Sports Technology Trivia
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49 free Sports Technology trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Technology in sports changed the games we watch: a 24-second clock rescued basketball, a 1,200-pound machine invented instant replay, and a swimsuit was so fast it had to be banned. Cricket's Decision Review System, football's VAR and tennis's Hawk-Eye now decide matches that used to hinge on one official's eyesight. This trivia about sports technology covers officiating tech, timing systems, equipment breakthroughs and broadcast tricks across cricket, football, tennis, baseball, athletics, swimming and more. Every answer is sourced and explained.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Hawk-Eye, familiar from tennis line calls, was first used on TV in 2001 to analyse what?
LBW decisions in cricket
LBW decisions in cricket. It projected whether a ball that struck the batter's pad would have gone on to hit the wicket, a judgement that had rested largely on guesswork.
Q 02Hawk-Eye plots a ball's flight using several what, mounted around the stadium roof?
High-speed cameras
High-speed cameras. Each films the ball from a different angle, and software triangulates the views into a 3D path, then predicts where the ball was heading.
Q 03Which Grand Slam was the first to let players challenge line calls using Hawk-Eye, in 2006?
US Open
US Open. A run of bad calls against Serena Williams in her 2004 quarter-final there, exposed by TV replays, pushed tennis to hand players electronic challenges two years later.
Q 04Which electronics company bought the Hawk-Eye system in 2011?
Sony
Sony bought the British firm in March 2011. The Hawk-Eye name is a play on its inventor, Paul Hawkins, who said the sale created "immense opportunities for the sports industry".
Q 05Which football chief, until then opposed to goal-line technology, reopened the debate after a missed goal at the 2010 World Cup?
Sepp Blatter
Sepp Blatter apologised for the missed goal and reopened the goal-line debate, but said other errors needed no technology; by 2014 he was proposing that managers be allowed video challenges.
Q 06In a 2016 Dutch cup tie, a video referee turned a Willem II player's yellow card red against which club?
Ajax
Ajax. Anouar Kali was booked for kicking Lasse Schöne's ankle, and seconds later the video assistant had the card changed to red, the first dismissal of its kind in the Netherlands.
Q 07The first World Cup to use video assistant referees was held in which country?
Russia
Russia. Video review helped push the 2018 tournament to a record 29 penalties, eleven more than any World Cup before it.
Q 08How does a football referee signal an on-field VAR review?
Drawing a rectangle in the air
Drawing a rectangle in the air stands for a TV screen. Players who mimic the gesture too insistently to demand a review can themselves be shown a yellow card.
Q 09Whose disallowed goal against Germany in 2010 reopened the goal-line technology debate?
Frank Lampard's
Frank Lampard's shot hit the bar and bounced well over the line, yet play went on and England lost 4-1. Two days later FIFA's president apologised to England for the error.
Q 10Which league's clubs voted in April 2013 to adopt goal-line technology for the following season?
Premier League
Premier League. The following January an Edin Džeko strike for Manchester City against Cardiff became the first goal in the league to be awarded on the technology's say-so.
Q 11When goal-line technology detects a goal, where is the alert sent within one second?
The referee's watch
The referee's watch. It vibrates and lights up, and FIFA's test rules say the signal must reach the match officials alone, so the referee still makes the call.
Q 12At the 2014 World Cup, which team scored the first World Cup goal awarded by goal-line technology, against Honduras?
France
France. Karim Benzema's shot hit the post, then crossed the line off goalkeeper Noel Valladares; the stadium screen first flashed 'No Goal' for the post, baffling the crowd before the goal was confirmed.
Q 13In cricket's DRS, what is a ball-tracking verdict too close to overturn called?
Umpire's call
Q 21Which cockpit safety device, mandatory in Formula 1 since 2018, did Romain Grosjean credit with saving his life in 2020?
The halo
The halo. The titanium hoop kept a steel barrier off his head when his car split in two and caught fire; Grosjean, once a sceptic, called it the greatest thing brought to Formula 1.
Q 22Which organisation's wind tunnels did Speedo use to test fabrics for its record-breaking LZR Racer swimsuit?
NASA
NASA. A Langley wind tunnel ranked the drag of candidate fabrics; Speedo's team said people told them 'this isn't rocket science', and they began to think that maybe it was.
