Here's a great tool for quiz question writers who want to look for Olympics info in a new way, a really nice interactive map from the New York Times

 

You can search through the years and get super fast stats on how various countries performed in various years. There is also a version for the Winter Olympics.

Here's a couple of things I found from the map that I didn't know already:

  • Despite being separate and even rival countries at the time, East Germany and West Germany fielded a unified team for the Summer Olympics in1956, 1960 and 1964.
  • Up to and including the 2010 Vancouver games,  the only Southern Hemisphere country to win Winter Olympic medals of any colour has been Australia.  THIS IS A MISTAKE - SEE COMMENTS BELOW.

I'm sure you can find plenty more.

Of course, Wikipedia has its own excellent resources (such as the all-time Olympic medal table) that offer more depth but this is a refreshingly visual tool to probe the Olympics and should serve as a jumping off point for a nice bit of question-writing.

I'm off to do a bit now to bolster the dpquiz.co.uk sports trivia pages.