The Winter Olympics & Winter Sports Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What name is given to Sidney Crosby's overtime winner for Canada against the United States in the men's ice hockey final at the 2010 Vancouver Games, which secured a home gold and a record Canadian medal haul?

Question 2

Which Swiss resort in the Engadine valley is the only place to have hosted the Winter Olympics twice on a fully natural, non-refrigerated sliding track, in 1928 and again in 1948, and is the traditional home of the skeleton?

Question 3

Which event, a team race combining cross-country skiing, ski mountaineering and rifle shooting, was contested for medals at the first Winter Games in 1924 and then shown as a demonstration sport several times, and is regarded as the direct ancestor of the modern biathlon?

Question 4

Which American alpine skier, a slalom prodigy who won Olympic gold in the event at 18 in 2014, went on to break Ingemar Stenmark's 40-year-old record for the most World Cup race wins by any skier, man or woman?

Question 5

In ski jumping, what is the name of the mark part way down the landing hill, originally the construction point at the steepest part of the slope, that serves as the target distance, jumps beyond it scoring bonus points and shorter jumps losing them?

Question 6

Which 21-year-old Georgian luger died on the morning of the 2010 Vancouver opening ceremony after losing control on the final curve of the Whistler track in training, coming off his sled and striking a steel support pole?

Question 7

Which 1994 scandal in American figure skating began when one leading contender was clubbed on the knee with a baton after a practice session, an attack traced to associates of a rival, both of whom went on to skate at the Lillehammer Games weeks later?

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About The Winter Olympics & Winter Sports

The Winter Olympics gather the world's snow and ice sports into a single fortnight every four years, and this quiz covers the Games, their hosts and the disciplines around them in eighty questions. Each describes an edition, a champion, a sport, an event, a piece of jargon, a venue or a famous moment, and asks you to name it from four choices, then explains the story or the record behind it.

The first pack is the foundation: the Games themselves and their 1924 start at Chamonix; the sports of figure skating, alpine and cross-country skiing, the biathlon, ski jumping, the bobsled, luge and skeleton, long and short track speed skating, curling, ice hockey and snowboarding; and the moments everyone knows, the Miracle on Ice, Torvill and Dean's Bolero, Eddie the Eagle, two Games at Lake Placid, and Norway at the top of the all-time table.

The second pack fills in the detail. The champions, from Sonja Henie, Eric Heiden and Lidia Skoblikova through Bjoern Daehlie, Marit Bjoergen and Ole Einar Bjoerndalen to Lindsey Vonn, Mikaela Shiffrin, Shaun White and Yuzuru Hanyu. The host cities, Squaw Valley, Innsbruck, Sapporo, Sarajevo, Calgary, Albertville, Lillehammer, Nagano, Salt Lake City, Vancouver, Sochi, Pyeongchang, Beijing and twice-natural St Moritz. And the events and terms, the super-G, the halfpipe, the moguls, the Nordic combined, the team pursuit, the curling hammer, the ski-jump K-point, the refrigerated sliding track and the vanished compulsory figures.

The third pack is history and controversy: the Kerrigan and Harding attack; the 2002 pairs judging scandal that ended marks out of six; the McLaren Report into Russian state doping; the Jamaican bobsled team; the Eddie the Eagle qualification rule; the Battle of the Carmens; the klapskate and the ski-jumping V-style that each rewrote their sports; the death of the luger Nodar Kumaritashvili; Sidney Crosby's Golden Goal; the Kamila Valieva doping case; the hand-built Cresta Run; the sport of bandy; the Winter Paralympics; Sweden's Vasaloppet; the military patrol event that became the biathlon; Grenoble 1968; the Ailsa Craig granite in every curling stone; ski flying; and the neutral label Russia's athletes competed under.

Every answer is a single name, and the wrong options are always names of the same kind, so the game is recognition rather than recall. A few myths get cleared up: Norway, not a bigger country, leads the all-time medal count; ice hockey and figure skating both began at the Summer Games; and the 1988 Jamaican team crashed rather than triumphed. Because a photo of an athlete or a named venue usually gives the answer away, images are used only where a neutral shot of empty equipment or an unlabelled arena does not, and every fact has been checked.