With the Olympics starting up the world will once again be treated to amazing feats of athletic ability. There will be Bronze, Silver and Gold medalists, attesting that those who earn it are the best in their sports. Additionally, some of those performances will take it to another level altogether and be certified as world records, the best that there has ever been.
It's one thing to be able to run a mile, still another to be able to best others in a competition. But to do accomplish any athletic feat in a way that is faster or further or higher than any other person in recorded history is truly remarkable. Those records might stand for a day or a week or, in the case of Yuriy Sedykh and his hammer throw of 86.74 meters, for 31 years. That makes Sedykh the current world record holder for holding world records.
Of course not all records are made in the field of sports. There are markers for tallest building (Dubai's Burj Hhalifa at 2,716.5 feet), for longest bridge (China's Danyang-Kushan Grand bridge at 102.4 miles) and for deepest tunnel (Switzerland's Gotthard Base Tunnel reaches a depth of 2,300 meters). Many of those are achieved by advances in the state-of-the-art which enabled them to reach a superlative that was formerly out of reach. At the time, Gustav Eiffel's Tower was the tallest man-made structure in the world; now it is just another 81-story structure, not even as tall some of the apartment buildings surrounding Central Park.
But just as the Kardashians are famous for being famous, there is a whole set of records that exist for the sole purpose of being records. Civilization will not be advanced by putting a marker in the sand demarcating the most hula hoops ever spun at once or the largest serving of pancakes or the fastest motorized toilet. And yet those are all verified superlatives as compiled by the bible of such things, the Guinness Book of World Records.
If you have ever had dreams of being listed in that volume, it's likely that you consider your chance as the same as holding the world record in the pole vault (Mondo Duplantis at 20.18 feet). But as you might have gleaned from some of the aforementioned records, all the top spots are not necessarily achieved after years of training and practice. Yes, it does take determination, time and skills of a sort. But if you are dead set on holding the title for Most Socks Put On One Foot in 30 Seconds or Most Soft Toys Caught Blindfolded, Guinness has accreditors ready to look at the tape and pronounce you the best of the best.
And that's just what happened in Solihull England. Will Cutbill was enduring Britain's third pandemic related lockdown. With nothing but time on his hands, he opened a bag of M&M's and started putting one on top of the other. "I was in the living room, and I was incredibly bored and I just decided to see how many of them I could stack on top of each other," he told BirminghamLive. "I started thinking, I wonder if there's a world record for this, so I looked it up online and found out the most anyone had ever stacked was four."
Yup. Just four. But Cutbill, a civil engineer by trade, was a man with a mission. Sort of. "It's not something I would normally have taken the time to do - especially now that the sun is shining and the pubs are back open - but at the time, there wasn't much else to do so it seemed like time well spent." And in just a few hours he did it, besting the previous record jointly held by Silvio Sabba of Italy and Brendan Kelbie of Australia. "Five M&Ms doesn't sound like a lot, but it was near impossible to do so I was chuffed when I achieved it."
Chuffed indeed. So as the best in the world gather in Tokyo to swim the fastest and jump the highest, let Cutbill be an inspiration to each of us to reach for our personal best. Need a place to start? Leah Shutkever holds the current mark for fastest time to eat a burrito at 44.2 seconds. Do you have stuff (and stomach) to beat it?
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Marc Wollin of Bedford could medal in peanut butter cup eating. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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