MATTER OF FACT

TODAY I am going to share some fun facts about sport that maybe you know but maybe you don’t.

As I am an Olympian, I am going to start with a few Olympic facts:

■ DID you know that gold medals are mostly made of silver? Despite the popular belief that the gold medal is composed of pure gold, this hasn’t been the case since the 1912 Olympics. Made almost entirely from silver, it only has about six grams of gold which meets the standard laid out in the Olympic Charter.

■ THE 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, had the heaviest Olympic medals ever, with the gold medal weighing in at 586 grams. With gold selling for about $1350 an ounce, an Olympic medal made of pure gold would cost close to $28,000. I am sure that this would send the city and country holding the Olympics into major debt.

■ AT least one of the Olympic rings’ colours appears in every national flag. Baron Pierre de Coubertin who was the founder of the modern Olympic Movement, conceived of the five-ringed symbol. He chose the colours blue, green, yellow, black, and red because at least one of those colours appeared on all the national flags of the world.

■ THE youngest Olympian in the modern era was a Greek gymnast Dimitrios Loundras, who competed in the 1896 Athens Olympics at the age of 10. That is young! I am really not too sure what he would have taken in at that age.

■ DID you know the average soccer ball is made up of 32 leather panels and held together by 642 stitches? It also has 32 panels to represent the 32 European countries.

■ DID you know the average golf ball has 336 dimples? Dimples on a golf ball create a thin turbulent boundary layer of air that clings to the ball. A dimpled ball has about half the drag of a smooth ball.