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799 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 9 of 14.

  1. Blackstone's founders built its name from German and Greek versions of their ownStephen Schwarzman and Peter Peterson named their 1985 firm with a bilingual pun: Schwarz is German for black, and Peter comes from the Greek word for stone. Starting with $400,00…
  2. The teenage swing bowler who dismissed Sachin Tendulkar for a first-class duckIn the 2008/09 Ranji Trophy final, a young Uttar Pradesh bowler named Bhuvneshwar Kumar became the first ever to get Sachin Tendulkar out for nought in first-class cricket. Known …
  3. Bangladesh's women once beat India to claim an Asia Cup India nearly always winsIn 2018, in Malaysia, Bangladesh's women won four of five group games, then beat India in the Twenty20 Asia Cup final. It remains the only time any side other than India has lifte…
  4. A careless bonfire of oily rags gave London its first Palladian buildingIn January 1619, workmen tidying up after New Year revels at Whitehall burned their rubbish inside James I's wooden banqueting house and destroyed it. The replacement, designed by…
  5. London's Barbican rose from a bombed ward where only 48 people still livedBy 1951, wartime bombing had left the Cripplegate ward of the City of London almost empty, with just 48 residents. Planners replaced it with a raw concrete village of walkways, to…
  6. The first cash machine in history was first used by a British actor in EnfieldOn 27 June 1967, a Barclays branch in Enfield installed the world's first cash machine, and the actor Reg Varney was the first to use it. It was one of several banking firsts from…
  7. Battersea Power Station was once hailed as a temple of power rivalling St Paul'sFour towering chimneys on the Thames, a brick shell among the largest anywhere, and a control room dressed in Art Deco marble: Battersea was built to generate coal-fired electrici…
  8. Cricket's simplest statistic crowns Bradman and flatters a famously hopeless batterA batting average is just runs divided by dismissals. That simple sum gives Don Bradman a Test figure of 99.94, so far clear of everyone that some statisticians call him the great…
  9. Ben Stokes left school with one GCSE and became England's great all-rounderBorn in Christchurch, New Zealand, Ben Stokes moved to Cumbria at 12 when his father took a rugby league coaching job, and left school at 16 with a single qualification, in PE. He…
  10. Britain's part-time soldiers, dismissed by Kitchener, held the line in 1914When war broke out in August 1914, Lord Kitchener sneered that the Territorials were young men led by middle-aged professionals playing at soldiers. Within months these part-timer…
  11. Delhi's Kotla ground has staged cricket records on fourteenth-century soilAnil Kumble took all ten wickets in a Test innings here in 1999, only the second bowler ever to do it. The Delhi ground, founded in 1883 as Feroz Shah Kotla, sits on land that bel…
  12. How Australia's cricket team became the most successful in the sportAustralia won the very first Test match, at Melbourne in 1877, and has kept winning ever since. With 427 Test victories, six World Cup titles and a mock newspaper obituary that cr…
  13. Earth's tilted axis gives us seasons, and the Moon keeps it steadySummer and winter exist because Earth spins on an axis leaning about 23.44 degrees from upright. That lean keeps pointing the same way among the stars all year, so each hemisphere…
  14. Bangladesh cricket survived record losing streaks to beat the world's bestBetween 2001 and 2004, Bangladesh lost 21 Tests in a row, and a separate run of 23 straight one-day defeats is also theirs. Critics asked whether the country had been promoted too…
  15. Andrew Strauss went from injury replacement to Ashes-winning England captainAndrew Strauss only got his first Test cap because Michael Vaughan hurt his knee in the nets. At Lord's in 2004 the left-handed opener made 112 and 83, took the match award, and b…
  16. Andy Flower, Zimbabwe's finest batter, became a title-winning coach abroadFor three months in late 2001, the best-ranked Test batsman in the world played for Zimbabwe. Andy Flower kept wicket for his country for over a decade, averaged above 51 in Tests…
  17. Aravinda de Silva carried Sri Lanka from underdogs to 1996 world championsNo other player has made a hundred and taken three or more wickets in a World Cup final. Aravinda de Silva did both in the 1996 showpiece against Australia, removing Mark Taylor a…
  18. Buhurt turns medieval armour and blunt steel into a full-contact sportPicture two fighters in steel plate trading full-power blows with blunted swords, while a trained knight marshal watches for illegal strikes. Buhurt, or armored combat, is no fest…
  19. A cathedral choirboy who became England's patient opener and Test captainBefore he was a batting machine, Alastair Cook was a clarinet-playing chorister with a punishing rehearsal timetable. His cricket break came by accident: a visiting MCC side turne…
  20. Alex Hales, picked as a fast bowler, became England's first T20 centurionAt sixteen, Alex Hales walked out at Lord's in a Cricket Idol tournament and plundered 55 from one over: eight sixes, a four and three no-balls. The organisers had actually chosen…
