had trained as an architect, and he had kept private a 2019 diagnosis of cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare type of cancer.

Which video game about a divorcing husband and wife turned into dolls won Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2021?

It Takes Two cannot be played alone: it needs a pair of players, online or in split-screen, each steering one of the spouses, Cody or May.

Which team won the 2021 NBA title, its first in fifty years, after losing the opening two games of the Finals?

Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo scored 50 points in the deciding sixth game, the most he had managed in any playoff game.

Which British player became the Open Era's first qualifier to win a Grand Slam singles title at the 2021 US Open?

Emma Raducanu did it without dropping a set, and she was the first British woman to win a singles major since Virginia Wade at Wimbledon in 1977.

Qatar's Mutaz Barshim and Gianmarco Tamberi chose to share an Olympic title in Tokyo in which athletics event?

High jump officials offered a jump-off after both men cleared 2.37 metres, but Barshim asked whether the two could simply both be champions.

Which Star Trek actor flew to the edge of space aboard a Blue Origin rocket in 2021 at the age of 90?

William Shatner was then the oldest person to have flown in space, and the sub-orbital hop made him one of the first 600 people to get there.

Who became golf's oldest major champion by winning the 2021 PGA Championship a month before turning 51?

Phil Mickelson won at Kiawah Island by two strokes, breaking a record that Julius Boros had held since winning the same title at 48 in 1968.

Which NASA spacecraft crossed into the Sun's outer atmosphere in April 2021, a feat the agency called touching the Sun?

Parker Solar Probe crossed the boundary on its eighth flyby, and it was the first NASA spacecraft named after a living person, the physicist Eugene Parker.

Which Irish jockey became the first woman to ride the Grand National winner, partnering Minella Times in 2021?

Rachael Blackmore won at an Aintree meeting held behind closed doors, in the year she also became the first woman to be leading jockey at the Cheltenham Festival.

Which sprinter, born in El Paso, Texas, won the men's 100 metres at the Tokyo Olympics in 9.80 seconds?

Marcell Jacobs moved to Lombardy with his mother as a baby, after his father, an American serviceman, was posted to South Korea three weeks after the birth.

The Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, fully approved by the FDA in August 2021, is sold under which brand name?

Comirnaty is an mRNA vaccine developed by the German biotechnology company BioNTech, and it was the first COVID-19 vaccine to win approval from the FDA.

Which lawmaker for Hiroshima, a former foreign minister, became prime minister of Japan in October 2021?

Fumio Kishida won the ruling party's leadership in a run-off against Taro Kono, a year after losing the same contest to Yoshihide Suga.