The Summer Olympics Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which state-run scheme, known internally as State Plan 14.25, systematically fed anabolic steroids to about 10,000 of a small country's athletes from the 1970s to 1989, many of them teenage girls who were told the blue pills were vitamins?

Question 2

Which affair, laid out in the McLaren Report of 2016, found that a country had run a state-directed programme of doping and cover-ups across dozens of sports, including swapping athletes' urine samples through a hole in a laboratory wall during the 2014 Winter Games it hosted?

Question 3

Which American discus thrower won gold at four consecutive Games from 1956 to 1968, each time as an underdog and each time with an Olympic record, despite injuries that had him throwing in a neck brace and heavily strapped at Tokyo in 1964?

Question 4

What object, designed in 1913 and first flown in 1920, shows five interlaced rings on a plain white field and is passed at each closing ceremony from the mayor of the departing host city to the president of the committee and on to the mayor of the next host?

Question 5

Which Games were the first held in South America, took place amid a national political and economic crisis and worries about the mosquito-borne Zika virus, and saw the debut of a Refugee Olympic Team competing under the Olympic flag?

Question 6

Which boxer won the light-heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Rome Games as an 18-year-old, then still known by his birth name, and 36 years later lit the cauldron at the Atlanta Games with visibly trembling hands?

Question 7

Which Romanian gymnast, aged 14 at the 1976 Montreal Games, was awarded the first perfect score of 10 in Olympic history, on the uneven bars, on a scoreboard that could only show three digits and so displayed it as 1.00?

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About The Summer Olympics

The modern Olympic Games began in Athens in 1896 and have grown into the biggest recurring event on Earth. This quiz covers the Summer Games in eighty questions. Each describes an athlete, a host city, an event, a rule, a symbol, a moment or an official, and asks you to name it from four choices, then explains the background, the records and the controversy where there is one.

The first pack is the foundations and the biggest names: the founder Pierre de Coubertin and the first Games; the rings, the flame, the motto and the marathon; the International Olympic Committee and ancient Olympia; the parade of nations and the Paralympics; the Fosbury flop and the 1968 podium protest; and the towering champions Jesse Owens, Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Nadia Comaneci, Carl Lewis and Spyridon Louis.

The second pack widens out. More great Olympians: Paavo Nurmi, Emil Zatopek, Mark Spitz, Abebe Bikila, Bob Beamon, Muhammad Ali, Simone Biles, Steve Redgrave, Jim Thorpe, Cathy Freeman, Wilma Rudolph, Fanny Blankers-Koen, Vera Caslavska, Kip Keino, and India's field-hockey dynasty and its javelin champion Neeraj Chopra. The multi-event contests, the decathlon, the modern pentathlon, the triathlon, the steeplechase and the pole vault. And the host cities and their moments: the Munich massacre, the Mexico City altitude, the Nazi Games of 1936, the Barcelona Dream Team, three-time host London, the pandemic Games of Tokyo, the twin boycotts of 1980 and 1984, the Atlanta bombing, and Rio's refugee team, plus the Olympic mascot and the long, doomed rule of amateurism.

The third pack is the institution and its troubles: the presidents Brundage and Samaranch; the Salt Lake City bribery scandal; the doping sagas of Ben Johnson, East Germany and Russia, and the anti-doping agency that grew from them; the blade-runner Oscar Pistorius and the long fight over sex testing; how women went from banned to equal; the medal table and its two ways of counting; the refugee team; the little Shropshire festival at Much Wenlock that helped inspire the whole thing; the 1906 Games struck from the record; the flag, the pictograms and the host-city vote; and the recent editions from Tokyo 1964 to the river-borne opening of Paris 2024. Because a photograph of a champion or a host stadium usually gives the answer away, images are used only where a neutral site photo or artefact does not, and every figure has been checked. Along the way the quiz clears up a few things people half-remember wrong: that Athens 1896 gave winners silver, not gold; that the marathon's odd 42.195 kilometres was fixed by a royal box in London, not by ancient tradition; that the five rings are not colour-coded to particular continents; and that Jim Thorpe, Paavo Nurmi and others lost medals to an amateurism rule that no longer exists.