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799 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 10 of 14.

  1. A teammate's daughter gave Eddy Merckx his nickname, the CannibalWhen a teammate told his young daughter how Eddy Merckx refused to let anyone else win, she suggested a name for him: the Cannibal. It stuck, and the numbers justify it. Over eigh…
  2. The Ferrari prancing horse began on a First World War fighter planeThe black horse on every Ferrari first belonged to Francesco Baracca, an Italian fighter pilot shot down by an Austrian aircraft in 1918. Enzo Ferrari adopted the emblem in his me…
  3. Jesse Owens set five world records in 45 minutes with a sore backOn a May afternoon in 1935, between 3:15 and 4 p.m., an injured college sprinter in Michigan equalled one world record and broke five more. That burst, still unmatched, came a yea…
  4. Jim Thorpe cleared a school record high jump while still in street clothesWalking past the Carlisle track one day in 1907, a young Sac and Fox student stopped, tried the high jump in his everyday clothes, and beat every jumper on the team with a school …
  5. Joe Louis may have hidden his boxing gloves inside a violin caseHis mother wanted him to play the violin. Young Joe Barrow, the story goes, carried the case to the gym with his boxing gloves tucked inside. He also fought under his first and mi…
  6. Johan Cruyff grew up five minutes from Ajax, and his mother cleaned its lockersJohan Cruyff's childhood home sat a short walk from Ajax's stadium in Amsterdam. When his father died suddenly, his mother took a job there cleaning the lockers. The boy from that…
  7. Gordie Howe played professional hockey across six different decadesGordie Howe skated in the NHL in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the only player ever to span five decades in that league. Then, in 1997, he took a single shift for a mi…
  8. Haile Gebrselassie ran with a crooked arm shaped by years of school runsAs a farm boy in Ethiopia, Haile Gebrselassie ran ten kilometres to school each morning and ten back each evening, books tucked under one arm. Long after he became a champion, his…
  9. Jack Nicklaus went to a high school called the Golden Bears, fittinglyLong before golf fans called him the Golden Bear, Jack Nicklaus played basketball for a high school whose mascot was, by coincidence, a golden bear. He was good enough at hoops to…
  10. Jackie Joyner-Kersee's heptathlon world record has stood since 1988At the Seoul Olympics in 1988, Jackie Joyner-Kersee piled up 7,291 points across seven events, a heptathlon score nobody has matched since. Five days later she won the long jump t…
  11. Jackie Robinson was a football star before he broke baseball's color lineWhen Jackie Robinson took first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers in April 1947, ending decades of segregation in the major leagues, many knew him from a different sport. At UCLA he w…
  12. Margaret Court learned tennis hitting a ball against a wall with a fence palingAt eight, a girl in Albury taught herself tennis by whacking a ball against a wall with an old fence paling, then sneaked onto a local club's grass courts. Margaret Court went on …
  13. Jonah Lomu became rugby's first global superstar while battling kidney diseaseThey called him a freight train in ballet shoes. At the 1995 World Cup, a 20-year-old winger scored four tries in one semi-final against England and swept past defenders as if the…
  14. Fangio won nearly half his Grand Prix starts, a rate nobody has matchedJuan Manuel Fangio entered 52 Formula One races and won 24 of them, a strike rate above 46 percent that still stands as the best in the sport's history. He claimed five world titl…
  15. A bullied 41-kilogram schoolboy grew up to invent judo and its beltsAs a teenager Kanō Jigorō stood 1.57 metres and weighed 41 kilograms, and classmates would drag him outside to beat him. He wanted to be able to fight back. That wish led him to j…
  16. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's scoring record lasted nearly four decadesWhen he retired at 42 in 1989, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar owned the NBA career marks for points, games, minutes and blocked shots, among others. His 38,387 points, built largely on an un…
  17. Larisa Latynina won world titles while four months pregnantAt the 1958 World Championships, Larisa Latynina took five of the six gold medals on offer and reached the podium in every event, all while four months pregnant. Two years later s…
  18. LeBron James went from Akron apartments to the NBA's all-time scoring summitBorn to a 16-year-old mother who moved him between run-down Akron apartments, LeBron James found stability with a youth football coach's family, who also handed him his first bask…
  19. Lionel Messi has won more team trophies than any footballer in historyAcross more than 1,150 appearances, Lionel Messi has lifted 46 team trophies, the most of any professional footballer. Add eight Ballons d'Or, a World Cup, 91 goals in a single ca…
