It is Olympics time. The greatest sporting spectacle on earth will unfold in London this Friday and the world waits with bated breath. Sports enthusiasts have been flooded with a series of books recounting stories of Olympics. Some give detailed accounts of exceptional deeds performed by the athletes. Some test your sporting intellect. The Olympics Games Quiz Book, published by Ocean Books, is one such offering.
Compiled by Vijaya Khandurie, it is an interesting collection of some little known facts about Olympics. Obviously he has taken efforts to research and confesses he was inspired by David Wallechinsky’s The Complete Book of the Olympic Games . Wallechinsky’s work is an authoritative documentation of Olympics from the time they began in 1896 at Athens.
Khandurie has quiz books to his credit on popular science, sports and word games. This follows a successful quiz book he did on the Commonwealth Games in 2010. The one on Olympics has been divided into 43 chapters, each comprising some questions that leave you foxed.
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When were swimming goggles first used in Olympics? Who is the only Olympic medallist to be awarded the Nobel Prize? Which venue hosted the first ever Games Village?
If you don’t have the answers to the above questions, then Khandurie’s effort deserves to be lauded. “This exhaustive quiz book is meant to create awareness among the students in special and masses in general,” says the author. It certainly makes for interesting reading. As for the answers, the goggles happened at Montreal in1976; Philip Noel-Baker was the Noble laureate who won a silver in 1500m at Antwerp in 1920; Paris in 1924 was the first to have an Olympic Games Village.