Track and Field Legends Trivia Quiz

Answer: Diane Leather

When Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile barrier in 1954, he quite rightly became world famous and a legend of the athletic world. But just three weeks later Diane Leather achieved her milestone for women and it went almost entirely unheralded.

Women were poorly treated in athletics - at the time Leather ran her five-minute mile, the longest event that women were permitted to compete in was the 200 metres so Leather's record was not officially recognised as a world record. Fortunately later that year the women's 800 metres was recognised as an event by the IAAF which allowed Leather to compete and win a silver medal at that year's European Championships. It wasn't until the 1976 Olympic Games that the 1500 metres for women was introduced and longer distances weren't sanctioned until the late 1980s.

Answer: Tommie Smith

The black power salute given by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics sometimes overshadows the fact that they were only able to give it, from the podium, because they were both remarkably talented athletes.

Smith went into the 1968 Mexico City Olympics as the holder of the 200 metres world record at 20.0 seconds. He had also, until one month before the games, been the holder of the 400 metres record too. In the 200m final he smashed his record with a time of 19.83 seconds, the first sub-20 second run in history. He would hold the record for nearly 11 years before Pietro Mennea of Italy ran 19.72 seconds in 1979.

Answer: Fanny Blankers-Koen

Fanny Blankers-Koen was nicknamed the flying housewife because she was 30 years old and a mother by the time she achieved her remarkable haul at the London Olympics of 1948. Her success destroyed several stereotypes that older women and mothers could not compete in international sport.

Blankers-Koen had been to her first Olympics as an 18-year-old in Berlin in 1936 but was denied the chance of competing again until London because of the outbreak of World War II and the subsequent cancellation of the 1940 and 1944 Games. In the meantime she set about breaking multiple world records across several events - the 80 metre hurdles, the high jump and the long jump. She won six events at the Dutch championships in 1947 but decided to restrict herself to just four at the London Olympics: the 80m hurdles; the 100m, the 200m; and the 4 x 100m relay. She won all four and wrote her legend into the history books as the first woman in Olympic history to claim four gold medals at a single games.

Answer: Harry 'Butch' Reynolds

When Lee Evans broke the 44-second barrier at altitude for the 400 metres at the Mexico City Olympics, it was a time that everyone knew was exceptional. The fact that no-one got near the record for almost 20 years emphasised that point. So, when Butch Reynolds ran 44.09 at a meet in Ohio in 1987, the whole world sat up and took notice. The following season, Reynolds became the first man to run under 44 seconds anywhere since 1968 and the first ever to do so at sea level. Not only did he do that but he took a remarkable 0.57 seconds off the world record with a time of 43.29 seconds. It was a record that would itself stand for 11 years until beaten the US athlete, Michael Johnson.

Reynolds was to run under 44 seconds again later in 1988 at the Seoul Olympics but it was only enough for silver as his compatriot, Steve Lewis won gold in a time of 43.87 seconds.

Answer: Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce

Fraser-Pryce's first Olympic gold in 2008 was unexpected. When she ran 10.73 seconds the next season on the way to claiming the World Championship title, no-one doubted that she was an athlete for the ages. What she achieved over the next decade and a half placed her at the very top of the pantheon of great sprinters. Between 2009 and 2022 she won a staggering 16 World Championship medals across the 100m, 200m and 4 x 100m relay, ten of those medals being gold.

As well as her unmatched achievements in the World Championships, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce was the first woman to win a medal in the 100m at four consecutive Olympic Games (two golds in 2008 and 2012, one silver in 2021 and one bronze in 2016).

Answer: Dick Fosbury

Fosbury came up with an entirely new technique for the high jump, running a J-shaped route to the bar, and launching himself backwards, head-first over the bar, kicking his legs up at the end of the movement. The athletic world was not quite ready for it.

Many laughed at his technique and not every track had a soft landing for him, meaning he picked up the occasional injury. But he also picked up a fair few medals and the laughing definitely stopped. His peak came with Olympic gold in Mexico City in 1968 but his greatest impact in the sport was the fact that his technique took over from the straddle technique - by the next Olympics in Munich, 70 per cent of the high jumpers used the new technique.

Answer: Mike Powell

Powell's 1991 World Championship battle against Carl Lewis for the long jump title was one of the greatest competitions in the history of sport. Going into the tournament, Bob Beamon had held the world record with a jump of 8.90m ((29ft 2¼in) since 1968 and Lewis had not been beaten in a long jump competition in more than ten years.

Both records were to be broken. Lewis jumped beyond Beamon's record first with a jump of 8.91m but it did not count as a world record because it was wind-assisted. Powell responded with a jump of 8.95m (29ft 4¼in), this time with a legal following wind meaning Beamon's mark had gone from the record books. In trying to respond, Lewis jumped the two longest legal jumps of his career, 8.87m and 8.84m but had to settle for silver. In 2014, Powell's record was still unbeaten, meaning he had surpassed the length of time that Beamon's record had stood for.

Answer: Derartu Tulu

Tulu from Ethiopia was the first African woman to win an Olympic track and field gold medal with her performance at the Barcelona Games in 1992. Although she was unable to successfully defend her title in 1996, finishing fourth, she came back in Sydney in 2000 to become the first woman to win the 10,000 metre title twice.

A year later she claimed her first World Championship title in Edmonton, to go alongside her three gold medals from the World Cross Country Championships. She soon moved on to the marathon, winning the prestigious New York and London marathons in the same year.

Answer: Edwin Moses

Edwin Moses won the 400m hurdles gold at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. A year later he began his run of 122 consecutive victories over the distance, a run that included winning a second Olympic gold, a World Championship gold and setting two world records.

What made Moses so imperious at this distance was his technique of making 13 strides between every hurdle. Other athletes of his era would use either change down from 13 during the latter half of the race or go with more strides from the beginning. His streak was eventually ended in 1987 and he retired a year later after claiming a third Olympic medal in Seoul, this time a bronze.

Answer: Jonathan Edwards

Edwards was slow to make his mark on the world of athletics despite his obvious talent. His strong Christian beliefs meant that he refused to compete on a Sunday and this meant he missed out on the World Championships in 1991.

1995 was Edwards high peak. He gave an indication of just how far he could jump when he recorded wind-assisted jumps of 18.39m and 18.43m at the European Cup competition in France. Neither counted as a world record but he had jumped more than a meter further than any other competitor could that day.

The 18 metre barrier was a big one for the triple jump. Three weeks before the World Championships took place in Stockholm, Edwards beat the ten-year old world record by a centimetre to take it to 17.98m. But in Stockholm he blew it away. In his first jump in the final he set a new record of 18.16m, the first ever legal jump over 18 metres. The very next jump saw him extend his record to a remarkable 18.29m (60ft). These distances were so far ahead of the rest of the world that it would be more than 20 years before anyone was able to better his *second* best jump. Edwards would win a second World gold in 2001, a year after claiming his first Olympic title.