Q 23Since swimming's 2010 ban on full-body suits like the LZR Racer, what is the lowest a pool racing suit may reach?
The knee
Umpire's call. It applies when ball-tracking is too close to be sure, so the original verdict stands either way, and since late 2017 a side that draws one keeps its review.
Q 14How does a cricketer request a DRS review?
Making a 'T' with the arms
Making a 'T' with the arms. The sign dates from the system's first trial, in a 2008 Test series in Sri Lanka, where an overruled official had to revoke his first signal before giving the new one.
Q 15Which T20 league held out against the Decision Review System until 2018?
Indian Premier League
Indian Premier League. India's board spent years insisting the system was not foolproof, so a rival got there first: the Pakistan Super League used DRS in its 2017 play-offs.
Q 16Cricket's Hot Spot system uses which kind of camera to show where the ball struck?
Infrared
Infrared. Two cameras at either end of the ground pick up the friction heat where ball meets bat or pad, using technology first built to track tanks and fighter jets.
Q 17The Snickometer, or Snicko, pairs slow-motion replay with what?
A sound waveform from a stump microphone
A sound waveform from a stump microphone. A sharp spike just as the ball passes the bat means an edge, the faint 'snick' that names the gadget; a duller wave means pad or ground.
Q 18Which UK broadcaster unveiled the Snickometer when it took over Test cricket coverage in 1999?
Channel 4
Channel 4 unveiled the Snickometer at the launch of its Test coverage in June 1999, which ended decades of live cricket on BBC television; computer scientist Allan Plaskett had invented it in the mid-1990s.
Q 19The first computerised tennis line judge, shown in 1974, detected the ball using what?
Pressure sensors under the court
Pressure sensors under the court. Thin switches beneath the lines told a ball from a shoe by timing: a bounce lasts a few milliseconds and a footstep far longer, so feet on the line were ignored.
Q 20Cyclops, the beeping machine Wimbledon adopted in 1980, ruled on which shot?
The serve
The serve. Beams of light skimmed 10 mm above the court just beyond the service line, so a long serve broke one and set off the beep, while the line judge still ruled on the obviously long ones.
The knee. From 2010 men's suits could run only from waist to knee and women's from shoulder to knee, in permeable textile that cannot trap air and lift the swimmer.
Q 24Which swimmer spearheaded Speedo's LZR Racer campaign for the Beijing Olympics?
Michael Phelps
Michael Phelps wore the suit to a record eight gold medals in Beijing, where, by Speedo's count, 98% of the swimming medals went to swimmers in LZR Racers.
Q 25Which 1954 rule change lifted NBA scoring by nearly 14 points a game?
Shot clock
Shot clock. Teams had been sitting on leads by passing endlessly; given 24 seconds to shoot, scoring jumped at once, and the Syracuse Nationals, whose owner pushed the rule, won that season's title.
Q 26After Darryl Dawkins shattered two backboards with dunks in 1979, which piece of equipment did the NBA adopt league-wide?
Breakaway rims
Breakaway rims. The spring-loaded hoop came from Arthur Ehrat, an Illinois grain-elevator manager who used a John Deere spring and said he knew 'practically nothing about the damn game'.
Q 27Clap skates attach the blade to the boot by what mechanism?
A hinge at the front
A hinge at the front. The heel lifts free, so the blade stays flat on the ice through a longer push; after Tonny de Jong won the 1997 European title on clap skates, the rest of the sport switched.
Q 28Clap skates were developed at a university in which Dutch city?
Amsterdam
Amsterdam. Gerrit Jan van Ingen Schenau built his first prototype there in 1980 but could not patent it, because the same idea turned out to have been patented back in 1894.
Q 29Statcast's exit velocity measures a baseball's speed where?
Off the bat
Off the bat. Statcast, in every ballpark since 2015, made the reading so central that Tampa Bay Rays hitters were reportedly told it mattered more than their batting average.
Q 30Which Statcast component replaced PITCHf/x for official pitch speeds in 2017?
TrackMan
TrackMan. Its Doppler radar follows the whole pitch and reports the speed just out of the hand, where the ball is fastest, not 55 feet from the plate, so readings rose a little in 2017.