30+ Greatest Sports Moments of the Past 100 Years
It’s great to be able to work together and win as a team player, but one of the best things about solo sports is that it’s just you. No one else is responsible for your results, making winning even more satisfying.
People will always love football and baseball, but there’s nothing wrong with trying some new, non-traditional games too. No matter what, seeing someone work hard to reach their goals and dreams is always inspiring.
People like that sometimes create events that go down in history. Guess which amazing players made our list of the most important events in sports history?
1926: Setting a Record for Decades to Come
Honored Athlete: Gertrude Ederle
Sport Category: Swimming
Date of Event: August 6, 1926
From England to France, the English Channel is 560 km (350 mi) long. As of August 5, 1926, only five men were known to have come across it. Things were going to change the next morning, though.
Image via Bain News Service / Wikipedia
Charles Toth, an American, held the record for 16 and a half hours at the time. But Gertrude Ederle, an American, started her trip at 7:08 in the morning in France. Fourteen and a half hours later, she was on the English coast. Ederle established a world record that remained unbroken for nearly 30 years. She was also the first woman to swim across the English Channel.
1932: The First Female Olympic Javelin Champion
Honored Athlete: Mildred Ella “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias
Sport Category: Track & Field
Date of Event: July 31, 1932
Babe Didrikson Zaharias is a star in the world of women’s sports, more than just a top athlete. She was good at a lot of different games as a child, from basketball to boxing to skating to diving, and plenty more.
She competed in five events at the Olympics for the first time in 1932, despite the fact that women could only participate in three at the time. The javelin throw was her first event at the Olympics. Women competed in this sport for the first time. She won by 19 centimeters, which is about 7.4 inches, and became the first person to ever win this event at the Olympics. She won medals and set world records in the jumping and sprint events, too.
1954: The First “Sportsman of the Year”
Honored Athlete: Roger Bannister
Sport Category: Running
Date of Event: May 6, 1954
He ran for the British team in the 1952 Olympics and came in fourth place in the middle distance race. At that point, he decided he wanted to be the first person to run a mile in less than four minutes, even though he wasn’t sure about his performance before the race. To give you an idea, the normal runner who isn’t a professional can run a mile in seven to ten minutes.
After many failed efforts over the years, Bannister finally reached his goal and broke the world record by running a mile in exactly 03:59:04, which is just under four minutes.
Image via Wikipedia
Not only did he do that, but Sports Illustrated also gave him the first “Sportsman of the Year” award!
1960: From Paralysis to World Records
Honored Athlete: Wilma Rudolph
Sport Category: Track & Field (Running)
Date of Event: September 8, 1960
Many professional athletes start their jobs when they are very young. If they improve and qualify for the Olympics, they compete at the highest level. Wilma Rudolph, on the other hand, had to deal with a lot more as a child before she could become a professional runner.
“The doctor told me I would never be able to walk again.” My mom told me to. “I believed my mother,” Rudolph told Olympic.org. Rudolph had infantile paralysis and polio as a child, but she went on to become one of the most inspiring female track and field champions of all time.
In the 1960 Summer Olympics, she won three gold medals and broke several world records in the 100-meter dash, the 200-meter dash, and the 4×100-meter relay.
1964: The Phantom Punch
Honored Athlete: Cassius Clay (Muhammed Ali)
Sport Category: Boxing
Date of Event: February 25 1964
We’re sure you’ve heard of Muhammad Ali, even if you don’t like fighting. He wasn’t a favorite in the fighting world, and this fight was the reason everyone went crazy.
Why was the match known as the Clay-Liston fight? Ali was referred to as Cassius Clay during that period. He was going up against Sonny Liston, who was the famous World Heavyweight Champion in 1962.
Liston led the attack for almost a minute and a half after they walked into the ring together, but Ali put him out with “The Phantom Punch,” his winning right-hand punch to the head. A lot of people thought the fight was “fixed” because Ali barely hit Liston, even though the underdog won.
Image via Wikipedia
A year later, they fought again in the ring, and Ali won the first round with a knockout!
1968: Jumping 21 Inches Farther
Honored Athlete: Bob Beamon
Sport Category: Track and Field (Long Jump)
Date of Event: Oct 18, 1968
If you are from a place that uses the imperial system to measure distance, you can see how using the metric system while training and performing could be a little tricky, even for skilled athletes. For instance, Bob Beamon experienced anxiety upon hearing the results of his long jump in feet and inches, rather than meters, at the 1968 Summer Olympics.
That day, he jumped 29 feet and 2.5 inches, beating the old record of 27 feet and 4.75 inches. He not only broke the old record by more than 20 inches, but he also kept it until Mike Powell jumped 29 feet and 4.5 inches in 1991.
1972: Seven Gold Medals in a Time of Crisis
Honored Athlete: Mark Spitz
Sport Category: Swimming
Date of Event: September 4, 1972
The Munich Massacre was one of the worst things that could have happened at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Germany. The extremist group Black September abducted eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team and brutally killed them. This led to the expulsion of Mark Spitz, a professional swimmer and Jewish Olympian, from West Germany, along with the rest of Israel’s Olympic team after all their events.
Image via Giorgio Lotti / Wikipedia
He overcame a lot of stress and won seven gold medals at the Olympics for the USA team that year, setting new world records along the way. This is what makes his story so historic.
