50 Amazing Facts about Sports | Amazing Facts 4U
- The five interlocking Olympic rings are black, blue, red, green, and yellow because at least one of these colors appears on every national flag.
- Since 1896 the beginning of the modern Olympics, amazingly only Greece and Australia have participated in every game.
- The 1912 Olympic Games were the last to include gold medals actually made of solid gold. The amazing fact is that the gold medals are 93 percent silver and six percent copper, leaving about one percent (or six grams) for the highly prized gold finish.
- At the 1912 Olympics, a marathon runner went home to Japan without completing the race and without informing the officials. He was considered missing in Sweden for more than 50 years. Amazingly he was invited back to complete the marathon in 1966 which he did. His time to complete marathon 54 years 8 months.
- In 1916, Georgia Tech beat Cumberland University in football by an amazing score of 222 to nothing.
- In the 1935 Olympics, the amazing event was Jesse Owens setting six track and field world records in less than one hour.
- In the 1930’s American track star Jesse Owens used to race against horses and dogs to earn a living.
- Until 1967 amazingly, it wasn’t illegal for Olympic athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs during competition.
- When Bob Beamon long jumped 29 Ft 2.5 inches in the 1968 Mexico Olympics, it was so amazing that they couldn’t measure it with their equipment! The previous world record for the long jump leap had been 21 feet and ¾ inches. It was known as the leap of the century.
- The amazing fact is that no high jumper has ever been able to stay off the ground for more than one second.
- Badminton rules say that the bird has to have exactly fourteen feathers.
- The amazing fact most soccer players run 7 miles in a game.
- 2022 world cup final shall be played in Lusail, Qatar. Amazingly the city doesn’t exist yet. It shall be constructed before the event.
- An amazing fact is Bulgaria was the only soccer team in the 1994 World Cup in which amazingly all 11 players’ last names ended with the letters “OV.”
- A world cup referee will run further than the players, at 12 miles in a 90-minute match.
- In 1998, lightning killed an entire soccer team. The tragedy occurred in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during a match between the villages of Bena Tshadi and nearby Basangana. Amazingly, the lightning annihilated all eleven members of the home team, while all of Basangana’s players were spared with severe burns at worst!
- In 1964 a referee’s call during a soccer match in Peru caused a riot that killed over 300 people! Another 500 people were injured in that riot in Lima, Peru.
- It is an amazing fact that no European team has ever won the World Cup outside of Europe.
- The catgut formerly used as strings in tennis rackets and musical instruments does not come from cats. Catgut actually comes from sheep, hogs, and horses’ intestines.
- The amazing fact is In the U.S., there are more than 10,000 golf courses.
- Cricket bats are made of a tree called Willow & base-balls bats are made out of the wood of a tree called Hickory.
- It is a fact that the first game of chess has been traced back to have originated in northern India. It’s thought that today’s rules have been around since sometime in the 1400′s A.D.
- There are 319,979,564,000 ways to play the first four moves in a game of chess. The amazing fact is that there are more possible iterations of a game of chess than there are atoms in the known universe. Possible iterations lower bound number is called Shannon Number.
- Viswanathan Anand from India is the first player in chess history to have won the World Championship in three different formats: knockout, tournament, and match.
- The game Monopoly was once very popular in Cuba; however, Fidel Castro ordered that all games be destroyed.
- Vasaloppet, which is located in Sweden is the oldest, longest, and the biggest cross-country ski race in the world. Every year, 14,000 people compete in the race.
- Canadian James Naismith invented basketball to give his physical education students at the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, an indoor team sport to play during the long winters.
- Until 1936, the jump ball in basketball took place at center court after every single made basket.
- Every ball used in Major League Baseball is dirty. In order to take the slick factory sheen off and allow pitchers to get a better grip, Major League Baseball wipes down each baseball with mud from an undisclosed location on the Delaware River. And it’s been done this way for close to 75 years now.
- An amazing fact is A baseball ball has exactly 108 stitches, a cricket ball has between 65 and 70 stitches. A soccer ball is made up of 32 leather panels, held together by 642 stitches.
- Howard Kinsey and Mrs. R. Roark, during a game of tennis, batted the ball back and forth amazing 2001 consecutive times.
- If a person had as many Rubik’s cubes as there were possible configurations, they could amazingly cover the surface of the Earth 275 times. However, any Rubik’s cube can be completed in 20 moves.
- Stefaan Engels, a 49-year-old asthmatic from Belgium completed 365 marathons in 365 days, that’s 9,569 miles of running, in 7 different countries!
- Leo Fiyalko of Clearwater, FL, a legally blind 92-year-old hit an amazing hole-in-one on January 10, 2008, the distance being 110 yards.
- The world record for spinning on an ice skate is 6 rotations per second by Lucinda Ruh! She accomplished her record in New York City on April 3, 2003, by getting one hundred and fifteen revolutions non-stop!
- There is a sport called Banzai Skydiving. You throw the parachute out of the airplane first and then jump after it!
- The amazing fact is USGA regulation golf balls have 336 dimples which add turbulence for more distance.
- Muhammad Ali became a boxer because someone stole his bicycle when he was 12 years old! The frustrated 12-year-old boy decided to report the incident to police officer Joe Martin, who also happened to be a boxing coach who saw the potential in him.
- Formula One Racing car races at an average speed of 170 miles per hour and a golf ball when gets hits from the front strike has the same speed.
- It is customary for jockeys to be paid in coins, no matter how large their winnings.
- The grass at Wimbledon was kept two inches long until 1949 when an English player was bitten by a snake.
- It is an amazing fact that no Olympic steeplechase silver medalist, male or female, has lived past the age of 41.
- Dimples on a golf ball help reduce drag, allowing the ball to fly further than a ball without dimples.
- Golf balls were originally made from dried cow eyeballs.
- Astronaut Alan Shepard played golf on the Moon after he smuggled a golf ball and club on to the NASA Apollo 14 mission to the Moon in 1971.
- Amazingly 125,000 golf balls a year are hit into the water at the famous 17th hole of the Stadium Course at Sawgrass.
- The longest golf course in the world is the par 77 International Golf Club in Massachusetts which measures amazing 8325 yards. The highest golf course in the world is the Tactu Golf Club in Morococha, Peru, which sits 14,335 feet above sea level at its lowest point.
- The fastest recorded tennis serve was an amazing 163.4 mph (263 kph) by Australian Samuel Groth at an ATP Challenger event in Busan, South Korea in May 2012.
- In 1986 yellow balls were used at Wimbledon for the first time to make them visible for the TV cameras.
- The fact is That Tennis was an Olympic event from 1896 to 1924 and was reintroduced into the games in 1988.
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