Arts & Entertainment Facts

Sports records, musical instruments, and the stories behind what entertains us.

Sports

From ancient Greece to modern Games, an authoritative tour through Olympic history's strangest records.

4 reading levels: Rookie · Curious · Sharp · Expert

Cheese rolling, wife carrying, and chess boxing. The world's strangest competitions.

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The world's most popular sport: 4 billion fans, 8 World Cup-winning nations, and a 173,000-strong crowd at the 1950 final in Rio.

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Invented by James Naismith in December 1891 with peach baskets and a soccer ball. Today, an Olympic sport with over 450 million players worldwide.

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32 NFL teams, an annual Super Bowl watched by tens of millions, and a sport whose 11-man rules go back to Walter Camp at Yale in 1880.

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The first instruments were made from bones 40,000 years ago.

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The longest song ever recorded takes 639 years to play.

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