Winning streaks and difficult marks in different sports.

These results are a small sample of the total that exist and are reflected in the Guinness Book of Records. Although the old phrase “records were made to be broken”, in sports there are some that make us think that they cannot be broken.

Sport is full of curiosities and performances that have endured since the last century, both individual and collective.

Although many rightly think that individual performance is more affordable to overcome results, as we recently expressed in a commentary published on this site, there are some athletes who have brought to the books such resounding performances that remain unbeatable over time.

Among these great personal performances Cuba has managed to include several of its athletes with significant marks: Ramon Fonst Segundo, the outstanding fencer who owns a performance that already spans 121 years, since the Olympic event in St. Louis, United States, in 1904, when in 24 bouts he did not receive a single touch from his opponents; Alfredo de Oro, who won 31 world billiard championships, 18 of them consecutively, and we cannot forget the brilliant chess player José Raúl Capablanca, world champion, Havana 1921, against Enmanuel Lasker, undefeated, matched 88 years later by the Russian Grandmaster Kramnik against Kasparov. Capablanca also holds the record of being undefeated for eight years.

To these Cubans who competed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we must add the recent achievement in Olympic events: the five golden titles of Mijaìn López in wrestling, a record destined to remain until eternity.

Major League Baseball has countless individual records, so I only want to recall a few that are considered immortal: the 56 consecutive games hitting imposed by Joe DiMaggio, of the New York Yankees in 1941; the two thousand 632 consecutive games played by Cal Ripken Jr, of the Baltimore Orioles, in the 80’s and 90’s of the 20th century; the 22 consecutive seasons averaging over 300, by Ty Coob, with twelve batting titles in that period or the five thousand 714 strikeouts delivered by the outstanding right-handed pitcher Nolan Ryan, in the last century.

In team sports there are records or consecutive streaks, so difficult that they could go on for eternity, due to changes in regulations or the number of games played, in addition to the technique and tactics applied today, very different from the stage in which they were achieved.

Of these collective sports, Cuba also occupies significant spaces in women’s volleyball. The women’s volleyball team of our country weaved a chain of eight consecutive triumphs between 1991 and 2000, of a worldwide nature. Of these, three were at the Olympic Games (Barcelona 92, Atlanta 96 and Sydney 2000). Before that, our Morenas del Caribe had won, in 1988, all the international tournaments in whichcompeted with a string of victories that extended to 50.

An outstanding winning streak in NBA professional basketball in the United States is the 73 wins with nine losses by the Golden States in the 2015 season.

In European soccer, there is an extra-class record of the Spanish national team in World Cup qualifiers, having accumulated 56 games without losing.

As it is known, baseball, due to its enormous rules and quantity of notorious facts that can occur, in a game or in a championship, is the most statistically rich.

In the American Negro Leagues there is an unbreakable record, from 1907, belonging to the Chicago Leland Giants of 48 consecutive victories. This is a unique case, since winning 20 or more games in a row does not happen easily. In Cuba, the record of 27 wins dates back to the XII National Series of 1972 and belongs to the eastern team Mineros.

The MLB, within the 30 best marks made in the first 50 games of a championship, 27 were in the 20th century (17, before 1950), which have not been broken and it seems that their holders will keep them at present. When the Chicago Cubs won 45 and lost five, they seemed poised to win the title that year in 1906. However, they lost the World Series to the other hometown team, the White Sox.

Although in Cuba it is measured up to the 45th game, in 90-game contests, the Matanzas team led by Victor Mesa in the 56th Series won 42 and lost three, but if we take it up to the 50 games, it reached the same figure of 45 and 5, of the Cubs. The Crocodiles did another feat when they won the first 15 sub-series of the tournament, twelve of them by sweeps. In the end, they had 70 wins out of a possible 90 and something similar to the Chicago Cubs team, they could not win the Cuban championship.

Then, the closest, happened in 2017 with the Los Angeles Dodgers of the MLB National League, who won 43 and lost seven.

These results are a small sample of the total that exist and are reflected in the Guinness Book of Records.

Although the old saying that “records are made to be broken”, there are some in sports that make one think that they cannot be broken.

written by Francisco Soriano.