Greatest Individual Sporting Achievements of All Time

1) Jesse Owens’ Four World Records in 70 Minutes
In 1935, heading into Big Ten Conference Championships, Jesse Owens, from Ohio State University, was suffering from a back injury. He received treatment right up to race time. Then something incredible happened. In less than 70 minutes, Owens broke three world records (in the long jump, the 220-yard dash and the 200-yard low hurdles) and tied a fourth (in the 100-yard dash). The following year, Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin thus mocking Adolf Hitler’s Aryan supremacy theory.

2) Bob Beamon’s Monstrous Leap
World records in track and field are typically broken by the slimmest of margins–a fraction of a second faster, an inch or two further. At the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, the world record for the long jump stood at 27 feet 4 3/4 inches. But history was written when Bob Beamon, broke the 28-foot barrier and the 29-foot barrier. He flew through the air like no athlete before him and when he finally landed, 29 feet 2 1/2 inches later, he had shattered the world record by nearly two feet. It would be 12 years before anyone jumped even 28 feet again. Beamon’s world record stood until 1991. He still holds the Olympic long jump record.

3) Nadia Comaneci’s Seven Perfect 10s
No one–man or woman-had ever earned a perfect score for an Olympic gymnastics routine before Nadia Comaneci mounted the uneven bars on July 18, 1976. But the 14-year-old Romanian gymnast’s flawless routine did the inconceivable, earning a perfect 10.0 score that was so unexpected it wouldn’t fit on the scoreboard and had to be displayed as a 1.0. But Comaneci didn’t stop there. She went on to score not one, not two, but seven perfect 10s during the games, winning 3 gold medals in the process. The feat remains one of the Olympics’ greatest achievements and after the games were over, the World Gymnastics Federation was forced to redesign their scoreboards.

4) Martina Navratilova’s 59 Grand Slam titles
Martina Navratilova is called the greatest singles, doubles and mixed doubles player who ever lived. Navratilova had won 18 Grand Slam singles titles, 31 Grand Slam women’s doubles titles and 10 Grand Slam mixed doubles titles. Navratilova is one of just three women to have accomplished a career Grand Slam in singles, women’s doubles, and mixed doubles (called the Grand Slam "boxed set"). She holds the open era record for most singles titles (167) and doubles titles (177). She recorded the longest winning streak in the open era (74 consecutive matches).  In 2003, she won the mixed doubles titles at the Wimbledon, partnering Leander Paes and this made her the oldest ever Grand Slam champion (aged 46 years, 8 months).

5) Michael Phelps’ 8 gold medals
In the 2008 Summer Olympics, Michael Phelps won 8 gold medals, the record for the most medals won at a single Olympics. With this record, he surpassed Mark Spitz, who had held the previous gold medal total with the seven. Michael Phelps set 7 new world records, only missing the 100 m Butterfly, where he beat Milorad Cavic by a fingernail (0.01 seconds to be exact) in one of the greatest races in the history of the Summer Olympics. He went on to win an unbelievable 22 medals, out of which 18 are gold medals.

Other notable mentions are Roger Bannister’s Sub-Four-Minute Mile run, Wilt Chamberlain scoring 100-points in a single NBA Game, Sir Donald Bradman’s incredible Test Average of 99.94, the 200 points in a single National Hockey League(NHL) season mark which has only been reached four times in the history of the NHL—and all four times by Wayne Gretzky, Roger Federer’s 23 consecutive Grand Slam semi-finals, Babe Ruth’s 60 Home Runs in a Single Baseball season, Sachin Tendulkar’s century of centuries in International Cricket and Usain Bolt’s complete domination of 100m and 200m.