Tracking History of Longest Record Holders

• Bob Beamon (54yrs)
• Nadezhda Olizarenko (42yrs)
• Ilona Slupianek (42 yrs)
• Sergey Litvinov (34yrs)
• Randy Barnes (31yrs)

Bob Beamon

• Bob Beamon hails from the USA.
• His Olympic record of 8.90 meters in the long jump. He made this record in 1968 and since, the Olympic Record has not been broken for 54 years.
• His record was broken by Mike Powell in 1991 but not in Olympics. His event was World Athletics Championship.

Nadezhda Olizarenko

• Nadezhda Olizareko from the Soviet Union is a middle-distance runner.
• She has a world record of 1 minute and 53.43 seconds in 800 meters race. Which she made during the 1980 Olympic games. Her record is unbeaten to date.

Ilona Slupianek

• Ilona Slupianek represented East Germany in sports competitions.
• She made the Olympic record, which has still not been broken, in shot put.
• Her record is 22.41 meters which she made during the 1980 Olympic games.

Sergey Litvinov

• Sergey Litvinov is from the Soviet Union.
• He has the Olympic Record for the longest hammer throw.
• He made this record during the 1988 Olympics and the record is 84.80metres. His record has not been broken for 34 years.

Randy Barnes

• Randy Barnes hails from the US. He is an American former shot putter.
• He has an Olympic record of 23.12 meters in the shot put which he made during the 1990 Olympic games. His record was broken by Ryan Crouser in the 2020 – 21 Tokyo Olympics.

Olympic Record Holders

Usain Bolt

An eight-time Olympic gold medalist, Bolt is the only sprinter to win Olympic 100 m and 200 m titles at three consecutive Olympics (2008, 2012, and 2016). He also won two 4 × 100 relay gold medals.

His parents ran the local grocery store in the rural area, and Bolt spent his time playing cricket and football in the street with his brother. He began showing his sprint potential when he ran in his parish’s annual national primary school meet. By the age of twelve, Bolt had become
the school’s fastest runner over the 100 meters distance!

Upon his entry to William Knibb Memorial High School, Bolt continued to focus on other sports, but his cricket coach noticed Bolt’s speed on the pitch and urged him to try track and field events. Pablo McNeil, a former Olympic sprint athlete, and Dwayne Jarrett coached Bolt, encouraging him to focus his energy on improving his athletic abilities. The school had a history of success in athletics with past students, including sprinter Michael Green.

Bolt won his first annual high school championships medal in 2001; he took the silver medal in the 200 meters with a time of 22.04 seconds. McNeil soon became his primary coach, and the two enjoyed a positive partnership, although McNeil was occasionally frustrated by Bolt’s lack of dedication to this training and his penchant for practical jokes.

Bolt is one of only nine athletes (along with Valerie Adams, Veronica Campbell-Brown, Jacques Freitag, Yelena Isinbayeva, Jana Pittman, Dani Samuels, David Storl, and Kirani James) to win world championships at the youth, junior, and senior level of an athletic event. He took his mischievousness to new heights by hiding in the back of a van when he was supposed to be preparing for the 200 m finals at the CARIFTA Trials. He was detained by the police for his practical joke, and there was an outcry from the local community, which blamed coach McNeil for the incident.

Yelena Isinbayeva

Yelena Gadzhievna Isinbayeva is a Russian former pole vaulter. She is a two-time Olympic gold medalist (2004 and 2008), a three-time World Champion (2005, 2007, and 2013), the current world record holder in the event, and is widely considered the greatest female pole-vaulter of all time.

Isinbayeva trained as a gymnast from the age of 5 to 15. She ultimately left the sport because, as she grew, she was considered too tall to be competitive in gymnastics, ultimately attaining a height of 1.74 meters (5 ft 8.5 in).

Six months after having taken up pole-vaulting she won her first major victory at age 16 during the 1998 World Youth Games in Moscow, Russia with a height of 4.00 m. It was her third athletic competition. She jumped the same height at the 1998 World Junior Championships in Athletics in Annecy, France, but this left her 10 cm away from the medal placings.

