28 World Records Nobody Has Broken
Records are supposed to fall. That’s the whole deal. Athletes get stronger, shoes get lighter, tracks get faster and coaching turns into a science.
Every few seasons, a number that looked untouchable gets wiped off the board, and the sport moves on without a backward glance.
Some numbers refuse to move. A few have stood for over a century. Others date back to the 1980s, when shoulder pads were big and drug testing was patchy.
A couple belong to South Africans, which is worth a moment of pride the next time someone at a braai says local sport peaked in 1995.
Each of the 28 records below still stood as of mid-2026. Some carry asterisks in people’s minds. Some are so far ahead of the field that statisticians struggle to explain them.
All of them make you wonder what it took to get there.
Cy Young’s 511 Wins
Denton True Young pitched in Major League Baseball from 1890 to 1911 and won 511 games. The next pitcher on the list, Walter Johnson, finished with 417. No active pitcher is anywhere close, and none will be.
The modern game simply doesn’t allow it. Young threw 749 complete games and more than 7,300 innings.
Today’s starters pitch every fifth day and rarely go past the sixth inning. A pitcher who won 20 games a year for 25 straight seasons would still fall short.
Baseball named its annual pitching award after him in 1956. It’s fitting. The trophy will never go to anyone who matches him.
Joe DiMaggio’s 56-Game Hitting Streak
Between 15 May and 16 July 1941, Joe DiMaggio got at least one hit in 56 consecutive games for the New York Yankees. Cleveland finally stopped him on 17 July, with third baseman Ken Keltner making two sharp plays to rob him.
Since then, the closest anyone has come is Pete Rose, with 44 games in 1978. That’s a gap of 12 games, which in baseball terms is a canyon.
Hitting is built on failure. Even great batters miss seven times out of ten. DiMaggio dodged a hitless night for two months straight.
Byron Nelson’s 11 Straight Tournament Wins
In 1945, Byron Nelson won 11 PGA Tour events in a row and 18 for the season. Tiger Woods, at his most dominant, managed seven in a row.
Critics point out that World War II had thinned the field. Fair enough. But Nelson’s scoring average that year, 68.33, stood as a tour record until Woods broke it in 2000. You don’t win 11 straight on luck, whoever turns up.
Don Bradman’s Test Average of 99.94
Every cricket fan in South Africa knows this number, even those who’d rather forget Australia’s dominance.
Don Bradman played 52 Tests between 1928 and 1948. He walked out at The Oval for his final innings needing just four runs to finish with an average of exactly 100.
Leg-spinner Eric Hollies bowled him for a duck with the second delivery he faced. The England players had given him three cheers on the way in.
Some say the tears in his eyes cost him the sight of the googly. Bradman himself denied it.
His average sits at 99.94. Most of the greatest batters in history, people like Jacques Kallis, Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara, finished somewhere in the 50s. Bradman sits almost twice as high.
No other athlete in a major sport has led their peers by such a margin, and the gap shows no sign of closing.
Jim Laker’s 19 Wickets in a Test
Old Trafford, July 1956. England’s off-spinner Jim Laker took 9 for 37 in Australia’s first innings and 10 for 53 in the second.
That’s 19 wickets in a single Test match, out of a possible 20.
Tony Lock, bowling from the other end on the same dusty pitch, managed one. Nobody has taken more than 17 in a Test since.
Think about that the next time a South African spinner takes five on the final day at Newlands and the commentators call it a career-best performance.
Wilt Chamberlain’s 55 Rebounds
On 24 November 1960, Wilt Chamberlain pulled down 55 rebounds against the Boston Celtics. Bill Russell, the greatest defensive centre of the era, was on the other side.
Modern NBA players consider 20 rebounds a monster night. Chamberlain more than doubled that, against the best rebounder of his generation. The pace of play was faster then, with more missed shots. Even so, nobody has topped 40 in a game for decades.
Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-Point Game
The most famous single-game performance in basketball happened in front of 4,124 people in Hershey, Pennsylvania. On 2 March 1962, Chamberlain scored 100 points for the Philadelphia Warriors against the New York Knicks. Philadelphia won 169 to 147.
There’s no video of it. No TV cameras covered the game. A radio broadcast exists in part, and a photographer captured the famous image of Chamberlain holding a sheet of paper with “100” scrawled on it.
He made 36 field goals and 28 of 32 free throws, a remarkable figure for a man who usually struggled from the line. Kobe Bryant’s 81 points in 2006 is the closest anyone has come. It’s still 19 points short.
Bob Beamon’s Olympic Long Jump
On 18 October 1968, in the thin air of Mexico City, Bob Beamon jumped 8.90 metres. He broke the existing world record by 55 centimetres.
The optical measuring device couldn’t handle a jump that long, so officials had to measure it with a tape.
When Beamon learned the distance, he collapsed to his knees. He had never thought in metres, so it took a teammate converting it to feet and inches, more than 29 feet, for him to grasp what he’d done.
Mike Powell finally took the world record in 1991. But at the Olympic Games, nobody has ever jumped further.
More than half a century later, Beamon still owns the Olympic record. Every four years, the best long jumpers on earth try, and every four years his name stays on the board.
Bill Russell’s 11 NBA Titles
Bill Russell played 13 seasons for the Boston Celtics and won 11 championships, the last two as player-coach. That made him the first Black head coach in any major American professional sport.
Michael Jordan won six. LeBron James has four. In the salary-cap era, with free agency pulling teams apart every few years, nobody is building a dynasty that lasts 13 seasons. Russell’s ring count is safe.
Wayne Gretzky’s 92 Goals and 215 Points
Gretzky holds so many NHL records that people lose count. Two of the most outrageous come from seasons only a few years apart.
In 1981–82, he scored 92 goals in 80 games, including 50 in his first 39. In 1985–86, he recorded 215 points. For context, a player who passes 150 points in a modern season is having a historic year.
Gretzky lost his career goals record in 2025, when Alex Ovechkin passed his total of 894. That loss makes the surviving season records more striking, not less. The best goal scorer of the modern era needed two decades to catch Gretzky’s career tally, and still never came close to 92 in a season.
Jarmila Kratochvílová’s 800 Metres
On 26 July 1983 in Munich, Czechoslovak runner Jarmila Kratochvílová ran the 800 metres in 1:53.28. It is the longest-standing individual world record in athletics.
The time has drawn suspicion for decades, partly because of the era and partly because nobody has caught it since. The closest anyone has come is Kenya’s Pamela Jelimo, with 1:54.01 in 2008.
Kratochvílová has always denied doping and never failed a test. Whatever you believe, the number remains.
Most modern 800m stars, with carbon-plated spikes and full sports-science teams, still run a second or more slower. That’s a lot of ground over two laps.
Marita Koch’s 400 Metres
East Germany’s Marita Koch ran 47.60 in Canberra on 6 October 1985. No woman has run faster in the 40 years since, although recent seasons have produced the closest challenges yet.
Documents released after the fall of the Berlin Wall exposed East Germany’s state-run doping programme in detail. That context hangs over many of the records on this list.
It also explains why some coaches argue the old marks should be reset. World Athletics has never done so, and the record stands.
Jahangir Khan’s Unbeaten Run
Pakistan’s Jahangir Khan didn’t lose a competitive squash match for about five and a half years, from 1981 to 1986. Guinness World Records credits him with 555 consecutive wins, the longest unbeaten run by any athlete in top-level professional sport.
New Zealander Ross Norman finally beat him in the final of the 1986 World Open in Toulouse. Norman had been chasing him for years and lost to him dozens of times before that night.
If you’ve ever played squash at a gym in Joburg after work, you’ll know how quickly a few loose shots can cost you a game. Imagine going five years without losing one match.