  21. Ally Pally burned twice, hosted a racecourse, and launched regular public televisionSixteen days after 102,000 people turned up for its grand opening, the north London People's Palace was a shell. It rose again, later housed wartime internees, jammed German bombe…
  22. Wimbledon's home began as a croquet club that grudgingly spared one lawnThe All England Club started life in 1868 amid a craze for croquet, not tennis. Lawn tennis got a single lawn in 1875, and the first champion, Spencer Gore, doubted the game would…
  23. Allan Border learned his flat-bat shots on a Mosman baseball diamondThe Australian who became the only batsman to pass 150 in both innings of a Test first sharpened his horizontal-bat strokes playing baseball. Across the street from his childhood …
  24. White Lightning: the zinc-smeared quick who spearheaded South Africa's returnAllan Donald was supposed to be twelfth man on his first-class debut, called up ten minutes before the toss. Six years later he took five wickets in South Africa's first ever one-…
  25. Freddie Flintoff's six landed in the stands, where his own father dropped itAt Edgbaston in July 2004, twenty thousand spectators watched Andrew Flintoff launch a ball into the Ryder Stand's top tier. One man rose to take the catch and spilled it: Colin F…
  26. The Pakistani all-rounder nicknamed Popeye after spinach made him illIn 2005 Pakistan discovered why its all-rounder Abdul Razzaq kept feeling sick on the field: he was eating too much spinach. Teammates promptly started calling him Popeye. By then…
  27. The Thames market town that gave the world Radiohead and Old Speckled HenAbingdon, a small Oxfordshire town on the Thames, packs in surprises. Radiohead formed there in 1985 while its members were pupils at Abingdon School, its brewery made Old Speckle…
  28. Adam Gilchrist, the wicket-keeper who hit hard and walked when he knew he was outAdam Gilchrist changed what Australia expected from the player behind the stumps. A left-hander who attacked from ball one, he became the first to hit 100 Test sixes, yet he was f…
  29. How Adar Poonawalla took a Pune vaccine maker to more than 140 countriesWhen Adar Poonawalla joined his father's Serum Institute of India in 2001, it sold to 35 countries. Within about fourteen years that figure passed 140, with most of the money comi…
  30. Sheep, bicycles and a 1911 scoreboard: the long life of Adelaide OvalBefore the first ball was bowled at Adelaide Oval in December 1873, some 2,000 sheep grazed the turf down to playing height. Since then the ground has held a cycling track, a near…
  31. From a Rajasthan cotton trade to aluminium, cement and a cricket franchiseIn 1857 Shiv Narayan Birla began trading cotton in the desert town of Pilani. Five generations later the business his family built makes more of India's cement than anyone else, r…
  32. How Afghanistan climbed from refugee-camp cricket to Test status in sixteen yearsAfghanistan's cricketers first learned the game as refugees in Pakistan during the 1980s and 1990s, practising on Peshawar's grounds. Their board joined the ICC's lowest tier in 2…
  33. Ajinkya Rahane, the stand-in captain who led India to victory at the GabbaAjinkya Rahane rarely held the job for long, yet he was one of India's most successful captains. Handed the Test team in Australia in December 2020 while Virat Kohli went home for…
  34. London beat favourite Paris by four votes to host a third OlympicsParis was the clear favourite, on its third recent attempt, when the IOC voted in Singapore in July 2005. London had been trailing badly until Sebastian Coe took charge of its bid…
  35. England won their first cricket World Cup on boundaries after two tiesAt Lord's on 14 July 2019, England and New Zealand each made 241, forcing the first Super Over ever played in a one-day international. That finished level too. England lifted the …
  36. Before India's 2023 World Cup, the trophy was launched into the stratosphereWeeks before the first ball, the men's Cricket World Cup trophy rode a balloon up into the stratosphere and came down at the stadium in Ahmedabad, making it the first sports troph…
  37. Abdul Qadir kept leg spin alive when cricket had written it offIn the late 1970s wrist spin looked like a dying art, squeezed out by pace. Then an imam's son from Lahore came bounding to the crease with a leg-break, a topspinner, a flipper an…
  38. India finally won a World Cup final at home in 2011Until April 2011, no country had lifted cricket's World Cup on its own turf. India changed that at Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai, beating Sri Lanka by six wickets in the first final …
  39. Number 10 was a cheap speculative build by a former spyBritain's most famous front door belongs to a house Winston Churchill called shaky and lightly built. Its namesake, Sir George Downing, was a spy for Oliver Cromwell and later Cha…
  40. At the 1900 Paris Olympics, many winners never knew they were OlympiansThe second modern Olympics sprawled across Paris from May to October, had no opening ceremony, and rarely used the word Olympic at all. Folded into a World's Fair, its events were…
