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40 free Indian Sports trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
India's sporting history runs far wider than cricket. Its hockey teams owned the Olympics for three decades, a village wrestler brought home the first individual medal in 1952, and since then shooters, lifters, boxers, shuttlers and a javelin thrower have added to the tally. Away from the Games there is kabaddi, a chess boom that produced the youngest world champion ever, and a century-old football culture with the oldest club tournament in Asia. These 40 questions cover all of it: the golden era of hockey, Olympic and Paralympic firsts, badminton and tennis champions, wrestlers who became film heroes, the national awards and the day they are handed out, famous grounds, and the biopics that turned athletes into box-office draws. Each answer comes with a short explanation and a cited source. It suits a school or college quiz, a sports-club night or a general knowledge round: play on your phone with instant feedback, or print the set and read it aloud.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which champion wrestler who beat Lou Thesz in 1968 played Hanuman in Ramanand Sagar's TV Ramayan?
Dara Singh
Dara Singh played Hanuman in the 1987–88 Ramayan two decades after his 1968 world title win in Bombay, and the role became the most recognised of his long film and TV career.
Q 02Which Pakistani president told Milkha Singh 'you didn't run today, you flew', coining the name Flying Sikh?
Ayub Khan
Ayub Khan made the remark after Milkha beat Pakistani sprinter Khaliq in a 1960 race, the same year the runner finished an agonising fourth in the Rome Olympic 400 m.
Q 03Ajay Devgn plays which coach in Maidaan, a 2024 biopic about India's 1962 Asian Games football gold?
Syed Abdul Rahim
Syed Abdul Rahim coached India to that 1962 gold in Jakarta, beating South Korea before a crowd of 100,000, and died the following year.
Q 04Dangal dramatised which wrestler's 2010 Commonwealth gold in Delhi, India's first by a woman in the sport?
Geeta Phogat
Geeta Phogat beat Australia's Emily Bensted for that gold, and Dangal cast Fatima Sana Shaikh as her opposite Aamir Khan as father Mahavir.
Q 05In 2021 India renamed its top sports award after Dhyan Chand; whose name had it carried since 1991?
Rajiv Gandhi
Rajiv Gandhi's name came off the Khel Ratna on 6 August 2021, the day after India's men's hockey team won Olympic bronze in Tokyo.
Q 06Appu, the mascot of the 1982 Asian Games in Delhi, was modelled on a real young animal of which species?
Elephant
The elephant Appu was based on a real calf named Kuttinarayanan, and those Games opened the newly built Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium as their main venue.
Q 07Which Indian Davis Cup star, a finalist in 1974 and 1987, played an MI6 agent in the Bond film Octopussy?
Vijay Amritraj
Vijay Amritraj played an agent who shared his own first name, went on to captain a starship in Star Trek IV, and was made a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 2001.
Q 08India qualified for which FIFA World Cup, the only time it has ever done so, then withdrew before it began?
1950 Brazil
1950 Brazil was reached only because every other team in India's qualifying group pulled out, and captain Sailen Manna denied the legend that a FIFA ban on bare feet kept India home.
Q 09Bombay's Pentangular cricket tournament, scrapped by the BCCI in 1946, grouped its five teams by what?
Religious community
Religious community decided the sides: Europeans, Parsees, Hindus, Muslims and 'The Rest', a fifth team of Buddhists, Jews and Indian Christians, before a zonal competition replaced it.
Q 10Which Bollywood actor owns the Jaipur Pink Panthers, winners of the first Pro Kabaddi League season in 2014?
Abhishek Bachchan
Abhishek Bachchan's side plays at Jaipur's Sawai Mansingh Indoor Stadium and added a second league title in 2022.
Q 11Which goalkeeper, blamed for India's 1–7 hockey loss to Pakistan in 1982, trained the actresses for Chak De! India?
Mir Ranjan Negi
Mir Ranjan Negi spent six months coaching the cast of the 2007 film, whose disgraced coach Kabir Khan echoed the abuse Negi took after that Asian Games final in Delhi.
Q 12Kartik Aaryan's film Chandu Champion tells the story of which swimmer, India's first Paralympic gold medallist?
Murlikant Petkar
Murlikant Petkar won that gold at Heidelberg in 1972 with a world record 37.33 seconds in the 50 m freestyle, and Kabir Khan directed the 2024 biopic.
Q 13Which runner, the Payyoli Express, missed 1984 Olympic 400 m hurdles bronze by a hundredth of a second?
Q 21India beat the same country in the 2004, 2007 and 2016 Kabaddi World Cup finals, all staged in India — which?
Iran
Iran lost all three finals, 55–27, 29–19 and 38–29, then finally beat India 27–18 in the 2018 Asian Games semi-finals in Jakarta.
