Olympic History
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49 free Olympic History trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
The modern Olympics were revived by a French baron who had been inspired by a village sports day in Shropshire. Pierre de Coubertin founded the IOC at the Sorbonne in 1894, Athens hosted 241 men in 1896, and the Games nearly died in the sideshows of the Paris and St Louis world's fairs before Athens rescued them again in 1906 with an edition the IOC no longer counts. These 49 questions follow the story from there: the first Winter Games at Chamonix, the flag first flown at Antwerp, the flame first lit at Amsterdam and the torch relay invented for Berlin, Jesse Owens, the war cancellations, Melbourne's Stockholm horses, Mexico City's Black Power salute and Fosbury's flop, Munich, the Moscow boycott and Peter Ueberroth's Los Angeles surplus, the Salt Lake scandal, Paralympic and Youth Games, and the first woman to lead the IOC. The expert tier asks about Hélène de Pourtalès, Dorando Pietri's silver cup, Barry Larkin's burning underpants and the podium borrowed from the British Empire Games. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even when you miss. Play solo or print it for an Olympics night.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The stadium for the 1896 Athens Olympics had been rebuilt in what material?
Marble
Marble, and white: the ancient stadium had long lain in disrepair when George Averoff, a wealthy Greek living in Egypt, paid for the rebuilding with a last-minute gift of 920,000 drachmas.
Q 02Who is known as the father of the modern Olympic Games?
Pierre de Coubertin
Pierre de Coubertin left one last instruction when he died in 1937: his body was buried in Lausanne, but his heart was removed and sealed in a monument beside the ruins of ancient Olympia.
Q 03The Wenlock Olympian Games, which inspired the modern Olympics' founder, began in which country?
England
England's Shropshire town of Much Wenlock first staged them in 1850, the idea of the local doctor William Penny Brookes, and London 2012 named its one-eyed mascot Wenlock in their honour.
Q 04Where was the 1894 congress that founded the IOC held?
The Sorbonne, Paris
The Sorbonne, Paris, hosted a congress billed as a debate on amateurism in sport; reviving the Olympics began as a single item on the programme, and it was the item the delegates voted through.
Q 05The early IOC wanted each president to come from where?
The next host country
The next host country: Greece was about to stage the first Games, so the writer Demetrius Vikelas took the chair, and he gave it up to a Frenchman once Paris was next.
Q 06From 1912 to 1948 the Olympics also gave medals for works of art inspired by sport, in which of these fields?
Painting
Painting sat beside sculpture, music, literature and architecture, and the 1912 gold for literature went to an ode sent in under two false names by the man who had founded the Games.
Q 07Boston-born James Connolly, the first champion of the modern Olympics in 1896, walked out of which university to compete?
Harvard
Harvard would not give him leave, so he quit and sailed for Athens, where his triple jump on the opening day made him the first Olympic champion in more than 1,500 years.
Q 08Which event did Greek hero Spyridon Louis win in 1896?
The marathon
The marathon was a new race devised for these Games, and Louis won it by seven minutes; Greeks showered him with gifts, jewellery among them, and he went home to his village and never raced again.
Q 09What were winners given at the 1896 Games instead of gold?
A silver medal and olive branch
A silver medal and olive branch went to each winner, the runner-up took a lesser medal and a laurel branch, and whoever came third went home with nothing at all.
Q 10Which American city hosted the 1904 Olympics, the first to award gold, silver and bronze medals to the top three?
St Louis
St Louis proved so hard to reach from Europe that fewer than 100 of about 650 competitors came from outside North America, and the hosts won more than three-quarters of the golds.
Q 11The 1900 and 1904 Games were both staged as part of what?
World's fairs
World's fairs swallowed both Games: Paris strung its events across five months with no opening ceremony, swimmers raced in the Seine, and most contests were never labelled Olympic.
Q 12In which sport did Margaret Abbott win at Paris 1900, never learning that her tournament had been the Olympics?
Golf
Golf: the Chicago art student, in Paris to study, shot 47 over nine holes in a field that included her own mother, and died in 1955 unaware that the event counted as Olympic.
Q 13Which sport appeared only once, at Paris 1900, and drew a single paying spectator?
Croquet
Croquet drew only French entrants, a few of them among the first women ever to compete at the Games, and sold a single ticket; the sport was never invited back.
Q 21Which Asian capital handed back the 1940 Olympics as war spread?
Tokyo
Tokyo gave the Games back in 1938, a year into Japan's war with China; Helsinki stepped in, only for the Second World War to cancel them, as the First had cancelled the Games of 1916.
