2018 Winter Olympics
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50 free 2018 Winter Olympics trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The 2018 Winter Olympics opened in a small South Korean mountain county after a tense year on the border with the North. Within days the two Koreas were marching into the stadium side by side, and a sporting event had become a diplomatic one as well. This quiz covers the whole Games: the bid that finally succeeded, the opening and closing ceremonies, the medal table, the doping ban that changed one team's name, and the champions on snow and ice, from teenage snowboarders to veteran skiers. It also collects the odd stories, including a flag bearer who refused to wrap up and a snowboarder who won a skiing race. The questions suit anyone who watched in 2018 and wants to test what stuck, quiz hosts building a winter sports round, and teachers looking for a ready-made set. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches you something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Pacific nation's flag bearer marched shirtless and oiled in the cold at the 2018 Olympics?
Tonga
Tonga's Pita Taufatofua had done the same at Rio 2016 as a taekwondo fighter. He then took up cross-country skiing and was his country's only athlete in Pyeongchang.
Q 02Which crop gave South Korea's silver-medal women's curling team its nickname at the 2018 Olympics?
Garlic
Garlic is what the rural county of Uiseong was long known for, so fans dubbed its curlers the Garlic Girls. All five team members share the surname Kim.
Q 03The 2018 Olympic host was styled 'PyeongChang', with a capital C, to avoid a mix-up with which city?
Pyongyang
Pyongyang is the capital of North Korea, and in English the two names differ by only a few letters. The Games emblem was built from the Korean letters that begin 'Pyeong' and 'Chang'.
Q 04Yun Sung-bin won skeleton gold at the 2018 Olympics in a helmet styled after which Marvel superhero?
Iron Man
Iron Man appeared to fly head-first down the track on Yun's helmet. He won by 1.63 seconds, a record margin for Olympic skeleton, and gave Asia its first Olympic gold in a sliding sport.
Q 05Which skier scattered her war-veteran grandfather's ashes near the 2018 Olympic downhill course?
Lindsey Vonn
Lindsey Vonn's grandfather Don Kildow, who taught her to ski, had served in the Korean War and died three months earlier. She raced with his initials on her helmet and won downhill bronze.
Q 06What became of the $100 million Pyeongchang Olympic Stadium within months of the 2018 Games?
It was demolished
It was demolished after hosting only the four Olympic and Paralympic ceremonies and one K-pop concert. To limit costs it had been built with no roof and no central heating.
Q 07Which skater, whose fans throw Winnie-the-Pooh toys onto the ice, kept his Olympic title in 2018?
Yuzuru Hanyu
Yuzuru Hanyu became the first man to defend the Olympic singles title since American Dick Button in 1952. The Pooh custom grew from a tissue box he carried to competitions.
Q 08Which 17-year-old won snowboard halfpipe gold at the 2018 Olympics with a top score of 98.25?
Chloe Kim
Chloe Kim won in South Korea, the country her parents had left for the United States. She had been too young to enter the previous Winter Olympics four years earlier.
Q 09North Korea sent what kind of 230-strong troupe to sing in the stands at the 2018 Olympics?
A cheerleading squad
A cheerleading squad came at South Korea's invitation, part of a push to improve relations between the two countries. Its numbers included 'Whistle', a North Korean pop song from 1990.
Q 10Which snowboarder's 2018 halfpipe win was the United States' 100th Winter Olympic gold medal?
Shaun White
Shaun White scored 97.75 to take his third Olympic halfpipe title, twelve years after his first. Japan's Ayumu Hirano had to settle for silver for the second Games running.
Q 11Which athlete won golds in both skiing and snowboarding at the 2018 Olympics, a Winter Games first?
Ester Ledecká
Ester Ledecká took the super-G by 0.01 seconds after many media outlets had already proclaimed Anna Veith the winner. She then won her specialist event, snowboarding's parallel giant slalom.
Q 12Which country's 39 medals at the 2018 Olympics set a Winter Games record that stood for eight years?
Norway
Norway passed the 37 medals the United States had won at Vancouver 2010 and tied Germany for the most golds, with 14 each. Its own team finally broke the record in 2026.
Q 13What was the name of the white tiger mascot of the 2018 Winter Olympics?
Soohorang
Q 21Which K-pop boy band performed 'Growl' and 'Power' at the 2018 Winter Olympics closing ceremony?
EXO
EXO shared the bill with the rapper CL of the girl group 2NE1, who performed 'I Am the Best'. A Dutch DJ's afterparty set then closed the show.
