Fun Facts About the Winter Olympics

Welcome to Fun Facts Daily, your source for just the good stuff. Monday through Friday, we're bringing fun facts and news you can use, all carefully curated to uplift and inform.

So give yourself a break, relax, and learn something awesome in just a few minutes every day.

Hi everyone, I'm Kyle Wood.

As the whole world is tuning into the Winter Olympic Games, I thought it'd be cool to make a series of episodes on all the sports in the modern Winter Games.

Today, I'm starting things off with an episode about the Winter Olympics more broadly, but starting tomorrow, I'll be covering individual events.

In order to fit in all that content before the end of this year's Winter Games, I'll be dropping some episodes on the weekends too.

And as long as I'm doing a little housekeeping, you might remember back in the kindness episode about two weeks ago, I announced a giveaway for someone who emailed me the word of the day by January 30th.

Well, the deadline has passed and congratulations to Sydney.

You were the randomly selected winner, so be sure to check your email if you haven't already.

A $50 Amazon gift card should have arrived on Saturday.

Thanks to everyone who's been listening and keep tuning in because I'll announce another $50 gift card giveaway.

In one of the Olympic episodes coming up this month.

And now, on with the episode.

Let's warm up our brains with a little challenge to see if you can tell fact from fiction.

Consider this.

We all know the Summer and Winter Olympics are two very distinctive events, held two years apart.

But in the early days of the modern Olympic Games, they weren't so spread out.

Would you believe in the early 20th century, organizers held the Olympics as one big summer spectacle, featuring all the events, including winter sports?

It sounds like a logistical nightmare, imagine having figure skaters and hockey players out on the ice in the heat.

But did it actually happen?

We'll find out at the end of the episode.

Now for your word of the day.

Our word for today is Slalom.

That's S L A L O M.

In the context of the Olympics, Slalom refers to an Alpine skiing discipline where skiers must race downhill while zigzagging through a series of gates or poles set closely together.

Unlike the downhill event, which is all about raw speed, Slalom is about technical precision, agility, and quick turning.

If a skier misses a single gate, they're disqualified, making it a tense and thrilling test of control.

Our word Slalom comes from Norwegian.

It's a compound of two words, Sla meaning slightly inclining hillside, and Lom meaning track after skis.

Originally, in the 1800s, Norwegian skiers used this term to describe a trail that wasn't too steep, but required skill to navigate around obstacles like bushes or rocks.

It's a perfect reminder that before it was a competitive sport, skiing was just a way of moving across the beautiful snowy landscapes of Scandinavia.

Time for your daily high five.

Our top five fun facts about the Winter Olympics.

Number one, only one person has ever won gold in both the Summer and Winter Games.

While a handful of talented athletes have managed to participate in both the Summer and Winter Olympics, Eddie Egan stands in a league of his own.

As of the time of this recording, he's the only person in history to win a gold medal in both.

His first Olympic win came in the 1920 Games in Antwerp, where he represented the US and fought for gold as a light heavyweight boxer.

12 years later, he won the gold again, this time as a member of the four-man Bobsled team at the 1932 Lake Placid Winter Games.

But Egan wasn't just a sports legend.

He was a road scholar and attended Harvard, Yale, and Oxford.

And on December 13th, 1948, long after his Olympic career ended, he flew around the entire planet in 147 hours, 15 minutes, setting at that time a world record for the fastest circumnavigation of the globe by scheduled airlines.

Number two.

In 2002, an Australian skater won Olympic gold by accident.

The Australian speed skater Steven Bradbury won what many consider the wildest gold medal of all time.

During the 1000-meter short track final, Bradbury knew he was slower than his opponents, so his strategy was simply to stay on his feet and hope for the best while trailing behind the pack.

As the skaters whipped around the final corner, a massive pileup occurred, causing every single athlete ahead of him to crash into the boards.

Bradbury, who was safely behind that chaos, glided past all those sprawling skaters to cross the finish line first.

And that wasn't the only first, he was actually the first person from the Southern Hemisphere to win Winter Olympic gold.

His victory is a legendary reminder that sometimes a slower and steady pace really can win the race.

Number three.

All Olympic curling stones come from one tiny volcanic island.

Every single curling stone used in the Winter Olympics is made from a specific type of granite found on Ailsa Craig, a small uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland.

This granite, known as Blue Hone and Common Green, is incredibly dense and water resistant, which prevents the stones from cracking or eroding as they slide across the ice and crash into one another.

