Winter Sports Trivia
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7correct to beat the crowd
This winter sports trivia quiz has 71 free questions with answers and runs across every discipline that needs snow or ice. Winter Olympics history comes first: Chamonix 1924, the year the Summer and Winter Games split, the city that gave the Games back, the army that hauled snow into Innsbruck, Sarajevo's surprise, Calgary's two underdog films, Nagano's debuts and Norway's medal record. Then the sports themselves. Alpine and cross-country skiing, ski jumping's K-point and the V-style, biathlon's military roots, Nordic combined, snowboarding from Rebagliati to Shaun White and Chloe Kim, figure skating from Sonja Henie to Torvill and Dean and Yuna Kim, speed skating from Eric Heiden to Sven Kramer, the Miracle on Ice, the Stanley Cup, curling's Scottish abbey records, and the three sliding sports and how to tell them apart. The Iditarod and Eddie the Eagle get a look-in too. Easy questions suit anyone who watches every four years; the hard ones ask who Bjørndalen overtook and which Games first had an athletes' village. Every answer has been checked against an encyclopaedic source and each question shows its citation once you have answered.
30 of 71 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The first Winter Olympics were held in 1924 in which French resort?
Chamonix
Chamonix staged it as an 'International Winter Sports Week', and only afterwards did the IOC decide that the event had been the first Winter Olympics.
Q 02Until 1992, the Winter Olympics shared a year with which event?
Summer Games
The Summer Games and the winter edition had shared a year ever since 1924, until the IOC voted in 1986 to stagger them, so the next Winter Olympics came round after two years instead of four.
Q 03Which US state hosted the Winter Olympics in both 1932 and 1980, the year of the 'Miracle on Ice'?
New York
New York's village of Lake Placid staged both: the first bid was driven by Godfrey Dewey, son of the man behind the Dewey Decimal System, and Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt opened those Games.
Q 04Which Japanese city hosted the first Winter Olympics held in Asia, in 1972?
Sapporo
Sapporo had first been chosen for the 1940 Winter Games, only to hand them back once Japan was at war in China, so the city waited more than thirty years for its turn.
Q 05Which US city was awarded the 1976 Winter Olympics but gave them back after voters refused to fund them?
Denver
Denver had won the vote in 1970, but Coloradans, worried about the cost and the damage to their mountains, voted in 1972 to cut off public money, and Innsbruck took the Games for a second time.
Q 06Innsbruck 1964 was so short of snow that which organisation was called in to haul it to the venues?
The Austrian army
The Austrian army hauled in thousands of cubic metres of snow after a warm föhn wind melted the ski courses just before the Games.
Q 07Which Hollywood producer was put in charge of the opening and closing ceremonies at the 1960 Winter Olympics?
Walt Disney
Walt Disney chaired the pageantry committee and staged an opening with thousands of performers and 2,000 birds set free, though a blizzard held everything up for an hour.
Q 08Eddie Eagan, one of two athletes with Summer and Winter golds, won his 1920 light-heavyweight title in which sport?
Boxing
Boxing brought him gold at Antwerp, and twelve years later he climbed into a four-man bobsleigh at Lake Placid and won again; the other man, Gillis Grafström, won all of his golds in figure skating.
Q 09Which city won the right to host the 1984 Winter Olympics, beating bids from Japan and Sweden?
Sarajevo
Sarajevo won by just three votes: Gothenburg's plan scattered its venues far and wide, and Japan's candidate had already hosted a few years before.
Q 10Which film tells the story of the British ski jumper who finished last at Calgary 1988?
Eddie the Eagle
Eddie the Eagle was the nickname of Michael Edwards, a plasterer who jumped in thick glasses that misted up in mid-air and learned he had made the team while lodging in a Finnish mental hospital.
Q 11What did Olympic officials do after a British ski jumper came last at Calgary 1988?
Raised entry standards
Raised entry standards: soon a jumper had to rank among the world's top 50 or so to reach the Games, a rule still nicknamed after him, and he never qualified again.
Q 12What happened to Jamaica's four-man bobsleigh on its third run at Calgary 1988?
It crashed and did not finish
It crashed and did not finish: the sled overturned coming out of a big curve, the four men climbed out unhurt and walked to the finish line beside it, and Hollywood later turned the story into Cool Runnings.