Yuriy Sedykh’s Hammer Throw
Soviet thrower Yuriy Sedykh set the hammer record at 86.74 metres at the 1986 European Championships in Stuttgart. Nobody has thrown further in the decades since.
Elite throwers now regularly win global titles with throws in the low 80s. Sedykh’s mark sits in a different zone altogether.
He won two Olympic golds and later coached in France, where he married fellow Olympic champion Natalya Lisovskaya.
Natalya Lisovskaya’s Shot Put
That’s the same Lisovskaya. On 7 June 1987 in Moscow, she put the shot 22.63 metres. Today’s world-class women’s shot putters win major titles with throws around 20 metres.
A record that far ahead of the current field doesn’t get broken by gradual improvement. It needs a generational talent, and even that may not be enough.
The fact that a married couple both hold world records in throwing events makes for one of the stranger footnotes in sport.
Galina Chistyakova’s Long Jump
On 11 June 1988 in Leningrad, Galina Chistyakova of the Soviet Union jumped 7.52 metres. The best women’s long jumpers of recent years, including Olympic champions, have landed in the 7.10 to 7.30 range.
This record gets less attention than others on the list. It shouldn’t. It has survived the entire careers of Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Heike Drechsler and every jumper since.
Gabriele Reinsch’s Discus
East German Gabriele Reinsch threw the discus 76.80 metres on 9 July 1988 in Neubrandenburg. Modern women’s discus champions throw around 70 metres.
The men’s discus record, set in the same town two years earlier, fell in 2024 to Lithuania’s Mykolas Alekna. Reinsch’s mark has outlasted it. The women’s event hasn’t seen a throw near her distance in decades.
Florence Griffith-Joyner’s 100 Metres
Florence Griffith-Joyner, known to everyone as FloJo, ran 10.49 at the US Olympic Trials in Indianapolis on 16 July 1988. Before that race, the world record stood at 10.76.
The wind gauge for her race read 0.0, while gauges on other parts of the track showed strong tailwinds. Statisticians have argued about it ever since. But the record is official, and no woman has broken it. Elaine Thompson-Herah came closest with 10.54 in 2021.
FloJo died in 1998, aged 38. She never got to see how long her times would last.
Florence Griffith-Joyner’s 200 Metres
At the Seoul Olympics in September 1988, FloJo ran 21.34 in the 200m final. There was no wind controversy here.
Just a sprinter in her prime, with long painted nails and total self-belief, leaving the field behind.
Shericka Jackson of Jamaica got within striking distance in 2023 with 21.41. That’s seven hundredths, the closest anyone has come.
Seven hundredths of a second is less than the time it takes to blink. And yet it has held.
Mike Powell’s Long Jump
At the 1991 World Championships in Tokyo, Mike Powell and Carl Lewis produced the greatest long jump contest in history. Lewis went past Beamon’s distance with a wind-assisted jump. Powell answered with 8.95 metres, legal wind, and took the world record Beamon had held for 23 years.
Lewis had won 65 straight long jump competitions before that night. He jumped further than he ever had and still lost. Powell’s record has now stood for more than three decades.
Javier Sotomayor’s High Jump
Cuba’s Javier Sotomayor cleared 2.45 metres in Salamanca, Spain, on 27 July 1993. That’s about the height of a ceiling in an older Johannesburg house.
In 2014 Mutaz Essa Barshim cleared 2.43 and Bohdan Bondarenko cleared 2.42. Both spent years attempting 2.46 without success.
The best men’s high jumpers in the world now win championships at around 2.36. Sotomayor’s bar looks a long way up from there.
Brian Lara’s 400 and 501
Brian Lara is the only batter on this list with two records still in his name.
In April 2004 in Antigua, he scored 400 not out against England. Matthew Hayden had taken his previous Test record of 380 only six months earlier, and Lara took it straight back on the same ground where he had first set it. No one has passed 400 in a Test since.
