Speed Skating Trivia
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48 free Speed Skating trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This speed skating trivia quiz covers both long track and short track, from bone skates on Frisian canals to the climate-controlled ovals of Calgary and Heerenveen. The easy questions handle the size of the two ovals, which way skaters race, Eric Heiden's haul at Lake Placid and how Steven Bradbury won gold from last place. From there it moves into the great careers: Bonnie Blair's distances, Sven Kramer's disastrous lane change, Ireen Wust's record medal count, Apolo Ohno's controversial 1,500 m and Claudia Pechstein's blood-values ban. The harder end is for skating obsessives: the 1763 race on the English Fens, the first women's race in 1805, the only Olympic allround champion, the pack-racing scandal of 1932, the university that built the clap skate, the hell of the 1963 Elfstedentocht, and the Chinese prisoner who received a Swedish gold medal. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the sport, the Olympics and the individual skaters, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, our Winter Olympics, ice skating and Netherlands quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How long is a standard long-track speed skating oval?
400 m
400 m, the same lap as a running track. Skaters go off two at a time and race the clock, so a champion may never share the ice with the runner-up.
Q 02A short-track speed skating oval is marked out on a rink built for which sport?
Ice hockey
Ice hockey: the 111-metre lap fits a standard 60 by 30 metre rink, so any hockey arena can stage short track, while long track needs an oval of its own nearly four times the size.
Q 03In which direction are speed skating races run?
Counter-clockwise
Counter-clockwise, so every bend is a left turn: short-track skaters lean so far over that they steady themselves with a hand on the ice, and their gloves carry hard fingertip caps for it.
Q 04In a short-track speed skating relay, how does a skater usually hand over to a teammate?
A push from behind
A push from behind: there is no baton, so the incoming skater shoves a crouching teammate to pass on speed, and teams may swap whenever they like except in the last two laps.
Q 05One of the earliest recorded speed skating races was a 15-mile dash across the Fens of which country?
England
England: racing on skates is thought to have begun in the Netherlands centuries earlier, yet one of the earliest races written down crossed the frozen Fens, from Wisbech to Whittlesey.
Q 06Which Dutch town is home to Thialf, the country's best-known speed skating arena?
Heerenveen
Heerenveen: Thialf opened there as an outdoor rink in 1967, and when a roof went on in 1986 world records fell at most distances inside a single winter.
Q 07The Thialf arena, the Netherlands' great skating temple, is named after a character from which mythology?
Norse
Norse: Thialfi was Thor's fleet-footed servant, who ran three races against a giant's champion and lost every one, because his rival turned out to be thought itself.
Q 08Speed skating's Olympic debut came at the first Winter Games, in which French resort?
Chamonix
Chamonix staged it in 1924 as an International Winter Sports Week; the meeting went so well that the IOC decided afterwards to count it as the first Winter Olympics.
Q 09Speed skater Charles Jewtraw won the first gold medal ever awarded at a Winter Olympics, competing for which country?
United States
The United States: Jewtraw, a sprinter from Lake Placid, won the 500 m, the first event decided in 1924, and later gave his gold medal to the Smithsonian.
Q 10Clas Thunberg won three speed skating golds at the 1924 Winter Olympics for which country, also home to runner Paavo Nurmi?
Finland
Finland: Thunberg won five Olympic golds in all, then stayed home from the 1932 Games rather than race under rules he believed were stacked in the hosts' favour.
Q 11The 1932 Lake Placid Olympics used which controversial race format, letting the hosts win all four golds?
Mass-start pack racing
Mass-start pack racing was the North American way, settled by tactics rather than the clock; European skaters were so angry that the Games went back to timed pairs four years later.
Q 12Women's speed skating joined the Olympic programme in 1960 at which mountain resort?
Squaw Valley
Squaw Valley gave women their first Olympic medal races; they had skated at the 1932 Games too, but only as a demonstration, and waited 28 years for the real thing.
Q 13Which Soviet skater was the first to win four individual golds at one Winter Games, in 1964?
Lidiya Skoblikova
Q 21Norway's Johann Olav Koss won three golds at the 1994 Lillehammer Games and later founded which charity?
Right To Play
Right To Play grew out of Olympic Aid, the relief fund Koss backed in 1994 by giving away a gold-medal bonus and auctioning his skates for the war victims of Sarajevo.
