Olympic trivia covers nearly 2,800 years of running, wrestling, and — for one glorious stretch — competitive poetry. Fifteen questions follow, from ancient Olympia to the events the Games would rather you forgot. Commit to each answer before reading on, keep score, and prepare to be upstaged by a ten-year-old.

Round One: The Ancient Games

Start at the very beginning. In what year were the first recorded ancient Olympics held? You get credit for anything in the neighborhood: the traditional date is 776 BC, at Olympia in Greece, and the Games ran every four years for roughly a thousand years afterward.

Next: how many events did those first recorded Games feature? Lock in a number. The answer is one — a single sprint called the stadion, a dash of about 192 meters. One race, one winner, done for four years. Everything else came later.

Speaking of winners: what prize did an ancient Olympic champion actually take home? Not gold. Not silver. An olive wreath, cut from a sacred tree at Olympia. The fame was the prize; the wreath was the receipt.

Last one from antiquity: what finally ended the ancient Games? They were suppressed around AD 393, traditionally credited to the Roman emperor Theodosius I and his ban on pagan festivals. The Olympics then took a modest break — about 1,500 years — before Pierre de Coubertin revived them in Athens in 1896. First modern footnote worth having: the marathon at those 1896 Games was won by a Greek water-carrier named Spyridon Louis, who became a national hero overnight.

Round Two: Events That Vanished

Now for the strange middle years. True or false: tug-of-war was once an Olympic sport. True — and not briefly. It was contested at every Games from 1900 through 1920 as part of the athletics program. Follow-up for the bonus point: which country owned the event? Great Britain. At the 1908 London Games, all three tug-of-war medals went to British teams, and every one of them was a squad of police officers — the City of London Police pulled their way to gold.

Harder now. From 1912 to 1948, the Olympics awarded real medals in five decidedly non-athletic categories. Name any of them. They were painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and music — the official Olympic art competitions, with the rule that every entry had to be inspired by sport. And here is the twist worth the whole round: at the 1912 Games, the literature gold went to a poem called “Ode to Sport,” entered under a pen name — and the true author turned out to be Pierre de Coubertin himself. The founder of the modern Olympics entered his own Games in disguise and won.

Two more lost events, quickly. At the 1904 Games in St. Louis, the “plunge for distance” required competitors to dive into a pool and then do what? Absolutely nothing — they glided motionless underwater, and whoever drifted farthest won. And from 1984 to 1992, swimmers earned medals in solo synchronized swimming, an event whose name has launched a thousand quiz-night arguments. (The routine was synchronized to the music, officially.)

Round Three: Records and Fine Print

Youngest-medalist time. How old was the youngest known Olympic medalist in history? He was ten: Dimitrios Loundras, a Greek gymnast who took team bronze at the 1896 Athens Games. The honest asterisk: a young French coxswain at the 1900 rowing events may have been even younger, but his identity was never confirmed, so Loundras keeps the record.

And the youngest individual Olympic champion? That's Marjorie Gestring of the United States, who won springboard diving gold in 1936 at thirteen years old.

Now the fine print your winners' podium doesn't mention. When were the last Olympic gold medals made of solid gold? 1912, in Stockholm. Ever since, “gold” medals have been mostly silver with a few grams of gold plating — a fact best deployed only after someone has finished celebrating.

Finish with a date. When were the first Winter Olympics held? 1924, in Chamonix, France — an event billed at the time as an “International Winter Sports Week” and only promoted to “first Winter Olympic Games” after the fact.

Tally up. If you landed Loundras, the plunge for distance, and Coubertin's secret poetry gold, award yourself an olive wreath — which, as you now know, holds its value better than the modern medals do.