9.58s
100 metres (men)
Set at the Berlin World Championships on 16 August 2009, improving his own Olympic record. Bolt reached a peak speed near 44 km/h; the mark has not been seriously threatened in over fifteen years.
A world record in athletics is an absolute claim: not that you beat the field on the day, but that no human, anywhere, has ever done it faster, higher or further. That is why records carry a weight found in few other sports, and why the longest-standing among them — some untouched for nearly four decades — acquire an almost mythical status. World Athletics ratifies them only under strict conditions of wind, timing and drug testing, which is what separates a genuine record from a merely stunning performance.
The marks below range from the freshest to the most stubborn. Some, like Kelvin Kiptum's marathon or Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone's hurdles, are products of the current technological wave; others, like Yuriy Sedykh's hammer throw from 1986 or Florence Griffith-Joyner's sprints from 1988, have survived every assault of a generation and are increasingly whispered to be unbreakable. Together they map the outer edge of what the human body has been measured to do.
Records
10.49s
100 metres (women)
Run at the US Olympic Trials in Indianapolis on 16 July 1988. The wind reading remains disputed, but the time still stands as the oldest sprint world record and the great unbroken mark of the women's game.
43.03s
400 metres (men)
Run from the outside lane eight at the Rio Olympics, with no rival in sight, breaking Michael Johnson's 17-year-old record. Van Niekerk is the only man to run sub-10, sub-20 and sub-44 for 100m, 200m and 400m.
1:40.91
800 metres (men)
The only track world record set in a final at the London 2012 Olympics, and the only sub-1:41 in history. Rudisha led from gun to tape without a pacemaker, dragging the field to one of the greatest 800m races ever run.
3:26.00
1500 metres (men)
Set in Rome in July 1998 and unbeaten for more than 25 years. El Guerrouj also holds the mile record of 3:43.13 from 1999; his middle-distance marks are among the sport's most enduring.
2:00:35
Marathon (men)
Run in Chicago on 8 October 2023, cutting 34 seconds off Eliud Kipchoge's record and averaging under 2:52 per kilometre. Kiptum, only 23, died in a car crash in Kenya four months later.
8.95m
Long jump (men)
Jumped at the Tokyo World Championships on 30 August 1991 to beat Bob Beamon's 1968 record, in a legendary duel with Carl Lewis. It has stood for over three decades — one of the sport's most coveted marks.
2.45m
High jump (men)
Cleared in Salamanca, Spain in July 1993. Sotomayor is the only man ever to clear 2.45m, and his record is the longest-standing in the men's field events, untouched for over 30 years.
6.29m
Pole vault (men)
Duplantis has broken the pole vault world record more than a dozen times since 2020, raising it a centimetre at a time. He surpassed Sergey Bubka's 6.14m in 2020 and has pushed the bar beyond 6.28m.
98.48m
Javelin (men)
Thrown in Jena, Germany in May 1996. Zelezny's mark has survived a redesign of the implement and nearly 30 years of challengers, standing as one of the great throwing records.
74.35m
Discus (men)
Thrown in Oklahoma in April 2024, ending Jurgen Schult's 74.08m from 1986 — the oldest record in the men's athletics book, which had stood for 38 years. Alekna is the son of two-time Olympic champion Virgilijus Alekna.
86.74m
Hammer throw (men)
Thrown at the 1986 European Championships in Stuttgart. Nearly four decades on it remains untouched, one of the oldest world records in the sport and a benchmark from the peak of Soviet throwing.
50.37s
400m hurdles (women)
Set in the Paris 2024 Olympic final. McLaughlin-Levrone has rewritten the 400m hurdles world record repeatedly since 2021, dragging an event that had barely moved for years to a once-unthinkable level.
7,291 pts
Heptathlon (women)
Scored at the Seoul Olympics across seven events over two days. Nearly four decades later no woman has come within 200 points, making it one of the most dominant records in athletics.
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