🏅The Greats

At the 1932 US women's track championships in Evanston, Illinois — doubling as Olympic trials — Didrikson entered as a one-woman team for her Dallas employer's club. In a single afternoon she competed in eight events, won five outright, tied for first in a sixth and set world records along the way, scoring 30 points. The runner-up club, the Illinois Women's Athletic Club, fielded 22 athletes and scored 22.

On 25 May 1935, at the Big Ten championships in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Owens — nursing a back injury from a fall down stairs days earlier — set three world records and equalled a fourth in about 45 minutes: the 100-yard dash, the long jump (8.13 meters, unbeaten for 25 years), the 220-yard sprint and the 220-yard low hurdles. Sports historians still call it the greatest single afternoon in the history of athletics.

Before London 1948, a British team official dismissed Blankers-Koen as too old to make the grade, and Dutch commentators told her to stay home with her children. She held world records in the high jump and long jump but was barred by the rules from entering more than three individual events — so she skipped both jumps, entered the sprints and hurdles, and won every event she started. Amsterdam's welcome-home gift was a bicycle, so she would not have to run so much.

In the 1958 World Cup final in Stockholm, the 17-year-old Pelé — whom Brazil's team psychologist had assessed as too immature to select, advice coach Vicente Feola overrode — scored one of the tournament's most replayed goals: a chest control, a lob over defender Bengt Gustavsson's head, and a volley past the goalkeeper. He scored twice in the 5–2 win, the Swedish crowd applauded a goal against their own team, and at the final whistle Pelé fainted and had to be revived by teammates.

In Kinshasa on 30 October 1974, the 32-year-old Ali met George Foreman, the undefeated champion seven years younger who had flattened Joe Frazier in two rounds. Instead of dancing, Ali lay back on the ropes round after round, absorbing Foreman's heaviest punches and taunting him to throw more — the tactic later named the rope-a-dope. Foreman punched himself into exhaustion; Ali knocked him out in the eighth as sixty thousand chanted "Ali, boma ye."

On 18 July 1976, the Montreal Forum's scoreboards could not display her score: before the Games, organizers had asked the manufacturer whether four digits were needed and were told a perfect 10 was impossible. When Comăneci's uneven bars routine received the first 10.00 in Olympic history, the board showed 1.00, and the crowd sat baffled until the announcement explained it. She scored seven perfect 10s at those Games.

In Vienna's Prater park on 12 October 2019, Kipchoge covered the marathon distance in 1:59:40 — the first human under two hours. The INEOS 1:59 Challenge used 41 rotating pacemakers in a laser-guided formation and a pace car, so the time stands outside the record books, which bothered him not at all: "No human is limited," he said at the line. Back at camp, he still cleans the toilets when the weekly rota says it is his turn.