Quiz on all-rounders

1 Mildred ‘Babe’ Didrikson won two golds and a silver in track and field in the 1932 Summer Olympics, played semi-professional basketball and baseball, and was also an expert diver and roller skater. But in which sport did she get elected to the Hall of Fame in 1951 after dominating it for almost two decades?

2 Which great Australian cricketer became the first person to score a hundred runs and take 10 wickets in a Test match, playing for Australia against the West Indies at Brisbane in 1960–61?

3 Which great 19th-century inventor also devised the metal detector, was one of the founder members of the National Geographic Society, and also formed the Aerial Experiment Association with other pioneering aircraft manufacturers to encourage early aviators?

4 Regarded as one of the greatest basketball players ever, who also represented his college in track events and played professional volleyball for the Seattle Smashers between 1974 and 1979?

5 Ellyse Perry is already regarded as one of the greatest women’s cricketers ever with a glittering career of over a decade in the sport. But in which other sport did she represent Australia a month after playing her first ODI in 2007?

6 Which renowned sportsperson was the first American to win an Olympic judo medal in 2008, and has also starred in three films, starting with The Expendables 3 in 2014?

7 Other than being one of the prime movers for his nation’s independence struggle, Benjamin Franklin was also a leading author, printer, postmaster, composer and the inventor of the bifocal lens and the lightning conductor. He was also an avid player of which sport and wrote on it for The Columbian magazine?

8 Which astronomer, physicist, engineer and mathematician was charged with heresy in 1633 for asserting that the earth moved around the sun?

9 Which Indian politician and former bureaucrat became the Indian junior tennis champion in 1966 and went on to win the senior title in 1974?

10 In Test cricket, 19 players have managed to take five wickets in an innings and score a century in the same match. While Jacques Kallis, Gary Sobers, Mushtaq Mohammed, Shakib Al-Hasan and Ravichandra Ashwin have all done it twice, who is the only person to have done it a staggering five times?

Answers

1 . Golf; she won 10 LPGA titles

2 . Alan Davidson. He took 5 for 135 and 6 for 87, and scored 44 and 80 in the first ever tied Test, all with a broken finger

3 . Alexander Graham Bell, best known for inventing the telephone

4 . Wilt Chamberlain, who represented the Philadelphia Warriors and Los Angeles Lakers, and once scored 100 points in a single game

5 . Football; she is the first Australian to have appeared in both the cricket and football World Cups

6 . Ronda Rousey, the Mixed Martial Arts performer

7 . Chess; he was probably the first well-known American to take up the sport and is in the US Chess Hall of Fame

8 . Galileo Galilei; he was found guilty and spent the rest of his life under house arrest

9 . Kiran Bedi, who was also India’s first woman IPS officer

10 . Ian Botham

_{Joy Bhattacharjya is a quizmaster and Project Director, FIFA U-17 World Cup; Follow Joy on Twitter @joybhattacharj}