Bobsleigh Trivia
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50 free Bobsleigh trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Bobsleigh (or bobsled, if you are American) began with bored Victorian tourists strapping delivery sleds together in the streets of St. Moritz, and it is now a sport where crews hit 150 km/h and pull 5 g through the corners. This quiz covers the whole story: Caspar Badrutt's hotel, the Cresta Run, the first purpose-built track in 1904, the four-man event at the very first Winter Olympics, the missing race of 1960 and the arrival of two-woman bobsleigh and monobob. There are questions on how the sport actually works: crew roles, sled lengths and weight limits, why races are timed to the hundredth, what a labyrinth is and why the push start matters. The people are here too: Eugenio Monti lending a bolt to his rivals, Kevin Kuske and Francesco Friedrich, Kaillie Humphries winning gold for two countries, Steven Holcomb's Night Train, and the real story behind Cool Runnings and the Jamaican team of 1988. About a third of the questions are easy for anyone who watches the Winter Olympics, a third are medium, and the rest will test committed sliding fans. Every answer is checked against reference and biography pages, and each question carries its source.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What were the first racing bobsleighs of the 1880s mostly built from?
Wood
Wood. By one account the very first was simply two wooden sleighs joined by a plank, rigged up in 1888 by an American visitor, Wilson Smith, to ride down from St. Moritz to Celerina.
Q 02By tradition, the 'bob' in bobsleigh recalls early crews doing what?
Rocking back and forth
Rocking back and forth. Riders bobbed like this in the belief that it added speed, and the sport says that is where the name comes from, though dictionaries trace 'bobsled' to an older short logging sled.
Q 03A St. Moritz hotelier's 1864 money-back bet is said to have launched winter tourism in the Alps with guests from which country?
England
England. As the story goes, the hotelier dared a few summer guests to return in winter and promised to cover their costs if they were disappointed; they came, and stayed for months.
Q 04Why were the early sledders in St. Moritz eventually banned from the public roads?
Too many collisions with pedestrians
Too many collisions with pedestrians. Pushed off the streets, the sledders got purpose-built ice runs just outside the village instead, beginning with the Cresta Run in the mid-1880s.
Q 05Eddie Eagan won bobsleigh gold in 1932, twelve years after winning Olympic gold in which summer sport?
Boxing
Boxing. Beaten in his first bout at the 1924 Games, he came back eight years later on a sled and won, the only person with gold in different sports at both the Summer and Winter Games.
Q 06Bobsleigh champion Billy Fiske, among the first Americans killed in the Second World War, was flying for which force?
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. He joined up in 1939 and was fatally wounded in combat in August 1940, well over a year before his own country entered the war; at 16 he had driven a sled to Olympic gold.
Q 07The St. Moritz-Celerina track, the world's oldest, is unique among bobsleigh tracks in what way?
It is naturally refrigerated
It is naturally refrigerated. With no cooling pipes, the whole run has to be rebuilt by hand from snow and water every winter, so its line is never exactly the same two years running.
Q 08Four-man bobsleigh was part of the first Winter Olympics, held in 1924 in which resort?
Chamonix
Chamonix. Nobody there knew it was an Olympics: the meeting was billed as an International Winter Sports Week, and the IOC only named it the first Winter Games afterwards.
Q 09Why did the 1960 Winter Olympics become the only Games without bobsleigh?
Building a track cost too much
Building a track cost too much. A poll suggested only nine countries would send sleds, so the organisers at Squaw Valley in California decided a run was not worth the expense.
Q 10Which future head of state raced bobsleighs at five straight Winter Olympics from 1988 to 2002?
Albert II of Monaco
Albert II of Monaco. He was already a member of the IOC when he made his Olympic debut, and Olympic sport ran in the family: his mother Grace Kelly's father and brother both rowed for the United States.
Q 11Which bobsleigh event joined the Olympic programme in 1932, eight years after the four-man?
Two-man
Two-man. Crew sizes had only just been tidied up: at the two Games before it the big sleds could carry either four or five riders, and the 1928 winners rode five to a sled.
Q 12Two-woman bobsleigh made its Olympic debut at which Games?
2002 Salt Lake City
Women's bobsleigh had begun with two demonstration races at Lake Placid in 1983.
Q 13Which bobsleigh event was added in 2022 to give women as many Olympic events as men?