Q 13Which 15-year-old beat Michelle Kwan to figure skating gold at Nagano 1998?
Q 21Which speed skater won all five men's events at the 1980 Winter Olympics?
Eric Heiden
Eric Heiden set a world record in the last of the five, the 10,000 metres, then switched to cycling and became the American professional road race champion in 1985.
Q 22Which speed skater won the women's 500 metres at three straight Winter Olympics?
Bonnie Blair
Bonnie Blair had finished eighth in the race on her 1984 debut, then won it three times in a row, the first of them in a world-record 39.10 seconds.
Q 23Short-track star Apolo Ohno won eight Olympic medals and which TV dance competition in 2007?
Dancing with the Stars
Tara Lipinski
Tara Lipinski packed seven triple jumps into her free skate, among them her trademark triple loop-triple loop combination, to edge Kwan, then turned professional soon afterwards.
Q 14What happened to Ross Rebagliati after he won snowboarding's first Olympic gold in 1998?
Briefly stripped of it over cannabis
Briefly stripped of it over cannabis: he tested positive for marijuana, blamed second-hand smoke, and within days the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that he could keep the gold.
Q 15Which snowboarder won Olympic halfpipe gold in 2006, 2010 and 2018?
Shaun White
Shaun White finished fourth in 2014, then won the title back in 2018 by landing back-to-back 1440s for the first time in his life on the final run.
Q 16Which figure skater won three straight Olympic titles from 1928 and then became a Hollywood film star?
Sonja Henie
Sonja Henie first skated at the Olympics aged 11 and finished last of eight, then won the next three Games and went on to make ten Hollywood feature films.
Q 17Torvill and Dean's gold-medal ice dance at the 1984 Winter Olympics was skated to which piece of music?
Boléro
Boléro ran 18 seconds over the time limit even when cut down, so they opened on their knees: the clock started only when a skate blade touched the ice.
Q 18Figure skating was the first winter sport at any Olympics, debuting at which Summer Games?
1908 London
1908 London held its skating events in late October, months after the main July events, and the men's winner was Ulrich Salchow, whose name now belongs to a jump.
Q 19Figure skating replaced its 6.0 scoring with a new judging system after a scandal at which Games?
Salt Lake City 2002
Salt Lake City 2002 ended with two pairs sharing gold, and skating then scrapped a century of 6.0 marks for a system in which points add up element by element.
Q 20Tonya Harding was the first American woman to land which jump in international competition, in 1991?
Triple Axel
The triple Axel is the only jump with a forward take-off, which adds an extra half turn, and Japan's Midori Ito was the only woman to land one before Harding.
Dancing with the Stars was a mid-career detour: he won the 2007 season, then went back to the ice and took three more medals at the 2010 Games.
Q 24Which Dutch skater won the Olympic 5000 metres at three straight Games from 2010 to 2018?
Sven Kramer
Sven Kramer also crossed the line first in the 2010 10,000 metres but was disqualified, because his coach had shouted him into the wrong lane.
Q 25The Dutch Elfstedentocht is a skating race linking the eleven cities of which province?
Friesland
Friesland can hold it only when natural ice along the whole route is thick enough, which happened just 15 times between 1909 and 1997.
Q 26Which coach led the US to the 1980 'Miracle on Ice'?
Herb Brooks
Herb Brooks had been the last player cut from the 1960 US team that won gold, and in 1980 he missed out again, because coaches are not given medals.
Q 27Which ABC broadcaster asked 'Do you believe in miracles?' as the 1980 US hockey game ended?
Al Michaels
Al Michaels made the call as the US won 4-3, yet that was not the final: the Americans still had to beat Finland two days later to win gold.
Q 28Which ice hockey trophy, first awarded in 1893, has its winners' names engraved on silver bands?
Stanley Cup
The Stanley Cup runs out of room every 13 years, so its oldest band of names is removed and retired to the Hockey Hall of Fame while a blank one is added at the bottom.
Q 29Curling stones are made of what?
Granite
Granite dense enough for the job comes from just two places, a quarry in Wales and the tiny island of Ailsa Craig, where one firm holds the sole right to harvest it.
Q 30The first written record of a curling contest, from 1541, comes from an abbey in which country?
Scotland
Stones dated 1511 and 1551 were found when a pond in Dunblane was drained.