Sports Facts for Kids
Fun facts from the world of sports
Sport climbing made its Olympic debut at Tokyo 2020 and combines three very different disciplines: speed climbing (racing up a wall as fast as possible), bouldering (solving short difficult routes), and lead climbing (scaling as high as possible in a time limit). Athletes compete in all three.
Major League Baseball rules state that a bat must be made from a single solid piece of wood. Most professional bats are made from ash or maple and are about 86 cm (34 inches) long. Players often have hundreds of custom bats made for them each season.
Jai alai (also called pelota) is a sport from the Basque region of Spain where a hard rubber ball is hurled using a curved wicker basket attached to the hand. The ball can reach speeds of over 300 km/h (186 mph), making it one of the fastest ball sports ever recorded.
At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson set a world record of 9.79 seconds in the 100m final. He was stripped of his gold medal just 72 hours later after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs in what became one of sport's biggest scandals.
Handball is sometimes called the fastest scoring sport at the Olympics, with teams regularly scoring over 30 goals each in a single game. Professional handball players sprint roughly 4–6 km per match, and shots at goal can reach 130 km/h.
Tiger Woods became the youngest US Amateur golf champion in history at age 18 in 1994. He went on to win 15 major championships, tie with Jack Nicklaus for second most majors ever, and is widely regarded as the greatest golfer of all time.
An Olympic swimming pool must be exactly 50 metres long, 25 metres wide, and at least 2 metres deep. The water temperature is carefully controlled at between 25 and 28 degrees Celsius — if it were any warmer or colder, swimmers would not be able to set world records.
Real Madrid of Spain is the most successful club in UEFA Champions League history, having won the trophy 15 times. The club was founded in 1902 and their famous all-white kit was reportedly inspired by the colours of a Corinthian amateur football team from England.
All thoroughbred racehorses in the Northern Hemisphere officially share the same birthday — 1 January — regardless of when they were actually born. This makes it easier to group horses into racing categories based on age.
The steeply banked corners of an indoor cycling velodrome can be angled at up to 45 degrees — nearly as steep as a ski slope. Without sufficient speed, cyclists on a velodrome would simply slide down the banking and fall off the track.