The island is actually a bird sanctuary, so quarrying the granite is highly restricted and only happens once every 10 years or so.

This makes the curling stones incredibly rare and special objects, when you watch the athletes sliding those stones.

You're actually looking at pieces of an ancient volcano that have traveled thousands of miles to get there.

Number four.

The first Winter Olympics weren't actually called the Olympics at the time.

When the games were held in Chamonix, France in 1924, they were originally organized as International Winter Sports Week.

The International Olympic Committee was initially afraid that Winter Games might detract from the prestige of the Summer Games.

But the event was such a massive success, attracting over 250 athletes from 16 different nations, that the IOC retroactively designated it as the first official Winter Olympic Games a year later.

It just goes to show that even the world's biggest sporting events had to start somewhere, often with a humble trial run.

And our fifth and final fun fact for today.

The Olympics has been known to experiment with some wild sports in the past.

Today, there are exactly 16 official sport disciplines in the Winter Games, including the classic favorites like hockey, skiing, and figure skating.

But in the past, organizers would host demonstration sports, experimental events that didn't count for medals.

But we're auditioning for a permanent spot in the games.

In 1932 at Lake Placid, Sled Dog Racing was an actual Olympic event where mushers raced teams of six dogs over a 25-mile course.

But my favorites are the ski events.

The 1928 St. Moritz Games included ski drawing, where skiers were basically dragged behind horses.

It was like water skiing, but on snow, and instead of a boat, the athletes were towed behind riderless galloping horses.

And if that sounds a bit wild and dangerous, in 1992, they actually tested speed skiing, where athletes skied straight down the mountain with no turns.

They reached terrifying speeds over 140 miles an hour or 229 kilometers an hour.

Perhaps the most visually unique experiment though, was ski ballet.

That's right.

Ski ballet, just like figure skating, athletes performed choreographed dance routines to music, complete with spins, flips, and elaborate costumes.

But they did it all in the snow while wearing skis.

Now for some news you can use.

You ever been outside in the cold and found that no matter how good your gloves are, your fingers still turn to icicles?

Here's a little trick that speed skaters and skiers use.

Let's call it the windmill maneuver.

Stand safely away from anyone else and swing your arms in a large, fast 360-degree circle.

Like a windmill.

Try that about 10 to 15 times.

This works thanks to centrifugal force.

That's the outward force you feel when you're spinning in a circle.

When you go on those spinning rides at an amusement park, they always tell you the bigger rider should ride on the outside because everything is getting pushed away from the center.

It's the same physics that keeps water stuck to the bottom of a bucket if you spin it upside down over your head.

The contents are pushed outward away from the rotation.

In the case of spinning your arms, that centrifugal force pushes the blood out of your core all the way down to your fingertips.

When you're cold, your body naturally constricts the blood flow to your hands to keep your vital organs warm.

But with this circular motion, you're overriding that, rushing blood back to your fingers and warming them up almost instantly.

At the beginning of the episode, I asked, could it possibly be true that figure skating and ice hockey were actually held during the Summer Games in the early 20th century?

Well, that's a fact.

Before the Winter Olympics were established in 1924, figure skating made its debut in the 1908 Summer Olympics in London.

And ice hockey followed at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp.

Organizers actually had to install artificial ice rinks in the middle of spring and summer to make it happen, which was a major technological marvel for the time.

Eventually, they realized that winter sports deserved their own dedicated festival and better weather conditions, leading to the creation of the Winter Games we know and love today.

Now, you might be wondering how they kept the ice from melting.

It's actually some interesting science here.

They used a brine system, engineers used massive compressors to chill a brine or salt water solution well below freezing.

This works because salt water actually freezes at a lower temperature than fresh water.

So, the liquid would stay a liquid even at 16 degrees Fahrenheit or negative 9 degrees Celsius.

This super chilled brine was pumped through miles of iron pipes embedded in a concrete floor.

When they sprayed fresh water on top of the cold floor, it froze instantly on contact.

While the technology was actually pretty good, organizers did have some other measures in place just to be safe.

In the 1920 case, ice hockey events were held in April, and the 1908 figure skating took place in October.

So the machinery didn't have to fight against the peak heat of July.

Now, we hope you enjoyed learning a bit about the Winter Olympics with me today.

Be sure to tune in every weekday for even more fun facts.

Fun Facts Daily is an Airwave Media podcast.

It was written, recorded, mixed, and edited by me, Kyle Wood.

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