Fun Sports Facts
- More than 1,800 medals are awarded at the Olympics!
- Track athletes are most likely to break records later in the day when their body temperatures are highest!
- A Chinese checkerboard has 121 holes!
- A bowling pin only needs to tilt 7.5 degrees to fall down!
- The opposite sides of a dice cube always add up to 7!
- Philadelphia Phillies was the first American sports team to lose their 10,000th game!
- There are more head and spinal injuries from cheerleading than from all other sports combined!
- There are about 16,000 serious injuries from cheerleaders performing stunts and tumbles!
- Australian rugby player Ben Czislowski found out he had an opponent's tooth in his forehead!
- Tiger Woods is the top-earning athlete in the world!
- Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team his sophomore year!
- Babe Ruth wore a cabbage leaf under his cap every game, and he used to change it every two innings!
- The longest baseball game was on May 1, 1920. It lasted over 8 hours and went on for 26 innings!
- Ashrita Furman jumped rope 130,000 times in 24 hours!
- There are 336 dimples on a regulation golf ball!
- The first women's intercollegiate basketball game took place between Stanford and the University of California on April 4, 1896. Stanford won!
- The first World Series was played between Pittsburgh and Boston in 1903 and was a nine-game series. Boston won the series 5-3!
- The New York Yankees have won 26 World Series titles!
- James Naismith, a teacher at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts, is credited with inventing basketball in 1891!
- The first hoops were actually just peach baskets, and the first backboards were made of wire!
- Ari Petrof is Sweden's National Sauna Champion. He stayed in a 212 degree F sauna for 5 hours and 10 minutes!
- The only rule during Roman wrestling matches was no eye gouging!
- Soccer is played by more than 20 million people in 140 countries!
- The most popular sport in the Philippines is basketball!
- The most popular sport in the Netherlands is ice skating!
- In Ancient Japan, contests were held to see who could fart the loudest and longest!
- There are three golf balls sitting on the moon!
- Shaquille O'Neal wears size 22 shoe!
- Before 1859, umpires sat in a padded rocking chair behind the catcher!
- The first puck ever used in a game was a frozen piece of cow crap!
- From a complete stop, a human is capable of outrunning a Formula One Racecar for about 30 feet!
- Each year, 30,000 people are seriously injured by exercise equipment!
- During WWII, there was a lack of players, so the Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles combined to become The Steagles!
- Cheetahs were raced at Romford greyhound stadium in 1937!
- Wilt Chamberlain never fouled out of a basketball game!
- People in nudist colonies play volleyball more than any other sport!
- Most NASCAR Teams use Nitrogen in their tires instead of air!
- Kite flying is a professional sport in Thailand!
- It takes 3,000 cows to supply the NFL with enough leather for a year's supply of footballs!
- In 1910, football teams were penalized 15 yards for an incomplete forward pass!
- Just days before the World Cup of 1966 in England, the trophy was stolen and then later retrieved by a dog!
- There are 318,979,564,000 possible combinations of the first four moves in Chess!
- Soccer players run on average as many as 6 miles during the course of a game!
- People who chase after rare birds are called twitchers!
- The word checkmate in chess comes from the Persian phrase shah mat which means the king is dead!
- Moderate dancing burns 250 to 300 calories an hour!
- All major league baseball umpires must wear black underwear while on the job!
- Left-handed people are better at sports that require good spatial judgment and fast reaction compared to right-handed people!
- No high jumper has ever been able to stay off the ground for more than one second!
- Tug of War was an Olympic sport from 1900 to 1920!
- When pitched, the average Major League baseball rotates 15 times before being hit!
- The state sport of Maryland is jousting!
- The Stanley Cup was originally only 7 and a half inches high!
- The practice of identifying baseball players by number was started by the Yankees in 1929!
- The king of hearts is the only king without a mustache on a standard playing card!
- The first baseball caps were made of straw!
- The average life span of a major league baseball is 5-7 pitches!
- A microwaved baseball will fly farther than a frozen baseball!
- Prior to 1900, prize fights lasted up to 100 rounds!
- Pittsburgh is the only city where all major sports teams have the same colors: black and gold!
