Sport's strangest tales

Prosthetic legs, wheelbarrow wheelchairs and guide… children? Those were just some of the assistive technologies and body augmentations available to our medieval and early modern ancestors. In this episode, Rae Gillibrand highlights how bodily difference was understood in this pr ...  Show more

It's now often used as an adjective for anything standard, plain, and borderline boring – but the history of vanilla is anything but. Eric T Jennings – whose book Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean is among the titles shortlisted for the 2026 Cundill History Prize – te ...  Show more

Dan is joined by the QI Elves James Harkin and Anna Ptaszynski to talk about cheating in sports as the 2024 Olympics get underway. Why do we do it and how far back does it go? From the man who jumped into a car during the 1904 Olympic marathon to the Puerto Rican twins who swa ...

How and when was football invented, and what are the origins of football clubs? What is the connection between public hangings, highwaymen, and early sporting events? Which is the most historically important sporting ground in the world? When was the first cricket test match play ...  Show more

Where did football come from? Was it really invented in China or is the truth a little closer to home? Why was knife crime such a problem for football hundreds of years ago? And what’s the real truth behind the history of the women’s game? Public historian Greg Jenner joins comed ...  Show more

It has been described as the most universal cultural mode there has ever been, but is football a worthwhile object of study for historians? Sports journalist and author Jonathan Wilson joins Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland to look at the history of the game and how it became Br ...  Show more