Sports

The Olympic Games are the biggest sporting festival on Earth. The story starts in ancient Greece, where games were held at Olympia in honour of Zeus (traditionally from 776 BCE). After about 1,200 years they were banned, and the Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin revived them. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was founded on 23 June 1894 in Paris (headquarters now in Lausanne, Switzerland), and the first modern Olympics were held in Athens in 1896. They are held every four years, and a four-year period is called an Olympiad. The Games were cancelled in 1916, 1940 and 1944 because of the World Wars, and Tokyo 2020 was played in 2021 because of COVID-19.

After the Olympics, the two multi-sport events that matter most for Indian exams are the Asian Games and the Commonwealth Games. Both come every four years, and India has hosted both. The Asian Games began in New Delhi in 1951 (the Asian Games Federation had been formed in 1949 under Guru Dutt Sondhi, called the 'Father of the Asian Games'). They are now run by the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA), with its motto 'Ever Onward'. The Commonwealth Games began in Hamilton, Canada, in 1930 as the British Empire Games and are open to countries of the Commonwealth.

Sports questions are mostly of three kinds: which term belongs to which sport, how many players or how long, and what are the standard measurements. The best way to handle them is to keep one small table per sport in your head. If a word sounds like movement (smash, spike, dribble), ask yourself which game has that action; if it sounds like a score (birdie, ace, love, ippon), connect it to one game only. Learn the tables below once and many one-mark questions become free.

In sports questions the examiner loves one simple pairing: trophy and sport. Once you know that the Ranji Trophy belongs to cricket and the Santosh Trophy to football, half the paper is solved. Most cups are named after a person, usually a royal patron, an administrator or a sportsman, and that name is the second thing the exam asks. So for every cup below, learn three things: the sport, the person it is named after, and the city or country where it is played.

Venue questions look scattered, but they follow a simple pattern: a stadium belongs to a city, a city belongs to a state association, and big events are remembered by the city that hosted them. So when you read about Wankhede, think Mumbai and the 2011 World Cup final; when you read about Eden Gardens, think Kolkata and the Cricket Association of Bengal. For federations, the exam usually asks only two things: the year of founding and the headquarters. Learn the tables below in that spirit.

India honours its sportspeople through a set of National Sports Awards given by the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports. The exam does not ask you to memorise lists of winners; it asks three clean things: who the award is for (player, coach or lifetime contribution), what it is called now (the Khel Ratna was renamed) and who got it first. A small memory story helps: in the Mahabharata, Drona was the teacher and Arjuna the student. In sport too, the student, the performing player, gets the Arjuna Award and the teacher, the coach, gets the Dronacharya Award. Above both stands the Khel Ratna, the jewel of sport.

This is the most human part of the chapter: who did what first. Examiners love 'firsts' because they have only one right answer. The easiest way to learn them is to hang each name on a medal or a record in a short timeline, then keep one table of sportsperson, sport and claim to fame. Remember that the exam asks for three kinds of facts: firsts (first woman, first individual gold), records (most centuries, most world titles) and nicknames (Wizard of Hockey, Flying Sikh). If you can place each name in its sport, even an unfamiliar question becomes an elimination game.