One card per event, women's reel and men's reel, in the order World Athletics lists them. Each card holds the fifty best marks ever in that event, read either way. Performances counts every mark ever set, so a name repeats as often as it earned the place — Mondo Duplantis has forty-three of the fifty best vaults. Performers keeps one mark per athlete, their best, so the same fifty ranks become fifty different people. The switch sits beside Women and Men, and changes the card in place.
Because marks tie, fifty is a rank and not a row count. Everyone ranked fiftieth or better is here, so a card may carry more than fifty — the women's high jump carries sixty-six, since so many share the same heights. Tied marks keep World Athletics' shared rank and the repeated number is dimmed to =.
The ladder on the left ranks them down one column and on down the next, one colour per athlete. The chart on the right puts the same marks where they happened in time, which is where each event tells on itself: the men's marathon list is almost entirely the last ten years, the women's shot put has not admitted a new mark since 1988.
The bar above the ladder is who owns the list — by athlete under Performances, by nation under Performers, where one mark each would only make fifty identical segments. The band under the chart is the decades, each as wide as its slice of the axis and as bright as the number of marks it holds. Hovering anything lights everything it belongs to: a row rings its mark on the chart, a name lights all of theirs, a decade lights its own.
A mark flagged WR was a world record the day it was set, and =WR equalled one; its dot on the chart wears a gold ring. Rank 1 is always the record still standing. The records come from this page's companion, the World Record Film, which holds every ratified progression — so the two reels agree by construction.
The tabs at the top of the card cross between the two on the same event: World records opens the progression there, Performers and Performances are the two readings here. The address bar carries both the card and the reading, so a reload lands back where you were and a copied link opens on the same thing.
Marks are wind-legal and electronically timed. An i beside a mark means it was set indoors.
Data: World Athletics all-time toplists. Its companion reel is the World Record Film.