Sports trivia quiz

How to play the sports quiz

Choose Play the quiz and you get ten random questions from all nine sports. Each has four options in shuffled order. Tap an answer to see straight away if you were right, with a one-line explanation, and get your score at the end with a list of the questions you missed. “Play again” deals ten new questions until you have seen the whole set.

The Sport menu filters the quiz to one sport, which is handy if your group has a golf fan who wants to show off. Question list shows all 60 sports trivia questions with hidden answers, a reveal-all button and print options for the host.

How to run a sports trivia night

Mixed sports trivia is ideal for bars, office parties and family game nights because nobody can be an expert on everything. A format that keeps every table in the game:

1. Teams of up to six, one answer sheet each, phones away.
2. Five rounds of six questions: Olympics, racket and club sports (tennis and golf), fight night (boxing), the big four US leagues (NHL, NFL, NBA, MLB) and soccer.
3. 1 point per answer, plus a joker: before a round starts, each team can play its joker to double that round’s points. It rewards teams who know their strong sport.
4. Mark between rounds while you read the answers and explanations aloud.
5. Tie-breaker: a number question, closest wins. Wayne Gretzky’s career points (2,857) or Michael Phelps’s Olympic medals (28) both work.

Worked example: scoring with a joker

Five rounds of six questions gives 30 points, and a joker can add up to 6 more, so the top score is 36. A team scores 4 in the Olympics round, 3 in tennis and golf, 5 in boxing (their joker round, so 10), 4 in the US leagues and 2 in soccer: 4 + 3 + 10 + 4 + 2 = 23. Without the joker they would have 18, so playing it on their best sport earned 5 points.

How the questions were chosen

The point of a sports quiz is a fair contest, and that needs answers nobody can argue with. We wrote these sports trivia questions using three rules:

• Fixed events only: Olympic finals, title fights, majors and championships that are already decided.
• Records with a date, or records held by retired athletes, such as Rocky Marciano’s 49–0 or Jack Nicklaus’s 18 majors. We avoided “who holds the record?” wherever an active athlete could break it.
• Fair wrong answers: the three wrong options are real athletes, places or numbers from the same sport and era.

Questions range from easy (how many rings are on the Olympic flag?) to hard (what time did Usain Bolt run in Berlin in 2009?), and each sport has a mix of both.

How we tested

The quiz runs on one small engine, and we wrote automated Node tests for it (tests/quiz.test.js) and ran them before publishing. They read the question list straight from this page's source and check that:

• all 60 questions have a unique id and no question appears twice;
• every question has exactly four different options, and the correct answer is one of them;
• a round always contains 10 different questions, and a second round avoids the questions from the first while enough are left;
• after the options are shuffled, the engine still knows which button is right: in 600 test rounds (6,000 shuffled questions) per quiz the correct answer landed in each of the four positions about a quarter of the time, and was always the one marked correct;
• the score counts only right answers (all right gives 10/10, all wrong gives 0/10, and answering the same question twice is ignored).

Facts were checked separately. The questions are built on well-known sports history, and we checked the exact figures with web sources before keeping them: Wayne Gretzky’s 2,857 points and 92 goals in 1981–82, Alex Ovechkin’s 895th goal on April 6, 2025 and Michael Phelps’s 28 Olympic medals, 23 of them gold. We changed one explanation after checking: Serena Williams’s 23 Grand Slam singles titles are the Open Era record for women, not for all players.

Every question was then reviewed a second time in a separate fact-check pass, and the details we doubted were checked against Wikipedia and news reports.

Those are the only tests we ran: we have not tried the quiz with groups of players or on a range of phones, so if something looks wrong, please tell us.