Q 22Which John Lennon song did four South Korean singers perform at the 2018 Olympic opening ceremony?
Imagine
Imagine was sung while families from the host province lit one another's candles. As the song ended, five children released a balloon shaped like a dove.
Q 23Which sister of North Korea's leader shook the South Korean president's hand at the 2018 Olympics?
Kim Yo-jong
Kim Yo-jong was the first member of North Korea's ruling family to visit the South since the Korean War. The next day she handed over a personal letter from her brother.
Soohorang joins 'sooho', Korean for protection, to part of the word for tiger. The white tiger is regarded as Korea's sacred guardian animal.
Q 14Pyeongchang won the 2018 Olympics on its third straight bid; which city had beaten it for 2014?
Sochi
Sochi edged Pyeongchang by just four votes, after Vancouver had beaten it by three for 2010. The third attempt was a first-round landslide, with 63 of the 95 votes.
Q 15Pyeongchang 2018 began a run of three straight Olympics in East Asia; which city staged the third?
Beijing
Beijing followed Tokyo's Summer Games with the 2022 Winter Olympics. That made it the first city to host both the Summer and the Winter Games.
Q 16Under what team name did Russian competitors enter the 2018 Olympics while their flag was banned?
Olympic Athletes from Russia
Olympic Athletes from Russia marched behind the Olympic flag and heard the Olympic anthem at their medal ceremonies. Their national committee had been suspended over state-sponsored doping.
Q 17What appeared on the flag North and South Korea marched behind together at the 2018 Olympics?
A blue peninsula
A blue peninsula on a white field, the outline of all Korea, forms the Korean Unification Flag. It made its debut in 1991, when the two countries sent a joint team to the world table tennis championships.
Q 18Which three-letter code did the unified Korean women's ice hockey team use at the 2018 Olympics?
COR
COR comes from Corée, the French word for Korea, which avoided either country's own code. The joint roster of 35 players was agreed only about three weeks before the Games opened.
Q 19Which South Korean star lit the 2018 Olympic cauldron after skating on a small rink beside it?
Kim Yuna
Kim Yuna, the 2010 Olympic figure skating champion, took the flame from two members of the unified ice hockey team, one from each side of the border, who had carried it up the stairs.
Q 20Which company's 1,218 drones formed the Olympic rings in a then-record show for the 2018 Games?
Intel
Intel had filmed its Shooting Star drones the previous December. A live flight planned for the opening ceremony was cancelled at the last minute, so television viewers saw the recording.
Q 24Which league kept its players out of the 2018 Olympics after sending them to five straight Games?
NHL
NHL bosses barred everyone under contract, even players who were not on a top-flight roster. Europe's leagues paused instead, led by a 33-day break in Russia's KHL.
Q 25The USA's 2018 women's ice hockey gold was its first since the sport's Olympic debut in which city?
Nagano
Nagano 1998 was followed by four straight golds for Canada. The Americans ended that run in the 2018 final, which went past overtime to a penalty shootout.
Q 26Which forward's overtime goal won the 2018 Olympic men's ice hockey final for the Russian team?
Kirill Kaprizov
Kirill Kaprizov, the youngest player on the roster, scored to beat Germany 4–3. It was the first Olympic gold for Russian hockey players since 1992, and the best result in German hockey history.
Q 27Which skip led the United States to its first Olympic curling gold at the 2018 Winter Olympics?
John Shuster
John Shuster had been dropped from the national high-performance programme, so he formed a team nicknamed The Rejects. In Pyeongchang they lost four of their first six games, then won five in a row.
Q 28Which drug, behind Maria Sharapova's 2016 ban, cost a Russian curler his 2018 Olympic bronze?
Meldonium
Meldonium turned up in Alexander Krushelnitskiy's sample, costing him and his wife and partner Anastasia Bryzgalova their mixed doubles medals. He was later banned for four years.
Q 29Which 17-year-old overslept on the morning he won snowboard slopestyle gold at the 2018 Olympics?
Red Gerard
Red Gerard had stayed up late watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine, then lost his jacket and had to borrow his roommate's. He still became the first Winter Olympic medallist born in the 2000s.
Q 30Which snowboarding event replaced parallel slalom to make its Olympic debut at the 2018 Games?
Big air
Big air sends each rider off one huge ramp to land a single trick. Parallel slalom, dropped to make room for it, had lasted just one Winter Games after its own debut in 2014.