Table tennis balls travel at speeds up to 70 miles per hour during professional matches.

Synchronized skating — where teams of up to 20 skaters perform together — is a competitive discipline not yet in the Olympics.

The average professional soccer player runs about 10–13 km per match.

Traditional Japanese kabuki theater originally featured women actors — they were banned in 1629, and men have played female roles ever since.

Gagaku, Japan's imperial court music, is the world's oldest surviving orchestral tradition, dating to the 7th century.

Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, directly challenging Hitler's ideology of Aryan supremacy.

Operation Northwoods was a proposed U.S. plan in the 1960s that was never carried out.

Beethoven continued to compose music after going almost completely deaf, including his Ninth Symphony.

Abraham Lincoln was a licensed bartender and co-owned a tavern before entering politics.