American Pharoah goes for the Triple Crown; NASCAR's 'King' is unbeatable
The saying goes that records are meant to be broken.
On Saturday, American Pharoah will look to complete the Triple Crown with a win in the 147th Belmont Stakes.
Twenty-three horses, including California Chrome last year, have won the first two legs of the Triple Crown -- the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes -- but not the last leg.
While the Triple Crown is obtainable, it is also pretty rare. Eleven horses have accomplished it, with Affirmed being the last to do so 37 years ago in 1978.
The degree of difficulty is high but not impossible. However, there are several records in sports, including NASCAR, that have little to no chance of being broken.
In baseball, Cal Ripken Jr.'s legendary consecutive games played streak stands at 2,632. The Hall of Famer for the Baltimore Orioles broke Lou Gehrig's 56-year-old record of 2,130 in 1995 and he then extended it even further. With the wear and tear of a 162-game season, it's rare to see players play in every game in a season, let alone do it for the 17 seasons needed to break the mark.
Baseball has another record that won't be broken: the all-time wins mark for a pitcher, held by Cy Young at 511. Young, for whom the annual Cy Young Award for the best pitchers is named, pitched for 22 years and in some seasons made as many as 49 starts. That number is unheard of in today's game. That is only part of the reason this record is unbreakable. The other? The closest pitcher on the list is Walter Johnson at 417. The most recently active pitcher in the top 10, Greg Maddux, sits seventh at 355.
In the NFL, Emmitt Smith holds the all-time mark for rushing yards at 18,355 yards after breaking Walter Payton's record in 2002. Why is this one so hard to break? The trend of the NFL is as a quarterback-driven passing league. Plus, more and more teams are relying on two running backs to carry the load, meaning the workhorse backs of years past are few and far between. Steven Jackson has the most rushing yards among active players (11,388), but he is 31 years old and unsigned with training camps a little less than two months away.
In the NBA, Wilt Chamberlain holds the single-game scoring record at 100 points in a 1962 game. That same season, he averaged 50.4 points per game. Kobe Bryant has come the closest to the single-game mark with an 81-point night in 2006, but no one has really come close to the single-season average mark. Chamberlain owns the top four marks in NBA history, then Michael Jordan is fifth on the list with his 37.1 average from the 1986-87 season. Averaging 30 points or more is considered a great season, and scoring 50 in a game is rare (only happened eight times in the 2014-15 season) let alone averaging 50 points in a season.
This season, the league's scoring leader, Anthony Davis, averaged 31.5 points per game.
NASCAR has several marks that are going to prove impossible to reach. "The King" set several of them.
Richard Petty has the most wins in the sport's premier series with 200 victories. The next closest is the retired David Pearson at 105 followed by Jeff Gordon at 92, who is in his final full-time season. With Sunday's win at Dover, Jimmie Johnson has 74 wins but at 39 years old, it is fair to wonder how many more years the six-time champion will compete in the Sprint Cup Series.
Petty also holds the mark for most wins in a season with 27 in the 1967 campaign. Granted, he did it in a season where he ran 48 events, meaning he won over half of the events in which he competed. But these days, it's rare to see a driver even get to double-digit wins in a season. Johnson was the last to do so in 2007 with 10 wins, before that Jeff Gordon accomplished it in 1996, 1997 and 1998.
Bill Elliott holds the fastest qualifying speed in premier series history at 212.809 mph, set at Talladega in April of 1987. That mark was set pre-restrictor plates, which have been used at Talladega and Daytona since 1988. Restrictor plates limit the output of the motor and slow both the acceleration and the overall top speed. The highest speed in the 28 years since was a 206.558 mph mark set by Jeff Gordon last August at Michigan.
The records mentioned above only begin to scratch the surface but you get the idea. Some records are simply too difficult to be broken. We will see if American Pharoah can prove to be an exception on Saturday afternoon.