The race where both boats sank
Some of the sports in this grid do not have a page of their own on the site, so here are a few of their stories. ROWING has one of the oldest contests in the world: the Boat Race between the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, first rowed in 1829 and held on the River Thames in London most years since, over a curving course of about 6.8 kilometres from Putney to Mortlake. In 1877 it ended in a dead heat. In 1912 rough water filled and sank both boats, and the race had to be rowed again.
Rowers are unusual among athletes in racing backwards, facing away from the finish. In an eight, a small crew member called the cox sits facing the rowers, steering and calling out the stroke rate.
Fencing plugged in
FENCING grew out of duelling and sword training, and our knights and castles page covers the swords of an earlier age. It is one of only a handful of sports that have been in every modern Olympics since 1896. Fencers fight on a long, narrow strip, and the traditional white kit comes from the days when judges had to watch for every hit by eye.
Electric scoring changed that. A wire runs up the sleeve to the tip of the blade, and a touch lights up the scoreboard. It came in for the épée in 1936, the foil in 1956 and the sabre only in 1988, because sabre fencers score with the edge of the blade as well as the point, which was harder to wire up.
Arrows, pins and bone skates
In Olympic ARCHERY, archers shoot at a target seventy metres away. The ten-point ring in the middle, called the gold, is just over twelve centimetres across. In tenpin BOWLING, a perfect game is 300 points, meaning twelve strikes in a row.
SKATING is older than most people think. Blades made from the leg bones of animals, strapped to the feet, have been found across northern Europe, and scientists think people in Finland were gliding across frozen lakes on bone skates thousands of years ago, probably to travel faster in winter. Metal blades came much later. SAILING has its own long rivalry, told on our sailboats page.
Pin boys and summer ice
For decades, every tenpin BOWLING alley needed pin boys, often teenagers, who crouched behind the pins, cleared away the fallen ones and set them all up again by hand, dodging flying pins. Automatic pinsetting machines took over from the early 1950s, and bowling alleys spread quickly once they no longer needed a crew behind every lane.
Ice SKATING reached the Olympics before there were any Winter Games at all. Figure skating was part of the Summer Olympics in London in 1908, held on an indoor rink, sixteen years before the first Winter Olympics.
The rest of the grid
The other sports here each have a puzzle and a page of their own: FOOTBALL and SOCCER, BASKETBALL, BASEBALL, TENNIS, GOLF, HOCKEY, RUGBY, CRICKET, BOXING, CYCLING, SWIMMING, VOLLEYBALL, SKIING, SURFING and WRESTLING, with KARATE on the martial arts page. The MARATHON, the longest standard race in the grid, belongs to athletics.