Track and Field: The Spirit of Competition!

#60 Week 13

Author

Sigrun Sørumgård
March 25, 2025

Do you have what it takes to answer questions about track and field events and its greatest athletes?

  1. Who holds the world record for the men’s 100m?

  2. Which American sprinter is known as “The Fastest Woman of All Time”?

  3. Which track and field legend won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics?

  4. What is the standard length for the modern marathon, which was set by the International Amateur Athletic Federation?

  5. Who holds the men’s pole vault world record with a “jump” on 6.27 m, set in February 2025?

  6. Who was the first woman to run the marathon in under 2 hours and 30 minutes?

  7. Which country did the runner Haile Gebrselassie represent in his long-distance events?

  8. Who holds the world record in high jump for men, with the hight 2.45m, set in 1993?

  9. Which athlete won 9 Olympic gold medals in track and field and is known as "The King of Track and Field"?

  10. Which female athlete held the world record for 400 meters for over 30 years?

The Wonder Wall

  • The implement used in the hammer throw weighs a whopping 7.26 kg for men and 4.00 kg for women. The world record distance for the hammer throw is 82.98 meters for women and 86.74 meters for men.

  • The sport of track and field has prehistoric roots, being among the oldest of sporting competitions, as running, jumping and throwing are natural and universal human physical expressions. The first recorded examples of organized track and field events are the Ancient Olympic.

  • The high jump was invented by a Scottish minister in the early 1800s to keep kids out of trouble!

Yesterday´s Questions & Answers

  1. Which Swedish author wrote the famous novels Gösta Berling's Saga (1891) and Nils Holgersson's Wonderful Journey Through Sweden (1906/7)?

    Selma Lagerlöf, she was a Swedish author, Nobel Prize winner and the first female member of the Swedish Academy.

  2. Which children's book by Astrid Lindgren features the mysterious country of Nangijala?

    The Lionheart Brothers

  3. Jan Guillou has had great success with a series of novels about which intelligence agent?

    Carl Gustaf Gilbert Hamilton, alias Coq Rouge, is a fictional Swedish intelligence officer who is the main character in 13 books by the Swedish author Jan Guillou.

  4. Which Swedish author is the creator of the policeman Kurt Wallander?

    Henning Mankell

  5. Which author is considered Albert Åberg’s “mother”? She wrote 25 picture books about Albert Åberg and his everyday life with his father Åberg.

    Gunilla Bergström. She also published some other children’s books: the series about Albert’s friend Milla, and the two picture books about Bolla and Bill (1979–1980), which are about having a sister with a developmental disability.

  6. Which Swedish crime writer is known for the Fjällbacka series?

    Camilla Läckberg

  7. Stieg Larsson is known for having written, for example, the Millennium series, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) and The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006), and a third script was completed, namely The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest (published 2007). What are the names of the main characters in the books; a hacker and an investigative journalist?

    The contradictory hacker Lisbeth Salander and the investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist are the main characters in all three books.

  8. The journalist Annika Bengtzon is the main character in a long series of exciting and effective crime novels, written by whom?

    Liza Marklund, a Swedish author and journalist. She is primarily known as a crime writer, where she made her early breakthrough with her first crime novel, The Bomber (1998), which received the Swedish Academy of Crime Fiction Prize the same year.

  9. Which Swedish author developed her poetry from classical simplicity to free modernism and thematized the conflict between individual freedom and societal norms? She was greatly affected by World War II, which led to her committing suicide?

    Karin Boye

  10. Which Swedish poet wrote the collection 17 poems?

    Tomas Tranströmer. Tranströmer held a central position in recent Swedish literature, and became perhaps the best-known Scandinavian poet of his time internationally. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011.