Olympic Games questions

The marathon may have ancient roots, but the foot race’s official length of 26.2 miles wasn’t established until the 20th century. As the story goes, Queen Alexandra requested that the race start on the lawn of Windsor Castle (so the littlest royals could watch from the window of their nursery) and finish in front of the royal box at the Olympic stadium—a distance that happened to be 26.2 miles (26 miles and 385 yards). The random boost in mileage ending up sticking, and in 1921 the length for a marathon was formally standardized at 26.2 miles (42.195 kilometers).

Both women and men's teams have dominated basketball at the Summer Olympics, winning 23 out of 30 possible gold medals. In 5 out of 7 remaining they finished second or third.

The decision to include women in athletic competitions was widely criticised not only by the majority of the sport community, but also by Vatican.

So far the Olympic Flame went out 5 times. In 1976 in Montreal the fire went out due to intensive rain. In Athens in 2004 the flame went down on the historical stadium of 1896. During Beijing Games of 2008 it was gone due to "technical issues". During the relay to London in 2012 the flame got extinguished on a boat. On the relay to Sochi in 2013 fire went out at Red Square of Moscow.

The Olympic games were disbanded as "pagan rituals" shortly after Christianity was made the official religion of the Roman Empire. Theodosius the Great dissolved the order of the Vestal Virgins in Rome and banned the Olympics in Ancient Greece.

Gyeorugi, a type of taekwondo sparring, has been an Olympic event since 2000. There have been attempts to introduce karate as Olympic sport as well. In the 117th IOC Session (July 2005), karate received more than half of the votes, but not the two-thirds majority needed to become an official Olympic sport.

The first Games held under the auspices of the IOC were hosted at the Panathenaic stadium in Athens in 1896. The Games brought together 14 nations and 241 athletes. Greek officials, the public and many of the athletes were so enthusiastic about the experience of hosting an Olympic Games, that they demanded that Athens be the permanent Olympic host city.

Of the total number of 397 medals awarded so far, Austria got 105, nearly twice as much as Switzerland, which comes second with 56 medals. Austrian dominance is not limited to the Olympic Games - Austrians won also nearly 30% of all Alpine Skiing World Cup races.

There are no places to practice alpine skiing in Finland, as the country is flat. In the whole history of the Olympic Games, Finland won only one medal (Tanja Poutiainen, silver in giant slalom in 2006).

According to Herodotus, an Athenian runner named Pheidippides was sent to run from Athens to Sparta (225 km, 140 miles) to ask for assistance before the battle. Then, following the battle, the Athenian army marched quickly the 40 km (25 miles) to Athens, in order to head off the Persian forces. Later these two events became confused with each other, leading to a legendary but inaccurate story (first recorded by Plutarch in 1st century AD) of Pheidippides running from Marathon to Athens after the battle, to announce the Greek victory.