Q 22Which town hosted the first Winter Olympics in 1924?
Chamonix
Chamonix staged it as an 'International Winter Sports Week', backed by the IOC but not an official Olympics; it went so well that the IOC created the Winter Games afterwards and counted Chamonix as the first.
Q 23Which town hosted the 1994 Winter Olympics, the first held midway between Summer Games?
Lillehammer
Lillehammer's Games came just two years after Albertville's, the only time the gap has been that short, after a 1986 rule change; some of the ice hockey was played in a rink blasted out of the inside of a mountain.
Q 14What name is given to the 1906 Athens Games held midway through an Olympic cycle?
The Intercalated Games
The Intercalated Games were meant to give Athens an Olympics of its own every four years, midway between the travelling ones; only 1906 ever took place, and the IOC later declined to count it as official.
Q 15Why was Dorando Pietri disqualified after crossing the line first in 1908?
Umpires helped him up
Umpires helped him up after he turned the wrong way into the stadium and collapsed five times; losing made him more famous than the winner, with a cup from Queen Alexandra and a song by Irving Berlin.
Q 16Jim Thorpe was stripped of his 1912 golds for having done what?
Played semi-pro baseball
Played semi-pro baseball is what plenty of college athletes did for summer cash, but they hid behind aliases; he had signed on in North Carolina under his own name, and a newspaper found it in 1913.
Q 17In which two events did Jim Thorpe win gold at Stockholm 1912?
Pentathlon and decathlon
Pentathlon and decathlon add up to fifteen events, and he won eight of them outright; the story goes that Sweden's king called him the greatest athlete in the world and he answered, 'Thanks, King.'
Q 18The five-ringed Olympic flag first flew at the 1920 Games, held in which war-battered city?
Antwerp
Antwerp lost one of those first flags as the Games ended: the American diver Hal Prieste shinned up a pole on a dare, kept it in a suitcase for 77 years and handed it back at Sydney 2000, aged 103.
Q 19Why were blue, yellow, black, green, red and white chosen for the rings and field?
Every nation's flag had at least one
Every nation's flag had at least one of them, the designer boasted in 1913: the five ring colours plus the white field, he wrote, reproduce those of all nations without exception.
Q 20Which word did the IOC add to the Olympic motto 'Faster, Higher, Stronger' in 2021?
Together
Together was voted in days before the delayed 2020 Games opened; the first three words were borrowed by the founder of the Games from a friend, the French friar Henri Didon.
Q 24The Olympic flame first burned in 1928, atop a tower beside the stadium in which Dutch city?
Amsterdam
Amsterdam's flame burned in a bowl atop the Marathon Tower, and the man who designed tower and stadium, Jan Wils, won an Olympic gold of his own that summer: the art competition's architecture prize, for the stadium.
Q 25The torch relay from Olympia was invented for which Games?
Berlin 1936
Berlin 1936 organiser Carl Diem wanted a link to ancient Greece, though the ancient Games never had such a relay; the runners' steel torches were made by Krupp, the arms firm, and the lighting mirror by Zeiss.
Q 26Which American won four golds at the 1936 Olympics?
Jesse Owens
Jesse Owens took the 100 metres, 200 metres, long jump and sprint relay. The tale that Hitler snubbed him is a myth: after the first day the IOC told Hitler to greet every winner or none, and he chose none.
Q 27The Olympic flame is lit at Olympia before the temple of which goddess?
Hera
Hera's temple is where an actress playing a high priestess holds the torch in a curved mirror until the sun lights it; under cloud, as happened in 2024, a flame kindled at the rehearsal is used instead.
Q 28On its way to Sydney 2000, the Olympic flame made its first underwater journey, at which site?
Great Barrier Reef
Great Barrier Reef: marine biologist Wendy Craig Duncan swam the torch around Agincourt Reef for three minutes, its flame swapped for a specially built flare that burns under water and still looks like the real thing.
Q 29What was Barry Larkin's hoax Olympic torch in 1956?
Burning underpants in a pudding can
Burning underpants in a pudding can, nailed to a silver-painted chair leg, fooled the police too: they escorted the Sydney student to the Town Hall, where the mayor took the torch and began his speech.
Q 30Why were the 1956 equestrian events held in Stockholm rather than Melbourne?
Australian quarantine laws
Australian quarantine laws demanded six months' isolation for any horse entering the country, and the government would not bend, so Stockholm staged a separate riders' Games, with the flame carried in on horseback.