Megan Campbell is a 31-year-old center back for the London City Lionesses, and a world record-holder. She set the mark a couple of weeks ago at a Lionesses training session, launching a throw-in 123 feet, 2 inches, the equivalent of more than two standard bowling alleys, or 1 1/3 full-size basketball courts.
We know this because someone from Guinness World Records was there to authenticate it. And so Campbell, an Irishwoman with 50 caps for her country, joins the quirky, oft-obsessed collection of high achievers who have gained a measure of fame for feats ranging from remarkable to ridiculous. The Guinness people don’t judge, as long as it’s a record. Take Leila Noone, for example. She is a 39-year-old circus performer who hung by her ponytail for 25 minutes, 11.30 seconds to set the standard for longest time suspended by hair. The previous record-holder, Australia’s Suthakaran Sivagnanathurai, hung by her hair for 23 minutes, 19 seconds. That was in 2011. Hair-hanging insiders thought that record might last for decades, before Noone came dangling.
Then there is Arnav Daga, a competitive card-stacker from India, who hit the trifecta when he built a skyscraper of playing cards 61 levels high, setting records for the world’s tallest stack of cards in the 8-hour, 12-hour and 24-hour categories. A Chinese rival, Tian Rui, has since reclaimed the 8 and 12-hour records, but Daga isn’t about to fold his deck.
“Card stacking has always been my passion and I really want to test my limits . . . ,” he told Guinness. “I wish to single-handedly own all the Guinness World Records titles in the field of card stacking.
Arnav Daga can stack with the best of them
An Irish beverage company that has been making the world’s most famous stout for more than 260 years, Guinness is celebrating its 70th year as the gospel of weird records. They are catalogued in what used to be called the Guinness Book of Records. The company changed the title to Guinness World Records in 1999, but whatever you want to call it, people keep buying it. According to the Guinness web site, the company has sold 143 million copies, a sales mark that even Stephen King or John Grisham would envy. Unfortunately, Guinness doesn’t make it into its own book. The record for the bestselling book belongs to the Bible (5-7 billion), followed by the Koran. Bill Belichick’s new release, The Art of Winning: Lessons from My Life in Football, hopes to become a contender.
The germ of the concept that became Guinness World Records traces to Sir Hugh Beaver, the managing director of the Guinness Brewery, who was at a party in County Wexford in the early 1950s on the southeastern coast of Ireland. Sir Hugh and his hosts began to have a spirited debate about which European species of game bird was the fastest. In the pre-Google era, they had to dip into encyclopedias and reference books to try to settle the matter. They could not. Several years later, Sir Hugh came up with a novel idea: what about compiling a book stuffed with astounding facts and figures – inane and otherwise - that could be used to settle pub arguments? He came upon twins named Norris and Ross McWhirter, who were Fleet Street fact-finding researchers, and enlisted them to write such a book. The operation incorporated under the name Guinness Superlatives and opened a two-room office in a converted gymnasium on the top floor of Ludgate House, 107 Fleet Street. The twins cranked out the book in 13 weeks, barely having time to stop for tea or a crumpet. Their work was a hit, even though it failed to resolve the original debate about the fastest game bird. (Subsequent editions did; it’s the red-breasted merganser, which can fly at speeds up to 81 MPH.)
Sir Hugh had clearly tapped into something powerful, namely humans’ complete enchantment with the unprecedented. As a young baseball fan on Long Island, I remember being mesmerized by three numbers: 714, 56 and 2,130. The first was Babe Ruth’s home-run record. The second was Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak. The third was Lou Gehrig’s consecutive-game streak, which began on June 2,1925 and ended on May 2, 1939, the day Gehrig told Yankees manager Joe McCarthy to sit him because he wasn’t helping the team. The Yankees were at Briggs Stadium in Detroit, playing the Tigers. Babe Dahlgren played first base for the Yankees, hitting a double and a home run in a 22-2 Yankee victory.
Gehrig, his ironman physique increasingly wracked by ALS, never played an official game again, though few remember that he did take the field one more time five weeks later in Kansas City. The date was June 11. The Yankees were playing an exhibition game against the Blues, their top farm team, and more than 23,000 fans turned out, many to see Gehrig. He didn’t want to disappoint them. The contest included two DiMaggios (Joe for the Yankees, Vince for the Blues) and one Rizzuto (Phil). Gehrig played three innings and grounded out weakly to second in his only at-bat. A month later at Yankee Stadium, he gave his “luckiest man” speech.
I was certain that Gehrig’s record would never be broken, but Cal Ripken Jr. had other ideas. You never say never with records. Not even two years ago, James Roumeliotis set the Guinness mark for consecutive jumps on a pogo stick (115,170) He did it in Boston, raising money for veterans through his charity, Hopping for Heroes. He bounced for 11 hours and 38 minutes. John Tyler, the 10th U.S. president, didn’t hop anywhere, except possibly to bed; he holds the record for White House fertility, fathering 15 children with two wives. Douglas Smith, an English gardener who prefers to do his breeding with plants, has the record for most tomatoes (1,269) grown from a single stem. The previous mark – 839 – was also set by Smith.
As for Megan Campbell, the throw-in record-holder, she is philosophical about her place in history. “I think my record might stand for about a week until someone gets hold of the information,” she said. “It’s an amazing achievement for me personally to have that now, as the first ever. But ultimately you want someone to beat you, I want someone to be more successful than me because then that means I’ve put another player in a better place.
https://www.humix.com/video/oN61UgbPzju
What fun. 1,269 tomatoes from a single stem? Who knew?