Ten years earlier, in June 1994, playing for Warwickshire against Durham, he scored 501 not out. It remains the highest individual score in first-class cricket. Picture that number on the old scoreboard at Edgbaston. It barely fits.
Cal Ripken Jr.’s 2,632 Consecutive Games
Lou Gehrig played 2,130 consecutive games between 1925 and 1939. People called it baseball’s unbreakable record. Cal Ripken Jr. passed it on 6 September 1995, and Baltimore stopped the game for a 22-minute ovation.
Ripken kept going until September 1998, finishing on 2,632 straight games. He ended it himself by asking out of the lineup. Modern teams build rest days into their plans, so nobody plays every game anymore. This one is locked.
Hicham El Guerrouj’s Mile
On 7 July 1999 at the Golden Gala in Rome, Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj ran the mile in 3:43.13. Kenya’s Noah Ngeny, running behind him, also broke the old record and still finished second.
El Guerrouj holds the 1,500m record too, 3:26.00 from 1998. Modern milers, including Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen, have come close in both races without breaking either.
The mile is the distance most people outside athletics understand. Ask anyone who has jogged one at a parkrun how long it takes them, then look at that number again.
Usain Bolt’s 100 Metres
At the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, Usain Bolt ran 9.58. Days later, he ran 19.19 in the 200m. Both records still stand.
Bolt broke his own 100m record by 0.11 seconds. In elite sprinting, that’s an enormous leap. Since then, the fastest men in the world have run in the 9.7s and celebrated wildly. Nobody else has gone below 9.69. Bolt didn’t just win races. He moved the finish line.
Muttiah Muralitharan’s 800 Test Wickets
Sri Lankan off-spinner Muttiah Muralitharan finished his Test career in July 2010 at Galle with exactly 800 wickets. He needed eight in his final Test to get there and took the last one, India’s Pragyan Ojha, with one of the final deliveries of his career.
Shane Warne finished on 708. James Anderson, the most successful fast bowler in Test history, retired in 2024 on 704.
Teams now play fewer Tests and spread their bowling across more players. Murali’s total looks safe for as long as the format survives.
AB de Villiers’ 31-Delivery Hundred
On 18 January 2015 at the Wanderers, AB de Villiers walked in against the West Indies with South Africa already well set. He reached fifty in 16 deliveries and a hundred in 31, the fastest century in men’s One Day International history. He finished on 149 from 44, with 16 sixes.
If you were in the stands that afternoon, you’ll remember the sound more than the shots. Every few minutes the whole ground rose at once, as if someone had flipped a switch.
Batters now hit harder than ever, with heavier bats and T20 instincts. Plenty have threatened that 31. None have matched it.
Wayde van Niekerk’s 400 Metres
At the Rio Olympics on 14 August 2016, Wayde van Niekerk ran the 400m final from lane eight. That’s the outside lane, where you can’t see anyone behind you and have to run blind. He ran 43.03 and broke Michael Johnson’s record of 43.18, which had stood since 1999.
His coach at the time, Ans Botha, was 74 years old. She became one of the most talked-about figures in athletics overnight, a great-grandmother from Bloemfontein who had trained an Olympic champion.
A serious knee injury in a celebrity touch rugby match in 2017 cost van Niekerk years of his prime. He worked his way back, but even he hasn’t run near that time again. When kids at school athletics days around the country line up for the 400, many of them have never known a world where a South African didn’t hold the record.
The Numbers That Wait
Every record on this list is a kind of conversation between the past and the future. Somewhere, there’s a 12-year-old running on a dusty field in Limpopo or practising cover drives against a garage door in Durban.
That child has no idea that a number set before their parents were born is waiting for them.
Some of these marks will fall. Others won’t, either because the sport has changed too much or because the athlete who set them was simply one of a kind.
So when you watch a final and see a number flash up beside “WR,” take a breath before you celebrate. The ones that matter most aren’t always the new ones. Sometimes the most impressive record is the one nobody touched.
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