  20. Johnny Weissmuller took up swimming to beat polio and never lost a raceA doctor told a nine-year-old Chicago boy recovering from polio to try swimming. He went on to win five Olympic golds, set 67 world records, and retire unbeaten as an amateur, bef…
  21. Before his Formula One debut, Schumacher learned Spa on a folding bikeMichael Schumacher arrived at the Belgian Grand Prix in 1991 having only ever watched the Spa-Francorchamps circuit as a spectator. His teammate was too busy to show him around, s…
  22. A stolen bicycle set twelve-year-old Cassius Clay on the road to boxingAt 12, Cassius Clay was furious that someone had taken his bicycle in Louisville and told a police officer he meant to beat up the thief. The officer, Joe Martin, also coached box…
  23. Nadia Comăneci's first perfect ten appeared on the scoreboard as 1.00On 18 July 1976 in Montreal, a 14-year-old Romanian finished her uneven bars routine and the scoreboard flashed 1.00. Omega, which built it, had been told nobody could score a per…
  24. Novak Djokovic's first tennis coach found him at a mountain snack barIn the summer of 1993, Novak Djokovic's parents were running a fast-food parlour on Mount Kopaonik in Serbia, beside a tennis camp. The camp's director, Jelena Genčić, spotted the…
  25. Paavo Nurmi ran with a stopwatch until he threw it on the grassIn the 1924 Olympic 5,000 metres, Paavo Nurmi's rivals set a world-record pace, hoping to exhaust him; he had won the 1,500 metres less than two hours earlier. Nurmi, who usually …
  26. Marta was the first woman to leave footprints in Maracanã's cementIn July 2007, Marta scored twice at Rio's Maracanã stadium to beat the United States and win the Pan American Games before 68,000 fans. Afterwards her footprints were pressed into…
  27. In 1983 Martina Navratilova lost exactly one singles match all seasonMartina Navratilova's 1983 record reads 86 wins and one loss, the best winning percentage of any professional since 1968. Her only defeat came in the fourth round of the French Op…
  28. Michael Jordan was once judged too short for his school's varsity teamAs a high school sophomore in Wilmington, North Carolina, Michael Jordan tried out for the varsity basketball team and was turned down; at 5 feet 11, coaches thought him too small…
  29. Michael Phelps retired with more Olympic medals than 161 countriesWhen Michael Phelps announced his second retirement in August 2016, his Olympic haul stood at 28 medals, 23 of them gold. That tally outstripped the combined total of 161 entire n…
  30. Rod Laver won tennis's Grand Slam twice, with five banned years betweenIn 1962 Rod Laver swept all four major tennis titles as an amateur. Then he turned professional, which barred him from those events until the Open Era began in 1968. The next year…
  31. Federer went from hot-tempered junior to tennis's most decorated good sportAs a boy Roger Federer struggled to control his temper on court. He remade himself so thoroughly that he collected a record 13 Stefan Edberg Sportsmanship Awards and was voted fan…
  32. A one-rupee coin on the stumps helped shape cricket's greatest run-scorerSachin Tendulkar's brother steered him toward cricket partly to cure his habit of picking fights at school. His coach later balanced a one-rupee coin on the stumps during net sess…
  33. Serena Williams held all four majors at once by beating her sister each timeBetween the 2002 French Open and the 2003 Australian Open, Serena Williams won four major finals in a row, and every one of those finals was against her older sister Venus. The ru…
  34. Simone Biles found gymnastics on a day-care outing and rewrote the sportAt six, Simone Biles tried gymnastics during a day-care field trip, and the instructors told her to keep going. She now owns 11 Olympic and 30 world championship medals, more than…
  35. Sonja Henie turned Olympic figure skating into a Hollywood fortune and the touring ice showAt her first Olympics, aged eleven, Sonja Henie finished eighth out of eight. Three years later she began a run of ten straight world titles, then won three Olympic golds, a feat …
  36. Steffi Graf's 1988 Golden Slam included a major final lasting 32 minutesIn 1988 Steffi Graf won all four major tennis titles and Olympic gold in one calendar year, something no player had ever done. Her French Open final that season was over in 32 min…
  37. Pelé learned football kicking a grapefruit, then Brazil declared him national treasureToo poor to own a proper ball, the boy from Bauru practised with a grapefruit or a sock stuffed with newspaper. A few years later Brazil's government declared him an official nati…
  38. The modern Olympics grew out of a Frenchman's failed school reformPierre de Coubertin's first mission was not a global sporting festival. He wanted French schools to adopt the games-playing ethos he admired in English public schools, and he fail…
  39. Cricket's great amateur W. G. Grace out-earned the professionalsW. G. Grace was officially an amateur, yet he reportedly made more money from cricket than any paid player of his day. Victorian England's most famous sportsman, he played first-c…
  40. Wayne Gretzky's assists alone outnumber anyone else's total pointsWayne Gretzky set up so many goals that his assists by themselves exceed the career points of any other NHL player. Small and not especially strong, he won by reading the game, sk…
