An armchair guide to the Olympics for couch potatoes

Is that ippon?
Ask this when watching judo: "ippon" is the word for a bout-winning move, which can involve a throw, an armlock or a stranglehold.

Who's in the chung?
In taekwondo, this means: "Who's wearing the blue colours?" Alternatively, inquire: "Who's in the hong (ie red)?"

What's happened to the Yngling?
Nothing to do with fishing. This is a class of boat, crewed by three women, which has been replaced in these Games by the Women's Match Racing class. Other classes include the Finn, Elliott, Star, Laser, Laser Radial, RS and 470. This plethora of different classes, along with the difficulty for spectators in telling who's winning, is the reason why sailing is rarely on TV, and three-times Olympic gold medallist Ben Ainslie can walk down any High Street without being recognised, let alone mobbed..

Lesser known-stars

You know all about Sir Chris Hoy and Jessica Ennis. But what about these homegrown wonders?
Sarah Stevenson, taekwondo
In the past year, the 2011 world champion has lost both her parents to cancer. Both insisted she carry on and try to win gold at London. She has vowed to do her best in their memory. Stevenson, 29, has recalled how her father did car boot sales and sponsored walks to raise the money to get her to competitions.

Alistair and Jonathan Brownlee, triathlon
These brothers, aged 24 and 22, are competing against each other - and could quite easily come first and second. However, the International Triathlon Union has forbidden them to stage a dead heat.

Mary King, equestrian
At 51, she's the oldest British competitor - and this after breaking her neck in a 2001 riding accident. This is her sixth Olympics (she's won one bronze, one silver so far).

Katherine Grainger, rowing
The first British female athlete to win medals in three consecutive Games - all silvers - and, in surely another first for an Olympic athlete, the 36-year-old has just finished her PhD in homicide at King's College, London.

Sound like a sporting fair

Shooting
Fascinatingly, there's two types: trap shooting - where you fire a shotgun at a single clay, launched from a pit 15 metres in front of you - and skeet shooting - where you fire a shotgun at two clays which are launched into the air at different heights, from two different pits, one to your left, one to your right.

Canoe Slalom
It's a canoe if the athlete is kneeling inside it, and using a single-bladed paddle. It's a kayak if they're sitting down and using a double-bladed paddle. The term C1 means a one-person canoe, C2 means a two-person canoe and K1 a one-person kayak.

Dressage
Or equestrian ballet, as it is known. Watch out for the piaffe - horse trotting on the spot - and the half-pass - horse trotting on the diagonal. It's also the only sport at the Olympics where men and women compete directly against each other.

Handball
In football, it's a foul if you touch the ball with your hand; in handball, it's a foul if you touch the ball with your foot (or anywhere below the knee). Played between two teams of seven, the sport is dominated by the most northernly European nations. The GB team didn't win its first competitive match until 2010, beating Bulgaria 33-32. Like several British players, skipper Bobby White started out with a Danish professional side, Bjerringro-Silkeborg-Voel (strong team, hard to fit their name into a good chant).

Modern pentathlon
Like watching a sporting event and a James Bond film at the same time. First, there's a fencing contest, then the competitors have to swim 200 metres, then they negotiate an obstacle course on horseback. Finally, they run 3,000 metres, stopping to fire at targets on the way.

Did tou know...?
You can be sent off in swimming?
Competitors in the 10-kilometre swim marathon will be followed round the Serpentine by a referee in a boat, who can give them a yellow card for an infringement (impeding, elbowing) or a red card in the event of persistent or extreme wrongdoing.

Gold medals aren't made of solid gold?
The last time that happened was in 1912. Required composition these days is 92.5 per cent silver, covered in just six grams of gold. Mind you, in the earliest days of the Olympics, you got a silver, not a gold medal for coming first.

The Olympic rings are colour coded?
They're blue, yellow, black, green and red, based on the fact that at least one of those colours appeals on the national flag of every country in the world.

Our boy got bitten?
In the final at Beijing, GB middleweight (and gold medallist) boxer James De Gale found his Cuban opponent sinking his teeth into his shoulder.

Victoria has a tattoo?
On the wrist of world-beating cycle sprinter Victoria Pendleton are inscribed: "Today is the greatest day I've ever known."

Ten-year-olds have taken part?
Well, one has: 10-year-old Dimitrios Loundas competed on the parallel bars in the 1896 Athens Olympics.

Well I knew...

They've come a long way
Some of our most beloved Team GB athletes weren't actually born here. Distance runner Mo Farah, 29, was born in Somalia; gymnast Beth Tweddle, 27, in South Africa and basketball player Luol Deng, 27, in what is now South Sudan. Deng and his eight siblings fled with their parents to Egypt to escape the civil war.

Sports you won't see in London
Over the years, the Olympic organisers have done away with the following events: croquet, polo, lacrosse, motorboating, the swimming obstacle race, baseball, softball, one-handed weightlifting, golf, rugby union, tandem cycling, tug of war, rope climbing, karate, the standing long jump, the standing high jump, pelota, cricket, club swinging, the 60 metres underwater and the live pigeon shoot.

Weight of history
We brought 47 medals back from Beijing, but that was nothing compared to our performance 100 years earlier when we won 146 medals at the 1908 London Olympics. Mind you, there were only 22 nations or territories taking part; this time there are 205.

OAP Olympian
At 71, Japanese dressage rider and retired pharmaceutical executive Hiroshi Hoketsu is the most senior competitor at London 2012.

The past of pommel horses
This gymnastic discipline came about as a result of cavalry officers showing off by swivelling around on top of their mounts, supporting themselves by their hands, but with legs whirling in the air.

Life of a Leotard
The stretchy garment favoured by many Olympians is named after 19th century acrobat Jules Leotard, who invented the trapeze and inspired the song: "He flies through the air with the greatest of ease, The daring young man on the flying trapeze." He never lived to become a daring old man, though, dying of smallpox at the age of 28.

Did you say 'slalom'?
It's Norwegian for "sloping track". While we're at it, "canoe" comes from the Spanish Caribbean word "canoa", meaning hollowed-out water craft, and "kayak" is the Inuit word for a wooden craft, covered in seal skin.