Q 22Which Indian football competition, first played at Shimla in 1888, is the oldest existing club tournament in Asia?
Durand Cup
The Durand Cup is named after Henry Mortimer Durand, the Raj foreign secretary who also gave his name to the Afghanistan–Pakistan frontier line.
Q 23Which Indian became the first from the country ranked world No. 1 in WTA doubles, in 2015, partnering Martina Hingis?
Sania Mirza
P. T. Usha
P. T. Usha clocked 55.42 seconds for fourth in Los Angeles, and in 2022 became the first woman elected president of the Indian Olympic Association.
Q 14Which weightlifter won India's first Olympic medal by a woman, a bronze in the 69 kg class at Sydney 2000?
Karnam Malleswari
Karnam Malleswari's Sydney bronze put the first Indian woman on an Olympic podium, and no other Indian woman reached one until the London Games of 2012.
Q 15Which bantamweight wrestler won independent India's first individual Olympic medal, a bronze at Helsinki in 1952?
K. D. Jadhav
K. D. Jadhav's bronze at Helsinki came four years after the Maharaja of Kolhapur funded his first Games trip, to London in 1948.
Q 16Which middleweight became India's first Olympic boxing medallist, with a shared bronze at Beijing in 2008?
Vijender Singh
Vijender Singh shared that bronze after a 5–8 semi-final loss to Cuba's Emilio Correa, then turned professional in 2015 and won the WBO Asia Pacific super middleweight belt.
Q 17Which wrestler won 58 kg bronze at Rio 2016, the first Olympic wrestling medal by an Indian woman?
Sakshi Malik
Sakshi Malik went on to win Commonwealth Games gold at Birmingham in 2022, six years after the Rio podium.
Q 18Which 2017 world champion at 48 kg won India's weightlifting silver in the 49 kg class at Tokyo 2020?
Mirabai Chanu
Mirabai Chanu lifted a total of 202 kg for that silver, the second Olympic medal by an Indian weightlifter and the first in 21 years.
Q 19Who was the first recipient of the Khel Ratna, India's highest sporting honour, for the 1991–92 season?
Viswanathan Anand
Viswanathan Anand, the 'Lightning Kid' who became India's first grandmaster, collected the inaugural award years before his first world title.
Q 20Which Indian honour for sports coaches, instituted in 1985, is named after the royal teacher of the Mahabharata?
Dronacharya Award
The Dronacharya Award goes to the coaches, while the Arjuna Award, named for Drona's star pupil, goes to the athletes themselves.
Sania Mirza won three women's doubles majors with Hingis, at Wimbledon and the US Open in 2015 and the 2016 Australian Open, and six majors in all.
Q 24Which gymnast finished fourth in the Rio 2016 vault final, the first Indian woman gymnast at an Olympics?
Dipa Karmakar
Dipa Karmakar scored 15.066 in Rio attempting the Produnova, a vault only five women in the world had then mastered.
Q 25Which north-eastern state, where polo is played as sagol kangjei, is credited as the birthplace of the modern sport?
Manipur
Manipur's version was codified under King Khagemba in 1605, and the Calcutta Polo Club that British officers founded in 1862 is the oldest still in existence.
Q 26Which driver became India's first in Formula One, qualifying 12th on debut for Jordan at the 2005 Australian Grand Prix?
Narain Karthikeyan
Narain Karthikeyan returned to the grid with the backmarker Hispania team in 2011 and 2012, but his only points came in that single Jordan season.
Q 27Which Kolkata club's barefoot side beat the East Yorkshire Regiment in 1911, the first native IFA Shield winners?
Mohun Bagan
Mohun Bagan won 2–1 before an estimated 80,000 crowd, Abhilash Ghosh scoring the winner two minutes from time after Shibdas Bhaduri's equaliser.
Q 28In which city did Neeraj Chopra throw 88.17 m to win India's first World Athletics Championships gold in 2023?
Budapest
Budapest's National Athletics Centre saw Chopra become the first Asian to win a world javelin title, a year after he became the first Indian to win a Diamond League final, in Zurich.
Q 29P. V. Sindhu won India's first badminton world title in 2019, beating Nozomi Okuhara 21–7, 21–7, in which Swiss city?
Basel
Basel staged the final in which Sindhu became the first Indian to win gold at the World Championships, after silvers in 2017 and 2018 that included a 110-minute loss to the same Okuhara.
Q 30Who became the first Indian to win a Grand Slam title, the 1997 French Open mixed doubles with Japan's Rika Hiraki?
Mahesh Bhupathi
Mahesh Bhupathi and Hiraki beat Lisa Raymond and Patrick Galbraith 6–4, 6–1 in that final, the first of many doubles majors he would collect.