Interesting Facts

The Honorary PDSA Dickin Medal, has been posthumously awarded to famous war horse Warrior, dubbed "the horse the Germans could not kill". (Warrior arrived on the Western Front on August 11 1914 and stayed there throughout the war.  He was injured several times, but survived to eventually return home to the Isle of Wight in 1918 where he lived until his death aged 33. The Dickin Medal, also know as the Animal VC, is the highest award an animal can achieve while serving in military conflict. 65 of these medals have been awarded - to 29 dogs, 32 Second World War messenger pigeons, four horses, and a cat.)

Mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani is the first woman to be awarded what is considered the most prestigious prize in math , the Fields medal. (Ms Mirzakhani has been a professor at Stanford University since 2008, but she is also the first person to win this medal from the Middle East, as she was born and raised in Iran. The Fields medal is considered to be the Nobel Prize for maths, because strangely there is no Nobel for mathematics. All 52 previous winners of the award were men.)

Jenny Jones has won Britain’s first ever Olympic medal for a snow based event. (Of course she's not the first Brit to be given one, but  Alain Baxter, who won a slalom bronze medal at the Winter Olympics in   Salt Lake City in 2002 , had to hand it back after testing positive for a banned stimulant.)

The oldest Olympic medalist is Britain's John Copley. (A lot of people believe it was Swedish shooter Oscar Swahn, who won his last medal at age 72, but Mr Copley was 73 when he won a silver medal in the 1948 Olympics. Of course his medal was for "etching", but a medal is a medal.)

An Olympic gold medal is almost 99% silver. (It seems a bit of a cheat really, I'm sure it's against the trade descriptions act.)

Togo won its first ever Olympic medal when Benjamin Boukpeti took bronze in the men's single kayak slalom at the 2008 Beijing Games. (He got a bigger cheer than the gold medal winner.)