Read the full guide → — every chart and every marker, with pictures.
One card per event: every world record ever ratified in it, drawn as a staircase through time. Each step sits at the mark that was set, and the width of the step is how long that record survived. The line always climbs — times are inverted so that better is up — and the flat gold tail on the right is how long the current record has stood untouched.
On a running event, every distinct record mark is run at once. It freezes the instant the current record-holder crosses the line, then zooms into the finish stretch — because a century of progress fits inside the last few metres.
A race makes no sense for a jump, so field events get the pit instead: every record laid out at the distance it reached, filling in the order it happened, with the biggest single gain marked. In the men's long jump that is Bob Beamon, 55 cm in one jump in 1968. High jump and pole vault use the same scale but draw each mark as a crossbar at the height it was cleared, and the combined events use it as a points scale.
The men's javelin carries a second discontinuity of its own: the implement was redesigned in 1986 to fly shorter, so the 34 marks thrown with the old one are drawn dashed and are not comparable with the record standing today. The furthest throw in the file, 104.80, is one of them.
A world record can be matched as well as beaten, and World Athletics ratifies both. Those marks are drawn as smaller, fainter dots sitting on the flat of the step they matched, and they are counted separately — times improved is how often the record actually moved. In the men's 100 m, 37 of the 58 ratified marks equalled the record rather than beat it.
Marks ending in h were taken by hand and are drawn dashed. They are not directly comparable with electronic marks: a hand-timed 9.9 and an electronic 9.95 are not a tenth apart. So when automatic timing became the standard the ratified record could get slower on paper.
Those backward steps are drawn as an orange riser, and hovering the mark says why. There are 17 of them across the film. Most are the timing change; a handful are older lists carrying marks from lineages that were later dropped — the men's 400 m goes 47.8 in 1900 then 48.2 in 1912, when the IAAF ratified its first list. None of it is smoothed over.
This film is one of two. A record progression says how the limit moved; the all-time lists say who else got near it. The tabs at the top of each card cross to the same event there: Performances is the fifty best marks ever set, where a name repeats as often as it earned the place, and Performers is the fifty best athletes, one mark each. Every mark that was a world record is flagged there, from this film's own data.
Every mark, date, venue and wind reading comes from the official World Athletics record progressions, read from their public API. Nothing is hand-entered and nothing is editorialised — the order is simply how long each record has stood.
The photographs on the share cards come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences — Public Domain, CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA and OGL — tinted to this palette. Photographer, licence and source for every one are listed in the image credits. No photograph appears inside the film itself.
An independent, non-commercial fan project, made for the love of athletics and of data visualisation. All data is the property of World Athletics. Built by Carlo De Marchis with Claude Code.