Byron Nelson won 11 PGA Golf tournaments in a row.
Pakistani Jahangir Khan won 555 squash matches in a row.
Four-wall handball is similar to racketball or squash, except the players strike the ball with their hands instead of with a racket. Olympic handball is a team sport similar in concept to hockey where players try to throw a ball into a defended goal.
De La Salle High School in Concord, California had a 151-game winning streak in football that began in 1992 and ended in 2004.
The LA Lakers had a 33-game winning streak in the 1971-1972 season.
And they did it without recruiting, either. (Being from that area - in fact, I drive by De La Salle when I go to my usual comic book store - I tend to throw that in whenever somebody mentions their football program. As I like to say, “They don’t have to recruit; the scoreboard does the recruiting for them.”)
Them again, the problem with a lot of high school winning streaks is, most of the wins are league/conference wins where one school just dominates over the others for a number of years.
Back on topic…
Kenyon College’s men’s swimming program won 31 consecutive NCAA Division III men’s swimming & diving championships, from 1980 to 2010 (they lost by 1 point in 2011, and by 81 in 2012, but regained the title in 2013).
What’s probably a more impressive streak is, from 1984 to 2000, the same coaches led Kenyon’s women’s swimming & diving team to the NCAA Division III women’s championship as well.
Undertaker. 20-0 at WrestleMania.
…::d&r::
No love for Sergey Bubka? He dominated polevaulting from 1983 to 1997 and still holds the world record.
Well, one probably-meaningless-but-at-least-interesting way to compare winning streaks is to figure out their probability in a really obvious way, namely, assume that all competitors have an equal chance of winning, and the see what the odds are of the streak happening by random chance.
So the chance of someone winning X straight matches in a row of a head-to-head competition are one in 2^x.
The odds of someone winning a tournament with Y entries X years in a row are one in Y^X.
So I think the longest winning streak in head-to-head competition mentioned in this thread is “Pakistani Jahangir Khan won 555 squash matches in a row.”
So our first figure is one-in-2^555, ie, 1.17e+167.
Another contender is “Australian squash player Heather McKay after 2 losses early in her career remained unbeaten for the next 19 and a bit years. During this time she won the world title or equivalent every year.”, but I couldn’t find the number of matches in a row she actually won during that period. More than 555?
If we’re super generous to my original post, and assume that every high school in American could conceivably win the large pom dance competition in any year, and if we think there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 high schools in the US (googling gives several numbers in that range, none of them definitive), then the odds of a school winning that competition for 10 straight years is one in 30,000^10, ie, 5.9e+44, or less impressive than Jahangir Khan by a factor of over a googol.
Another contender is:
“Kenyon College’s men’s swimming program won 31 consecutive NCAA Division III men’s swimming & diving championships, from 1980 to 2010 (they lost by 1 point in 2011, and by 81 in 2012, but regained the title in 2013).”, with odds of one in 442^31, or around 1.01e+82, still vastly less than Jahangir Khan.
There are a few other stats that we’re missing to do similar calculations for some other entrants in this thread (how many runners were in each race that Edwin Moses ran, for instance? how many games did Marion Tinsley actually win in his life while only losing seven?) but for the moment, the leader seems to be… Jahangir
And it better go to 21-0. He’s been too good to go down that way.
Well, in that vein I guess we should consider the Harlem Globetrotters’ alleged streaks of 2,495 and 8,829 wins.
Not to hijack too much, but the reason he’s in there with Punk is because Punk is the only guy on the roster (except for Ziggler, who’s not ready) who can carry 'Taker to a respectable match on that stage.
Yasuhiro Yamashita went undefeated in 203 consecutive matches in international judo.
Aleksandr Karelin was undefeated for 13 years in international competition, winning three consecutive gold medals in the Olympics and every World Championship in between. This was Greco-Roman wrestling, of course.
Dan Gable won 117 consecutive matches in high school and college wrestling before losing the NCAA final in 1970. He rebounded from that loss to win all his remaining matches, including his 1972 Olympic gold where he went unbeaten, untied, and un-scored on. His final record was 182-1. His record as a coach is almost as remarkable - 355-21-5.
Regards,
Shodan
Absolutely not. He SHOULD be on the list if we look at ‘Best Performances of the Year’, 'World Records’etc - but the fact is he lost a lot.
He was unbeaten at World Champs from 1983-1997, but in that time only won one Olympics - OK, he can’t be blamed for 1984, but 1992-2000 he entered 3 Olympics as favorite, and didn’t win.
How about F1 racing driver Michael Schumacher He has some amazing statistics including five consecutive world champion titles and 19 consecutive podium finishes.
I am so glad I am not alone. I literally did a double take when I first read that.