Not altogether surprisingly, the country that has competed most often at the Summer Olympic Games without winning a medal, of any description, is the Principality of Liechtenstein. A tiny, doubly-landlocked country in the Upper Rhine Valley, between Switzerland and Austria, Liechtenstein has a total area of just 62 square miles and a population of approximately 38,400; it is the sixth-smallest country in the world, by both metrics.

Liechtenstein first participated in the so-called ‘Nazi Olympics’ in Berlin in 1936 and, with the exception of Melbourne in 1956 and Moscow in 1980, the National Olympic Committee of Liechtenstein has sent at least one athlete to compete in every Summer Olympics since. That said, Team Liechtenstein has never numbered more than 12 and, indeed, at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens consisted of a single athlete. For the record, the athlete in question was shooter Oliver Geissmann, who failed to advance beyond the qualifying round in the 10-metre air rifle competition but did, of course, have the honour of carrying the national flag at the opening ceremony.

Predictably, granted its Alpine location (it is, in fact, the only country that lies entirely in the Alps), mostly mountainous terrain and frequent snowfall, Liechtenstein has fared better at the Winter Olympic Games. Once again, Team Liechtenstein has never numbered more than 13, but since making its Winter Olympic debut in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1936, has collected a total of ten medals – two gold, two silver and six bronze – seven of which were won by the same family.

Interestingly, Xaver Frick, a founder member and inaugural Secretary of the National Olympic Committee, competed at both the Winter and Summer Olympic Games. He ran in the heats of the 100 metres and 200 metres at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin and was part of the 4 x 10-kilometre cross-country skiing relay team at the 1948 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the golfer who invented the golf club known as the sand wedge, or sand iron, as he called it, was Gene Sarazen. Born Eugenio Saraceni in Harrison, New York in 1902, Sarazen was a leading exponent of the game of golf in the early twentieth century and the first player in history to complete a career Grand Slam by winning the Masters Tournament, U.S. Open, Open Championship and PGA Championship.

However, far be it from me to argue with the fact-checked online encyclopedia, but to say that Sarazen ‘invented’ the sand wedge is an overstatement. History records that a patent for a not dissimilar club – based, like the Sarazen version, on the construction of an ordinary niblick, or 9-iron – was granted to Edwin Kerr MacClain, a member at Houston Country Club, in 1928; that was four years earlier than Sarazen unveiled his design at the Open Championship, at Prince’s Golf Club, Sandwich, Kent, in 1932.

MacClain added a protusion, beneath and behind the clubface, to prevent the already-hefty clubhead from sinking too deeply into the sand and promote an upward trajectory of the ball on impact. Whether or not Sarazen had previous experience of this design is unclear, but he experimented with the ‘flange’ idea, by applying varying amounts of solder to the back and sole of the clubhead of a standard, off-the-shelf niblick until he produced a club to his liking.

According to the United States Golf Association (USGA), the specifications of his brainchild were a loft angle of 58.5°, a lie angle of 63° and a bounce angle of 13.5°, making it, to all intents and purposes, a standard modern sand wedge. Thus, while Sarazen may not have truly invented the club, he can, at least, be credited with making a massive contribution towards its development.

Historically, the invention of baseball was credited to future US Army officer Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York in 1839. At least, that was the conclusion of the so-called Mills Commission, appointed by former professional baseball player Albert Goodwin Spalding, in 1905, to definitively determine the origins of baseball. In a letter dated November 17, 1905, sent directly to Spalding, mining engineer Abner Graves stated, ‘Abner Doubleday unquestionably invented Base Ball at Cooperstown, New York’ and, while he could not ‘positively name the year’, he was ‘sure it was either 1839, 1840 or 1841’.

In any event, Doubleday became a cadet at the US Military Academy, a.k.a. ‘West Point’, in 1838 and did not graduate until 1842, so Graves’ account is almost certainly apocryphal. Furthermore, Doubleday never claimed to have anything to do with baseball, let alone inventing the sport; when he died, in 1893, his obituary made no mention of baseball, but did state that he was ‘rather averse to outdoor sports’.

The most plausible explanation for the invention of baseball, as espoused by the so-called ‘Father of Baseball’, Henry Chadwick, among others, was that the sport derived from the old English game of rounders, which was first documented in ‘A Little Pretty Pocket-Book’ by John Newbery, first published in 1744. Interestingly, the book also contains the earliest documented use of the word ‘baseball’.

The Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York, a.k.a. the New York Knickerbockers, founded in 1845, is credited with formulating a set of rules for baseball, unsurprisingly dubbed the ‘Knickerbocker Rules’, many of which still remain. The first ‘official’ baseball match was played, under those rules, between the Knickerbockers and the New York Nine at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey on June 1, 1846. The New York Nine won 23-1 in four innings.

In the real world, albeit the prehistoric real world of the Late Jurassic Epoch, approximately 150 million years ago, archaeopteryx was a genus of feather dinosaur. Archaeopteryx retained many of the features of small, carnivorous dinosaurs, such as teeth and a long tail, but also had well-developed, feathered wings, suggesting that is was capable of short bursts of active flight. As such, it was once thought to be the earliest known bird.

Anyway, in golfing parlance, ‘archaeopteryx’ is used figuratively, in much the same way as ‘albatross’ or, rarer still, ‘condor’, to describe the rarest of rare birds. However, while ‘albatross’ describes a score of three shots under par on a golf hole and ‘condor’ describes a score of four shots under par, ‘archaeopteryx’ goes to the other extreme of scoring and, as such, is much less desirable. In fact, ‘archaeopteryx’ is the term used to describe a score of 15 shots, or more, over par on a single hole.

Many sources, including reputable sources, attribute the most famous ‘archaeopteryx’ in golfing history to 1927 US Open champion Tommy Armour who, one week after defeating Harry Cooper in an 18-hole playoff at Oakmont Country Club, purportedly scored an 18-over-par 23 on the par-5 seventeenth hole during the third round of the Shawnee Open at the Shawnee Inn & Golf Resort. Various accounts, acscribing the score to drive ten balls out of bounds, or into water, or ‘yips’ on the putting green, are apocryphal. Armour did, indeed, drive two balls out of bounds and miss a two-foot putt, but his final score on the hole was a sextuple-bogey 11, not 21, 22 or 23, as staed elsewhere.