Originally Posted by mikemcgrail
EDDY MERCKX
The cycling GOAT. Remove all of his success at the Tour de France and he would still be the cycling GOAT!!
ISAAC BURNS MURPHY
More than a century before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball, black athletes were dominating America's first national sport. The sport was horse racing and the greatest jockeys were slaves and the sons of slaves. Isaac Burns Murphy was the greatest of them all.
He won 628 of his 1,412 starts—a 44% victory rate which has never been equaled, and a record about which Hall of Fame jockey Eddie Arcaro said: "There is no chance that his record of winning will ever be surpassed.”
He rode in eleven Kentucky Derbies, winning three times. He was the first jockey to win three Kentucky Derbys. Murphy is the only jockey to have won the Kentucky Derby, the Kentucky Oaks, and the Clark Handicap in the same year (1884).
ONOMASTOS OF SMYRNA
Onomastos of Smyrna was the first ever Olympic champion in boxing and also wrote the rules of Ancient Greek boxing as well. He also holds a record which remains remarkable even today. After hundreds of ancient and modern Olympiads, he’s still the boxer with the most Olympic boxing titles (4) to his name. Laslzo Papp, the world’s greatest amateur boxer of the twentieth century, came close to Onomastos’ record—but he stopped at three Olympic victories before becoming a professional boxer.
MARTIN STREL
Martin Strel is a Slovenian long-distance swimmer. He is one of the most elite endurance athletes, best known for swimming the entire length of various rivers. Strel holds successive Guinness World Records for swimming the Danube, the Mississippi, the Yangtze and the Amazon. He's been attacked by piranhas and dodged dead bodies on the most grueling swims ever completed. His athletic accomplishments are too impressive to make sense of.
Strel's first two river swims were the Krka river (65 miles) in 28 hours in 1992, and the Kolpa river (39 miles) in 16 hours in 1993.
In 2000, he swam the length of the Danube, covering 1,878 miles in 58 days, setting a world record and providing a taste of things to come.
Two years later, he broke his own record on the Mississippi, swimming from northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico (2,360 miles) in 68 days. He spent about 12 hours in the water each day.
In 2003, he swam the entire Paraná River (2,484 miles) in Argentina in 24 days. He swam from dawn to dust and averaged over 49 miles per day.
In 2004, he took on the toxic waters of the Yangtze, covering 2,488 miles in 50 days, passing several floating corpses along the way. The Yangtze provided a useful tune-up for his greatest swim of all, the Amazon.
In 2007, he swam from Peru to the South Atlantic (3,278 miles) in 68 days. The Amazon is home to one-third of the animal species in the world and Strel encountered most of them up close. He avoided the candiru. He managed to swim past crocodiles that lined the shores in shallow waters. He escaped bull sharks. Strel wasn’t able to dodge all the predators, however. He brought home a souvenir he’ll never lose; an eight-inch gash across his back where piranhas bit through his wet suit. It is a half-inch deep. He didn’t bother to get it stitched.
Strel was 52 years old when he finished his Amazon swim !!!
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