What does baseball slugger Barry Bonds have, which triple jumper Jonathan Edwards doesn’t? Usain Bolt doesn’t have one either but Florence Griffith-Joyner does.
It’s an asterisk.
The little star next to their world-record arks indicates a question mark against how it was achieved, basically making it a bit iffy.
Bonds was probably the greatest baseball slugger of all time. He holds the record for the most career home runs with 762, and in 2001 smacked the ball over the fences 71 times to set a record for the most in a single season.
He had muscles like Popeye after a couple of cans of spinach and could almost hit the ball into orbit.
In fact, it is rumoured that one of the tasks of the Artemis II space missions is not just to go around the Moon but to go boldly where no man has gone before and also retrieve a ball he pelted into the upper spheres years ago.
But it was because he was built like a brick outhouse, that his records are questioned.
Bonds’ muscle power was supposedly the result of pumping up on steroids. He made Arnold Schwarzenegger in his body-building prime look like the weedy poingdexter who got his lunch money nicked and a wedgie which pulled his undercrackers over his head.
It’s for this reason that his numbers have an * next to them.
If you disregard Bonds’ records because of the steroid-injected doubts, you have got go back to 1961 for the season home-run record, which New York Yankees Roger Maris set with 61. Steroids would not have been heard of back then and Maris would have looked wraith-like against Bonds, having relied on Katz’s Deli’s pastrami sandwiches to beef himself up.
Jonathan Edwards and Usain Bolt – two clean athletics legends
When Bob Beamon took advantage of Mexico City’s thin air in 1986 to almost leap out of the long jump pit, his world record of 29ft 2in was though to be unbeatable.
Several athletes got close, but his record stood for 23 years when American Mike Powell beat it at the World Championships in Tokyo.
Edwards took triple-jumping to a whole new level in August 1995 in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Had the event been held a day earlier, Edwards would have watched from the sidelines. As a devout Christian, Edwards refused to compete on Sundays, but he was somebody who did like Mondays. So much so, that he broke the world record twice in the space of an hour and his record has stood for over three decades.
There is certainly no asterisk against Edwards’ name, neither against Bolt, possibly the most drug-tested athlete in history, and after all why not?
His 100m record of 9.58 second and 200m of 19.19, both set within days of each other in Berlin in August 2009, are generally considered to be unbeatable, although an Australian teenager called Gout Gout is doing his best to dispel that.
Gout Gout, which sounds like something excrutiating in both big toes, has been smashing age group records for fun and could threaten Bolt’s supremacy.
But asterisks continue alongside some of the most stunning records.
Doubts over Jarmila Kratochvilova and Florence Griffith-Joyner
Jarmila Kratochvilova zipped round the track twice at Munich in July 1983 to set a world 800m record of 1:53.28 which has lasted for over 40 years.
The Czech athlete, who could never be described as a pin-up girl like Femke Bol, has the shoulders of the Incredible Hulk – which were apparently the product of dragging truck tyres across muddy fields.
She passed drug tests but the question marks were over her sexuality in the days when the only way of determining whether a female athlete was a male in disguise, was to shove a warm hand down her shorts.
Unlike Kratochvilova, whose picture was only used on mantlepieces to keep kids away from fires, Florence Griffith-Joyner was a real, all-American pin-up.
Generally considered the fastest woman who lived, Flo-Jo set the 100m record of 10.49 seconds and 21.34 for the 200m within three months of each other in 1988.
While she passed all post-event drugs tests, when the US Athletics Federation announced its intention to introduce random out-of-competition testing in 1989 she rapidly announced her retirement.
Her tragic early death in 1998 at the age of 38 was declared as suffocation during a severe epileptic fit but the coroner’s verdict was accompanied by coughs and splutters.
Joey Chestnut: The hot dog king
But if there is one competitor whose record is beyond reproach, it is Joey Chestnut.
You will have noticed that FSOM stopped short of calling him an athlete, although he trains and prepares hos body in the same dedicated way that any world record does.
Chestnut is the current world hot dog eating champion, and has won the title 17 times. His record is 76 hot dogs in the 10 minutes allowed in the competition rules for the annual competition in New York’s Coney Island funfair.
To watch him in action is to observe a human waste disposal unit in action. There’s no onions, ketchup or chilli topping involved, the hot dogs are just shovelled in his gaping maw faster than a stoker feeding coal into a boiler on a steam ship.
It is both an awesome and terrible sight to behold and when it comes to records, there’s no asterisk next to Chestnut’s name.
