I’m going to go with a slightly different answer.
In most sports, records are set. They hold for a few years, sometimes a couple decades, until they are surpassed—which is only natural.
Training, nutrition, technique, equipment—all these things begin to improve over time.
But it is perhaps a racehorse who has the most impressive accomplishment of all athletes.
Secretariat won the triple crown, winning the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes.
And not only that, he set the track record for each of these courses. Those records still stand to this day, more than 50 years later. When they did an autopsy on Secretariat after his passing at age 19—they discovered he had a genetic advantage: his heart was 2.5 times larger than that of a standard racehorse.
His genetics did not pass down to his offspring, so there has been little competition since.
His time at the Belmont Stakes in particular is the most impressive, completely blowing out the field, making Secretariat look more like Pegasus than a horse. It led to this famous photo of his jockey:
He was more than 30 body lengths ahead of second place during this race.
Look at the top 5 times at this event over the past 50+ years:
Nobody has even broken 2:26 yet. It really shows how massive his lead is on the rest of them.
With today’s nutrition, a better jockey, modern training—I suspect Secretariat would have been even more untouchable than he is currently.
It is simply rare that you hear of records standing for so long, especially in a sport that is as competitive as horse racing. I suspect Secretariat might be the best athlete we’ve ever seen—and many people don’t even realize it.