  41. Wilma Rudolph wore a leg brace until 12, then became the world's fastest womanPolio struck Wilma Rudolph at age five and left her left leg weak; she wore a brace until she was twelve. Eight years later, at the 1960 Rome Olympics, she won the 100 metres, the…
  42. An asthmatic boy from Sendai became figure skating's first men's Super Slam winnerYuzuru Hanyu was diagnosed with asthma at two and started skating at four only because a coach wanted him out from under his sister's feet. He went on to win back-to-back Olympic …
  43. Zidane learned football on a narrow Marseille plaza and conquered the worldZinedine Zidane first played football at five on the Place Tartane, a concrete square roughly 80 yards by 12 in the Marseille housing estate of La Castellane. Two decades later he…
  44. Sugar Ray Robinson fought under a borrowed name and never gave it backAt 14, Walker Smith Jr. was too young for the amateur boxing card he needed, so he used the ID of a lad called Ray Robinson who had quit the sport. The name stuck. After a woman i…
  45. Tiger Woods once held all four major golf titles at the same timeWhen Tiger Woods won the 2001 Masters, he already held the other three major trophies from the previous season, the only player to hold four majors in a row. A year earlier he had…
  46. The 199th draft pick became football's most decorated quarterbackSix rounds and 198 players went by before the New England Patriots picked Tom Brady in the 2000 NFL draft. He went on to play 23 seasons, win seven Super Bowls and set records for…
  47. A cricket coach spotted the speed that made Usain Bolt the fastest man everUsain Bolt spent his childhood playing cricket and football in the streets of rural Jamaica. At high school, his cricket coach noticed how fast he ran between the wickets and nudg…
  48. The university born from a violent dispute between scholars and townspeopleIn 1209, a group of scholars fled Oxford after a local woman's death led to the hanging of two academics. Seeking refuge from the violence of Oxford's townsfolk, they settled in C…
  49. The unexpected evolution of the tire from metal bands to pneumatic perfectionBefore they were the flexible cushions we rely on today, tires were heavy metal bands designed to hold wooden wheels together. The journey from blacksmith-forged iron to high-perf…
  50. The surprising legal reality of what actually constitutes a highwayIn the US, we think of massive, multi-lane interstates. But in British law, a highway can be a narrow footpath. From the world's longest national road to a simple village path, th…
  51. The continuous-flow engine that mastered the art of high-speed rotationFrom ancient curiosities to the heart of modern jet propulsion, the gas turbine operates on a principle of relentless, continuous flow. Unlike the rhythmic up-and-down of a piston…
  52. Why the world's most important measurements no longer rely on physical objectsFor decades, the standard for mass was a physical cylinder of platinum-iridium kept in a French vault. But what happens to global science when your primary reference can be lost, …
  53. From spinning disks to the cloud: the evolution of the moving imageBefore high-definition streaming and smart TVs, television was a mechanical marvel of spinning disks and silhouettes. We often forget that the medium's origins lay in experimental…
  54. The ancient, mathematical struggle to fix the date of EasterEaster is a moveable feast, drifting through the calendar according to a complex lunisolar dance. This instability sparked centuries of intense theological debate, ranging from fi…
  55. How a golf ball and a water tank created a sporting legendBefore he was a national icon, Don Bradman practiced alone in the Australian bush. Using a golf ball and a cricket stump against a rebounding water tank, he honed the reflexes tha…
  56. Fifteen millennia of holds, pins, and theatreWrestling grapples toward advantage through throws, clinches, locks, and pins—martial art, combat sport, and, in its pro form, athletic theatre. Cave art found in France may push …
  57. Chinese chess where cannons must jump to captureXiangqi, known as Chinese chess, is China's most popular board game, a two-player strategy cousin of shogi, janggi, and Western chess. Checkmate the enemy general on a nine-by-ten…
  58. From royal menageries to the word "zoo"A zoo keeps animals in enclosures for display and often for conservation breeding. The nickname zoo stuck after London's Gardens opened for science in 1828 and to the public in 18…
  59. Why human walking is an inverted pendulumWalking vaults the body over a stiff limb each step, an inverted-pendulum gait used even by many-legged arthropods. Crosswalk pace averages about 5 kilometres per hour, while cham…
  60. Chamonix 1924 invented the Winter OlympicsSnow and ice sports meet every four years under the International Olympic Committee—usually in a Northern Hemisphere February. The first edition, retroactively crowned later, was …

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