Rocky Marciano won 49 heavyweight boxing bouts in a row before retiring in 1955. Arsenal went the same number of Premier League games unbeaten half a century later. Rafael Nadal's 81-match winning streak on clay ended last year. Ed Moses came first in 122 consecutive 400metres hurdles races from 1977 to 1987.
Each an incredible record, each belittled when compared to that of Esther Vergeer. The wheelchair tennis player from Holland rules her sport like a despot. 49, 49, 81, 122? Try adding those streaks up: Vergeer is on a winning run of 344 matches. Gold in the Beijing Paralympics, which start on 6 September, will take her tally beyond 350 consecutive wins since 2003. There is no statistic quite like it in sport.
Hers is almost the story of a Saturday-morning children's film, the kind in which the hero makes a wish or finds an enchanted item of sportswear and - boom - transforms into a world-beater. Ten years ago, Esther Vergeer was a teenage wheelchair basketball player on the fringes of the Dutch squad. She had entered a few tennis events and found the individuality of the sport appealing. She switched to tennis full-time in 1998 and - boom. Vergeer, rather to her surprise, discovered she was the best player in the world.
'It was instant success,' says Vergeer, now 27, 'and a little scary.' Within months of giving up basketball for tennis, she won the US Open. Within a year, she was world number one, and within two, a Paralympic gold medallist. Almost by accident, she found herself at the pinnacle of her sport, and just about unbeatable.
'I think about the streak every day, every match - "This is going to be the one that I lose",' Vergeer says. In August, she won the Mercedes Open in Holland (her 132nd singles title), a final tune-up tournament before Beijing where she is expected to add two more golds to those won in singles and doubles at the Sydney and Athens Games. 'A few months ago I wanted the loss to happen, well before the Paralympics, to get the pressure off,' she says.
Vergeer, born on 18 July 1981 in Woerden in central Holland, has been in a wheelchair since the age of eight, when surgery to correct defective blood vessels around her spinal cord left her unable to walk. She took up wheelchair sport as part of her rehabilitation, something strongly encouraged in Holland: anyone who loses the use of their legs receives a free sports chair from the government, as well as the option of a year's training in any chosen sport. After three years, anyone still in training gets a new chair. This helps explain why so many of the best wheelchair tennis players are Dutch: all the top three women are and one of the top the three men is, too.
It does not explain, however, why Vergeer, is an invincible among them. Travelling to a tournament in America, her wheelchair broke in the aeroplane's hold ('every wheelchair athlete has trouble with airlines') and Vergeer had to borrow a friend's chair to play. Unfamiliar, configured for somebody else, it was, says Vergeer, like playing in high heels. She won the tournament anyway.
Success, she thinks, may be to do with her serve. A key difference between able-bodied and wheelchair tennis is that, in the latter, players are expected to drop rather than hold their serve. The particular mechanics of wheelchair tennis - in which the ball is allowed to bounce twice, and players tends to weave a figure-of-eight shape along the baseline - favours the mobile receiver rather than the stationary server. 'For most players, serving is a disadvantage - it's about defence not attack,' says Vergeer. 'But my serve is an advantage.' She attributes this to the particularities of her disability: she has some feeling in her left leg (none in her right) but hits the ball with her right hand, forming what she calls 'a kind of diagonal' of strength and balance across her body.
'I didn't plan it that way, but it works,' she says, pointing out that making the most of a disability is a crucial tenet of the sport. So is taking advantage of an opponent's limitations. 'If I'm playing someone who has more disability than me - a higher paralysis, for example - I'll play on their weaknesses. That's all in the game.'
It may also be a difference in mentality. When she was younger, wheelchair sport helped Vergeer come to terms with her disability: 'How to turn, how to push, what to do if I fell out.' But it has since become an all-encompassing pursuit. 'You can see wheelchair tennis as a good waste of time,' she says. 'But if you see it as an elite sport, you have to live your life like a top athlete. A lot of players don't want to do that - training a couple of times a week, but still going out, still drinking. I'm not saying I'm a miracle woman, but winning a gold medal is more important than a party.'