  41. Thin air, a new track and a flop made Mexico 1968 a record factoryMexico City sits 2,240 metres above sea level, and no Summer Olympics before or since has been staged so high. In October 1968 that thin air, plus a brand-new synthetic track and …
  42. The 1992 World Cup rain rule that asked for 22 runs off one ballSouth Africa needed 23 runs from 13 balls in a World Cup semi-final. Then came a ten-minute shower, and when play resumed the scoreboard demanded 22 from a single delivery. That a…
  43. How Sri Lanka's reckless opening overs won the 1996 World CupIn the mid-1990s a one-day side was happy with 50 or 60 runs from the first 15 overs, while fielders were forced to stay close in. Sri Lanka's openers treated those overs as a fre…
  44. The 1999 World Cup Super Six format that made some wins worthlessAt the 1999 Cricket World Cup, beating a weak team in your group could count for nothing. A new Super Six stage threw away results against sides that failed to advance, so what re…
  45. Walkovers and misread rain sums rewrote cricket's first African World CupIn 2003 Kenya, a country without Test status, reached a World Cup semi-final, something no side of its kind has managed before or since. It got there partly because New Zealand re…
  46. Before kung fu fame, Bruce Lee won a Hong Kong cha-cha championshipIn 1958 teenage Bruce Lee collected two very different titles in Hong Kong. He knocked out the reigning champion to win the schools boxing tournament, and he also won the Crown Co…
  47. Carl Lewis won Olympic long jump gold, then got booed for stoppingAt the 1984 Los Angeles Games, Carl Lewis won the long jump with his very first leap of 8.54 metres, fouled once, then passed on his remaining four attempts. The crowd, promised a…
  48. Cristiano Ronaldo was named after Ronald Reagan and survived teenage heart surgeryHis father, a municipal gardener in Madeira, admired Ronald Reagan and named his youngest son after the American president. Around fifteen the boy was diagnosed with tachycardia, …
  49. Karelin lost twice in 889 senior wrestling bouts, each by one pointAsked to name his toughest opponent, Aleksandr Karelin said his refrigerator. He had once bear-hugged one weighing over 500 pounds up eight flights of stairs. Rivals fared worse: …
  50. Real Madrid and Barcelona were once told to share Di StéfanoIn 1953 two Spanish giants both claimed the Argentine striker Alfredo Di Stéfano. A FIFA-appointed mediator proposed a strange compromise: he would alternate seasons, playing one …
  51. Young Schwarzenegger went AWOL from the Austrian army to win a bodybuilding titleIn 1965, doing compulsory service in the Austrian Army, eighteen-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger slipped away from basic training to compete in the Junior Mr. Europe contest. He wo…
  52. Babe Didrikson won a national team title as a team of oneAt the 1932 national athletics championships, Mildred Didrikson represented a Dallas insurance company all by herself. She entered eight of the ten events, won five outright and t…
  53. Babe Ruth learned to hit at a Baltimore reformatory run by monksAt seven, George Herman Ruth was placed in St. Mary's, a Baltimore reformatory and orphanage, and labelled incorrigible. He spent much of the next 12 years there, learning to make…
  54. Bobby Fischer's mother tried to find him chess partners through a newspaperIn November 1950, worried that her seven-year-old son spent too many hours playing chess against himself, Regina Fischer wrote to the Brooklyn Eagle asking to place an advertiseme…
  55. The Flying Housewife won four golds at the 1948 London OlympicsAt the 1948 London Games, a 30-year-old Dutch mother of two won four gold medals and outshone every other athlete there. Fanny Blankers-Koen, nicknamed the Flying Housewife, did m…
  56. Before her world records, Flo-Jo was working as a bank tellerFlorence Griffith Joyner, the sprinter who set world records in both the 100 and 200 metres in 1988, twice stepped away from the track to work at a bank. The second time, after an…
  57. A youth-match scuffle sent Beckenbauer to Bayern instead of his favourite clubAs a boy, Franz Beckenbauer dreamed of playing for 1860 Munich, and his whole youth team planned to move there together. Then the two sides met in an under-14 final, tempers flare…
  58. Garry Kasparov was named after an American president his father admiredGarry Kasparov says his first name honours Harry S. Truman, whom his father respected for standing up to communism. It was an unusual name in the Soviet Union. The boy who carried…
  59. Hockey's greatest player barely touched a stick before joining the armyAs a boy in Jhansi, Dhyan Chand preferred wrestling and could not recall playing any hockey worth mentioning. He picked it up after enlisting as a private on his 17th birthday, an…
  60. Maradona's first professional touch was a nutmeg, ten days before turning 16On 20 October 1976, a boy wearing number 16 came on for Argentinos Juniors and, within minutes, slipped the ball between an opponent's legs. Diego Maradona, the youngest player th…

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