Monobob
Monobob. Every pilot in this solo event drives an identical sled, so the result turns on how she pushes and steers and not on how much her team could spend on equipment.
Q 21How is an Olympic bobsleigh race decided?
Total time of four runs
Total time of four runs. The clock splits crews to a hundredth of a second, and even then an Olympic gold has twice been shared by sleds that could not be separated.
Q 22Which James Bond film climaxes with 007 chasing Blofeld down a bobsleigh run?
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The 1969 chase used top winter-sports athletes as stunt doubles, and a real crash they suffered during shooting was kept in the finished film.
Q 23What riding position made its debut at the Cresta Run's 1887 Grand National, breaking with custom?
Head-first
Q 14Which two nations have been the most successful in bobsleigh across all major competitions?
Germany and Switzerland
Germany and Switzerland. It was not always so: American crews and their sled designs led the sport in the first half of the 20th century, before the two European neighbours took over.
Q 15Almost every modern bobsleigh track is built from what, with a skin of ice on top?
Concrete
Concrete. The big bends are banked very steeply, and a crew sweeping through them is pressed into the sled at several times normal gravity.
Q 16In bobsleigh track design, what is a labyrinth?
Three turns in quick succession with no straight
Every modern track must have at least one straight and one labyrinth, and ideally at least fifteen curves.
Q 17Why do bobsleigh crews fix slabs of metal inside their sleds?
For weight
For weight. A heavier sled runs faster, so crews add ballast up to the permitted maximum; before a limit arrived in 1952, teams chased speed by picking very heavy men instead.
Q 18In a four-man bobsleigh, which crew member jumps in last at the start?
Brakeman
Brakeman. He shoves from the back, leaps in last, and then leaves the brake alone all the way down: his only job on board is to stop the sled once the finish line is behind it.
Q 19How does a bobsleigh pilot steer the sled?
By pulling on two rings
By pulling on two rings. Ropes run from the rings to the front axle, and only the gentlest tugs are used, because at racing speed a sharp pull would put the sled into the wall.
Q 20What do bobsledders wear to grip the ice as they run up to 50 metres with the sled at the start?
Shoes with brush-like spikes
Shoes with brush-like spikes. The grip matters because that short push is the only moment a crew can add any speed of its own; once everyone is aboard, gravity does the rest.
Head-first. The new style took over so completely that the sport which grew up on that run is still ridden face down, chin just above the ice.
Q 24Which of the three sliding sports is the slowest?
Skeleton
Skeleton. Its rider is less streamlined than a luger, so on the same ice the sled tops out at around 130 km/h, while luges pass 140 and four-man bobsleighs approach 160.
Q 25Which NFL running back pushed a bobsleigh for the United States at the 1992 Winter Olympics?
Herschel Walker
Herschel Walker. The Heisman Trophy winner was first picked for the four-man crew but ended up in the smaller sled, finishing seventh with pilot Brian Shimer.
Q 26At Innsbruck 1964, Italy's Eugenio Monti famously lent what to Britain's Nash and Dixon?
A bolt from his own sled
A bolt from his own sled. The Britons used it to win the gold he had been chasing himself, and Monti was honoured with an international award for fair play.
Q 27The rebuilt bobsleigh track named after Eugenio Monti lies in which Italian resort?
Cortina d'Ampezzo
Cortina d'Ampezzo. The old run on the site, a venue of the 1956 Winter Olympics, had been shut since 2008, so an entirely new track was built there for the 2026 Games.
Q 28Which American hurdler went on to race as a bobsleigh brakewoman at the 2014 Winter Olympics?
Lolo Jones
Lolo Jones. It made her one of the few people to compete at both Summer and Winter Games, and she stayed in the sled long enough to win a world two-woman title in 2021.
Q 29Four-time Olympic bobsleigh champion Kevin Kuske competed in what before he took up the sport?
Sprinting
Sprinting. A relay bronze medallist at the 1998 World Junior Championships, he switched to the ice, where he was rated the fastest man in the sport at the push and turned that start speed into four Olympic golds.
Q 30Francesco Friedrich tied for a 2018 Olympic bobsleigh gold with a pair from which country?
Canada
Canada. Justin Kripps and Alexander Kopacz matched Friedrich's sled to the hundredth of a second, so both crews were given gold and no silver medal was awarded.