TITLE: Motives over finite field not generated by hyperelliptic curves
QUESTION [9 upvotes]: So the question is that, over a finite field, does there exist an abelian variety $A$ for which there does not exist a generically one-to-one morphism from a hyperelliptic curve $C$ to $A$.
p.s. A result of Oort and de Jong proved that a "generic" abelian variety satisfies this property. However it seems generic means outside a countable subfamily in their result.
I'm interested in this question because if we assume all motives over a finite field is semisimple (or just semisimplify it), then by Weil conjecture and Honda-Tate (maybe also Tate's conjecture over finite field), such motive all live in the tensor category of that of abelian varieties, or equivalently that of curves. I am then wondering if there could be any chance that they all actually come from hyperelliptic curves.

REPLY [3 votes]: I don't know the answer, but I'll note that this is explicitly raised as a question by Bogomolov and Tschinkel in remark 8 of this paper:
http://www.cims.nyu.edu/~tschinke/princeton/papers/yuri/jacob/jacob6.pdf
I'll also remark that a version of this question often comes up among people who study ranks of elliptic curves.  For an elliptic curve E/K, is there a hyperelliptic curve X/K in E^r whose Jacobian surjects on E^r?  If so, there are infinitely many quadratic twists of E of rank at least r.