The Goodwill Games Trivia Quiz

Answer: Ted Turner

On June 1, 1980 Ted Turner launched the first 24 hour news network, CNN which grew into a worldwide television network. He also created several other stations. WTBS (Turner Broadcasting System) was the first cable superstation which in the early days of cable enabled viewers all over the country to see the Atlanta TV station that carried the Atlanta Braves baseball team and the Atlanta Hawks basketball team. TBS was also the network that carried the first two Goodwill Games in the US.

A little known fact about TBS is that the call letters WTBS were owned by the MIT college radio station (my alma mater) when Turner wanted to use them for his station. He bought the rights to the call letters making both sides happy as the MIT radio station was able to get funding for the next several years. MIT started using the call letters WMBR which stood for Walker Memorial Basement Radio as their station was located in the basement of the Walker Memorial building.

Answer: The prior two Summer Olympics had each been boycotted by multiple countries

Over 60 countries boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics held in Moscow after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Although the boycott was ostensibly led by the United States, several countries not allied with the US such as Iran (which at the time was holding 52 US hostages in Tehran) joined the boycott as well. In 1984 when the Olympics were in Los Angeles the Soviet Union and 13 of its allies boycotted those games with Romania being the only Eastern Bloc nation to attend.

In response to these events, Ted Turner decided to create the Goodwill Games in an attempt restore athletic relations around the world.

Answer: 5

The Goodwill Games were held every four years from 1986 to 1998 and then after only three years in 2001. By that time, Ted Turner had sold most of his television related holdings including TBS and the Goodwill Games to Time Warner. They decided to hold the games in 2001 rather than 2002 but then cancelled them after low television ratings as well as a decline in the number of participating athletes and countries.

Answer: Moscow

Moscow which had been the site of the boycotted 1980 Olympics was chosen to host the inaugural Goodwill Games. After that, the next three games alternated between US and Russian cities with the 1990 games in Seattle, 1994 in St. Petersburg, and 1998 in New York City.

Answer: False

There were eighteen different sports in the 1986 Goodwill Games. In addition to athletics and swimming, other sports included boxing, cycling, gymnastics, judo, weightlifting, and wrestling. One non-Olympic sport that was included was motoball which is essentially football (soccer) played on motorcycles.

Answer: Pole Vault

Sergey Bubka was a multi-time world champion pole vaulter who set the world record a total of 35 times between 1984 and 1994 when the indoor and outdoor record were considered separately (they were combined into one world record in 2000). He would do this be clinching the win for the meet and then making a further attempt that was only one or two centimeters above the current world record so if he made it, it would be a new world record.

His last outdoor record of 6.14 meters wasn't broken for over 25 years until Armand Duplantis vaulted 6.15 meters in 2020. After his retirement from vaulting, Bubka was involved in the Olympic movement government as a vice president of the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federation) and President of the Ukrainian Olympic Committee.

Answer: Jackie Joyner-Kersee

The Heptathlon is a competition consisting of seven track and field events contested over a two day period. Athletes are awarded points in each event based on their performance according to predetermined tables with the sum of their points across all seven events determining the winner. In the 1986 Goodwill Games, Joyner became the first athlete to score over 7000 points across the seven events.

In addition to winning the event at the first four Goodwill Games, Jackie Joyner-Kersee won two gold medals and one silver in the Heptathlon in the Olympics between 1984 and 1992. She also won a gold medal and two bronzes in the Olympic Long Jump between 1988 and 1996. She won two gold medals in each of the events in the IAAF World Championships between 1987 and 1993.

Answer: Lake Placid

Lake Placid hosted the Winter Olympics in 1980 and was the site of the famous Miracle on Ice where the underdog US Hockey team defeated the heavily favorite Soviet Union. It also hosted the Winter Olympics in 1932. There were eleven winter sports featured in the Winter Goodwill games including both alpine, cross country and freestyle skiing, bobsleigh, and luge.

Figure skating, which was included in the Lake Placid games, had also been a feature of the Summer Goodwill Games in every edition except the 1986 games.

Answer: Brisbane

2001 was the only time the Goodwill Games were held outside of either the USSR/Russia or the United States. There were about 1300 athletes who participated in 14 sports, down from around 3000 athletes in 18 sports at the inaugural games in 1986. A new non-Olympic sport, surf lifesaving, which combines surfing with lifesaving techniques, was included in this edition.

Answer: Al-Qaeda attack on New York and Washington

It was two days after the final edition of the Goodwill Games closed that the September 11 attacks occurred killing almost 3000 people. While I haven't been able to find any evidence that the cancellation of future games was related to this, it does feel ironic that this event happened so close to the end of games that were setup to help bring the world together.

Unfortunately, while Ted Turner was willing to fund games which cost him millions of dollars in order to help promote world unity, once Time Warner became involved, it was no longer possible to run games based on ideals rather than profit.