Olympic Problems Trivia Quiz

Answer: He had travelled part of the route by car

It was a very tough marathon with fewer than half the starters lasting the course in the 33 degree celsius conditions. In addition to the heat, there was no water stops other than a well halfway along the route and it was run over steep hills and on roads that had not been closed to traffic.

Lorz dropped out at the nine mile mark, exhausted and suffering from cramp from his exertions in the heat. He accepted a lift back to the stadium but in the car was persuaded to rejoin the race. Problem was, the car had travelled 11 miles before he decided to run again. Rejuvenated from his rest, he raced ahead towards the finish and crossed the line first. It wasn't until the medal ceremony that he was called out by spectators for his dishonesty, at which point he confessed he had only finished as a joke and apologised to the organisers.

The race and the gold medal was awarded to Thomas Hicks, who had finished second. He had been administered strychnine by his coach to improve his performance but at this time this was not illegal.

Answer: Baron Pierre de Coubertin

To be fair to the judges, de Coubertin entered his work "Ode to Sport" under the pseudonyms of Georg Hohrod and Martin Eschbach and entered as a German rather than under his true nationality, French. But it's still a bit suspect. In addition to the literature award, the architects of the Olympic stadium won the architecture gold medal.

The fact that there were art competitions in the Olympic Games is often forgotten but they were a big part of de Coubertin's vision for exercising the body and mind and remained a part of the games until the 1948 edition. In 1952, the competition was changed to an exhibition and after that was dropped as the professionalism of the artists was seen to be at odds with the amateur ethos of the sporting competition.

Answer: The match was played on wet clay, making dribbling impossible

The Olympic organisers had decided that the tournament should be played outdoors on a clay tennis court. Scores throughout the tournament were low by basketball standards but the final was particularly low because it had rained constantly the day before the final and then again during the game itself, turning the surface to a muddy consistency. One journalist described the scene as "almost like watching a water polo game".

It's to the great credit of both sides that the score was as high as it was.

Answer: The Spanish Civil War broke out a week before the start date

The 1936 games are somewhat of a stain upon the reputation of the Olympic movement. Berlin had been chosen to host in 1931, before the rise to power of the Nazi party. But despite the protestations of many countries to move them elsewhere the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided to stick with the German capital. As a consequence, the newly elected left-wing government in Spain decided to boycott the games. They arranged the People's Olympiad to run two weeks before the Olympics and had 49 countries signed up to compete, including a contingent of exiles from Germany. But when a failed coup d'etat in July 1936 sparked the start of a full scale civil war, the Spanish borders closed and the games were cancelled. More than 200 athletes who had arrived to compete in the games stayed on to fight on the government's side in the war.

"Events, dear boy, events" was a supposed response given by UK Prime Minister Harold MacMillan to a journalist's question of what was the most likely thing to challenge the running of a government.

Answer: Stockholm, Sweden (15600 km away)

Australia had a strict quarantine policy for horses of six months and refused to change it for the competitors in the 1956 Melbourne games. So the IOC chose a different venue as host for the equestrian events. The choice of Sweden may not seem logical but as the other options were Paris, L.A., Rio de Janeiro and Berlin, there was no local choice available.

The extreme distance between the two hosts meant that the equestrian events were also held at a completely different time of year, in June, compared to the Melbourne games that were held in November.

Answer: South Africa

New Zealand's decision to to undertake a rugby tour of South Africa was hugely controversial. Even though it was endorsed by the NZ government, it was condemned by the UN and led to huge protests at home and along the route of the Olympic flame.

The tour commenced just one day after violence erupted in the township of Soweto in Johannesberg, which left 176 school children dead at the hands of a reckless and panicking police force. South Africa's racist apartheid policies meant that the six non-white players in the All Blacks playing squad had to be offered honorary white status, meaning that they would not have laws applied to them that they would have otherwise done because of the colour of their skin. Such policies were the reason that South Africa had been excluded from participating in the Olympics since 1964.

The IOC was petitioned to ban New Zealand from Montreal if the tour went ahead but the IOC did not, saying that there was no justification for doing so. In response, a boycott led by Republic of Congo and Tanzania saw more than 20 nations withdraw in advance of the Games and a few more within the first few days of competition.

Answer: Modern Pentathlon

The biathlon is a winter event involving skiing and shooting. The heptathlon and decathlon are multi-event athletic competitions for women and men respectively. The modern pentathlon was devised as a contest to replicate the skills required by a cavalry soldier in enemy territory; swimming; horse riding; shooting; fencing; and running.

Russian Boris Onishchenko's device was attached to his epee during the fencing stage of the competition. Scoring in fencing was done by means of an epee making contact with the opponent's body with enough force to close an electronic circuit. The dodgy device meant that Boris could close the circuit with a press of a button on the handle of the weapon. In a bout against Jim Fox of Great Britain, Onishchenko won comfortably but the British team complained, saying that the Russian had scored points without hitting anything. They demanded to examine the epee and the subterfuge was discovered. He was disqualified and banned for life from future competition.

Answer: The scoreboards didn't have enough numbers on them to display her score

The iconic photo of the event shows a beaming Comaneci standing beside a scoreboard reading a score of 1.00. Before the start of the games, the manufacturers asked how many digits they should include on the scoreboard, and were told that three would be enough because no-one would score a 10.00. Comaneci achieved the feat seven times in the course of the competition and her rival Nelli Kim of the Soviet Union achieved it once.

Answer: The Soviet bloc countries boycotted the games

Oops. When McDonald's launched their campaign to give away free soft drinks, there was no hint of a boycott. But two months before the opening ceremony, the Soviet premier Konstantin Chernenko announced his country's intention to boycott the L.A. games, ostensibly because of security concerns. The US media hypothesised that the likely reason was a tit-for-tat response to the US boycott of the Moscow games in 1980. Once the Soviets had declared their hand, a number of other Communist-aligned countries followed suit, taking the number of absent nations to 14.

To McDonald's great distress, the US team benefitted significantly from the boycott in sports where the Soviet bloc was normally highly competitive, such as boxing, gymnastics and the women's swimming and athletics events. Another significant beneficiary was the only Warsaw Pact nation to attend L.A.; Romania, whose athletes took them to third place in the overall medal table.

Answer: Deliberately losing matches to get a more favourable draw

Naughty. The official crime was "not using one's best efforts to win a match" in the last round of group games. With the other two groups having already concluded, the matches in question would define which pairs met in the quarter finals.

Two pairs from South Korea were allegedly trying to avoid being placed in the same side of the draw so that both had the potential to make the final. The pairs from China and Indonesia appeared to be trying to avoid the seeded pairs from the completed groups, both of whom had failed to win their sections making the games for group winners potentially more tricky.

The matches between the pairs descended into farce with comically short rallies, easy missed shots and serves frequently being hit into the nets. Future badminton tournaments changed the way they created the draw, by not announcing the match-ups until after the group stage had concluded.