In 1999, Isinbayeva improved on this height at the 1999 World Youth Championships in Athletics in Poland when she cleared 4.10 m to take her second gold medal. At the 2000 World Junior Championships in athletics Isinbayeva again took first place clearing 4.20 m ahead of German Annika Becker. The same year the women’s pole vault made its debut as an Olympic event in Sydney, Australia where Stacy Dragila of the United States took gold. In the same event, Isinbayeva did not make it out of the qualifying round. On 13 July 2003, just about a month after her 21st birthday, Isinbayeva set her first world record at a meeting in Gateshead, England with a height of 4.82 m, which had made her the favorite to take gold at the 2003 World Championships in Athletics the following month. She ended up winning the bronze medal with Svetlana Feofanova taking gold and Becker the silver.

At a meeting at Donetsk, Ukraine, Isinbayeva set a new indoor world record, with a height of 4.83 m only to see Feofanova increase this by two centimeters the following week. The following month at the Worlds Indoor Championships in March Isinbayeva broke Feofanova’s record with a gold medal-winning jump of 4.86 m beating reigning indoor & outdoor champion Feofanova into bronze with reigning Olympic champion Dragila taking silver. The IAAF considered all three records to be overall records, hence the indoor and outdoor records now stood at 4.86 m.

27 June saw Isinbayeva return to Gateshead and improved the world record to 4.87 m. Feofanova responded the following week by breaking the record by a centimeter in Heraklion, Greece. On 25 July in Birmingham, England, Isinbayeva reclaimed the record by jumping 4.89 m and five days later in Crystal Palace, London, added a further centimeter to the record. At the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Isinbayeva won the gold medal with a new world record height of 4.91 m. She subsequently broke the record later that year in Brussels with a 4.92 m jump, her eighth world
record. Isinbayeva was named World Athlete of the Year for winning the Olympic & World Indoor title and breaking the World record eight times!

Isinbayeva was banned from the 2016 Rio Olympics after revelations of an extensive state-sponsored doping program in Russia. Yelena Isinbayeva has set 17 world records and 13 indoor world records. Several of her indoor world records were also ratified as world records.

Michael Phelps

Michael Phelps is an American former competitive swimmer. He is the most successful and most decorated Olympian of all time with a total of 28 medals. Phelps also holds the all-time records for Olympic gold medals and Olympic gold medals in individual events. When Phelps won eight gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Games, he broke fellow American swimmer Mark Spitz’s 1972 record of seven first-place finishes at any single Olympic Games.

Training

While preparing for the Olympics, Phelps routinely trained in double sessions three times a week, and once every other day. He swam 80,000 meters each week and spent the rest of recovering with “ice baths, stretching, working with a trainer, or getting massages.

Michael’s physical training amounts to 25-30hrs per week and includes at least three days a week of weight-lifting. He practices twice a day, sometimes more if he’s training at altitude. Phelps trains for around five to six hours a day six days a week. To give himself some additional entertainment in the water, Phelps listens to music during his long workouts with waterproof headphones.

Early Life

Phelps was born in Baltimore on June 30, 1985, and got serious with the sport after joining the North Baltimore Aquatic Club. A prodigy at his sport, he went to Sydney in 2000 aged just 15 –the youngest man on the USA team for an Olympic Games in 68 years). He came close to the podium only in the 200m butterfly, where he finished fifth. From then on, he would dominate the next four Games, finishing the most decorated athlete in everyone. In Athens he won six gold medals and two bronzes, falling just short of Mark Spitz’s world record (seven golds at Munich 1972). Beijing 2008 would see the greatest ever medal haul by a single athlete in an Olympic Games. Phelps won eight golds – in every event he entered – and broke World Record.

 London 2012 was also astonishing – he got four golds and two silvers – while Rio 1016 saw him stage a historic comeback (he had decided to retire after London), aged 31, to bag five gold medals and one silver.

He is now retired.