Q 22The clap skate has its blade attached to the boot by what?
A hinge at the front
A hinge at the front lets the heel lift away, so the whole blade stays on the ice through the push; a spring then snaps it back against the boot with the clap that gives the skate its name.
Q 23The modern clap skate was developed at a university in which city?
Amsterdam
Lidiya Skoblikova won every women's race at Innsbruck, the 500, 1,000, 1,500 and 3,000 m, and within weeks added the world title by winning all four distances again.
Q 14Which Dutch skater won three golds at the 1972 Sapporo Games, a fall in the 500 m costing him a possible sweep?
Ard Schenk
Ard Schenk then joined a new professional circuit, which shut him out of the Olympics; it folded within two years, and he retired at 30 without racing at another Games.
Q 15After sweeping five golds at the 1980 Winter Olympics, Eric Heiden turned professional in which other sport?
Cycling
Cycling: Heiden won the national professional road race title in 1985 and started the 1986 Tour de France, only to crash out with concussion five days from the finish.
Q 16After skating, Eric Heiden earned a medical degree from Stanford and became what?
An orthopedic surgeon
An orthopedic surgeon: Heiden qualified in 1991 and was soon patching up professionals in another sport, as team doctor to the NBA's Sacramento Kings.
Q 17Olympic champions Chad Hedrick and Derek Parra both came to the ice from which wheeled sport?
Inline skating
Inline skating: Hedrick, a serial world champion on wheels, took to the ice only after watching fellow inline skater Parra win Olympic medals in 2002, and was a world champion on ice within two years.
Q 18Bonnie Blair won all of her Olympic gold medals in which two distances?
500 m and 1,000 m
500 m and 1,000 m, the sprints: Blair won the shorter one at three Games running, the last two only two years apart because the Winter Olympics moved to a new four-year rhythm after 1992.
Q 19Brittany Bowe gave up her 2022 Olympic 500 m place so that which teammate, who had slipped at the trials, could race?
Erin Jackson
Erin Jackson took the place and won gold in Beijing, becoming the first Black woman to win an individual title at a Winter Olympics.
Q 20What happened to Dan Jansen on the morning of his 1988 Olympic 500 m race?
His sister died of leukemia
His sister died of leukemia hours before the race, and he fell in both his events; six years later he finally won gold and skated his victory lap carrying his baby daughter, named Jane after her.
Amsterdam: Gerrit Jan van Ingen Schenau built his prototype at the Vrije Universiteit in 1980, yet top skaters ignored it for a decade and a half, until the Dutch women's team began winning on it.
Q 24The 1998 Winter Olympics, where clap skates produced a flood of world records, were held in which city?
Nagano
Nagano saw world records in five events, and in one men's race the mark fell three times in a single afternoon as skater after skater went under it.
Q 25The Elfstedentocht is a roughly 200 km skating tour visiting eleven cities in which Dutch province?
Friesland
Friesland: the tour needs natural ice 15 cm thick along the whole course, and all 22 district ice wardens must agree before it is called, usually with barely two days' notice.
Q 26Since 1989 the Alternative Elfstedentocht has been skated in which country?
Austria
Austria: the Weissensee, a mountain lake in Carinthia, freezes far more dependably than Dutch canals, so the stand-in draws some 3,000 skaters a year, most of them Dutch.
Q 27Elfstedentocht skaters prove they have completed the course by collecting what in each of the eleven cities?
A stamp on a card
A stamp on a card, and every one counts: Olympic champion Piet Kleine finished fifth in 1997, then was struck from the results because a single stamp was missing.
Q 28Which member of the Dutch royal family completed the 1986 Elfstedentocht under the pseudonym 'Van Buren'?
Willem-Alexander
Willem-Alexander, then an 18-year-old crown prince, borrowed one of his family's lesser titles for the day, and used the same alias six years later to run the New York City Marathon.
Q 29At the Elfstedentocht's kluning points, what must skaters do?
Walk on their skates
Walk on their skates: the Dutch call it klunen, the way past ice too thin to carry the crowd, and before a race organisers even transplant slabs of ice to mend weak spots under bridges.
Q 30Short-track speed skating became a full Olympic medal sport in 1992 at which Winter Games?
Albertville
Albertville: the sport had been tried as a demonstration four years earlier, and so impressed IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch that it was given medal status at the very next Games.