Vergeer's dominance has earned her two Laureus awards ('Sportswoman with a Disability of the Year' in 2002 and 2008) as well as enough money to turn professional; she estimates fewer than 10 men and women in wheelchair tennis have been able to do so. 'If there's a company that would like to do something with wheelchair tennis, they will come to me. Frustrating for a lot of the athletes, because they do as much as I do, but it is hard for them to find sponsors.' She describes being signed up as a face of adidas last year as a watershed in her career, and her acceptance as an elite sportswoman. 'I didn't used to have the feeling that I could give companies something back for their money, and I think they felt the same. But now, with the streak and the gold medals, it feels more like a partnership and less like charity or goodwill. Less like... maatschappelijk verantwoord ondernemen. Social responsibility.'
Having won every elite tournament, Vergeer has only one ambition to fulfil. She has never won at Wimbledon because there is no women's competition there. Grass is deemed too difficult a surface for women to play on. Vergeer grins - recalling, perhaps, the cumulative experience of some 340 wins on the spin, better than Rafa, better than Rocky. 'Maybe next year they'll let us try.'
The second greatest show on earth
From boosting to Boccia, get ready for the drama of the Paralympics
In terms of size, the Paralympics are now second only to the Olympics as a sporting event. In 1960, there were 400 competitors. This year, there will be 4,000 - and another 2,500 assistants and coaches travelling alongside.
This is the 60th anniversary of the event, which began life as the rather more parochial 'Stoke Mandeville Games' - the brainchild of neurologist Sir Ludwig Guttman, director of the spinal injuries centre at Stoke Mandeville hospital in Aylesbury, who used sport to help rehabilitate soldiers wounded in the Second World War. Later they were dubbed the Paralympics to indicate that they were 'parallel' with the Olympics, and today they encompass almost all of the same sports, from athletics to archery, football to fencing, cycling to sailing.
Britain have always fared well, and were second in the medals tally four years ago, beaten, interestingly, by a country known for its retrogressive attitudes to disability - China.
You'll only see them here...
Goalball
Developed for the blind and partially sighted. Teams of three sit facing each other across a volleyball-size court, throwing a ball that contains bells, and aiming to roll it into the opposing goal. Players wear blindfolds so that all compete on an equal footing; Canada, Denmark and Finland tend to fare well.
Boccia
Similar to boules, derived from an ancient Greek game, and adapted for athletes with locomotor disabilities such as cerebral palsy. From a seated position, contenders throw, roll or kick six leather balls as close as possible to a jack, with the aid of a chute if required. Players compete both individually and in teams; Portugal and Spain are two of the strongest boccia nations.
Who to look out for
Destined for various golds is South Africa's Oscar Pistorius, the 'fastest man on no legs' who runs the 100m in under 11 seconds and holds Paralympic records in the 200m and 400m as well. Visually impaired Irish sprinter Jason Smyth broke the 100m world record in May and will challenge for gold in the 200m as well, while quadriplegic American swimmer Cheryl Angelelli Kornoelje is expected to dominate in the pool at the ripe age of 40. In one of the most frenetic events, 'the Michael Jordan of wheelchair basketball' Troy Sachs will lead Australia in his fifth Games; of the female players, look out for Australia's Liesl Tesch, who holds her own in an otherwise all-male league in Italy. On Team GB, club and discus thrower Stephen Miller is chasing his fourth gold.
For flag and country
Iraq and the US will both send 12 war veterans to the Games. Iraq, who won a silver and a bronze in 2004, have seven medal contenders this year, including weightlifter Zekra Zaki, 27, the first Iraqi woman to qualify for the Games.
Melissa Stockwell is one of two US soldiers wounded in Iraq to take part. Stockwell, who lost her leg in a roadside bomb in Baghdad, will swim in the 400m freestyle; also competing is shot-putter Scott Winkler, paralysed in a vehicle accident in Tikrit. US Paralympics chief Charlie Huebner estimates that, by London 2012, up to 15 per cent of their athletes will come from the military.
Let the dogs out
China has had to lift a general ban on guide dogs in Beijing for the two months covering the Olympics and Paralympics. Blind athletes will be given what the authorities call the 'preferential' treatment of being allowed to walk with dogs through the capital - but only if the dogs are 'registered by an authentication commission'. No red tape there, then.
Been there, done that
Two women competing here were also in the Olympics. Natalie Du Toit carried the flag for South Africa and was 16th in the 10km open-water swim. Now she will compete in the pool, where she won won five golds and a silver in Athens. Poland's Natalia Partyka played table tennis in the Olympics: here she is the defending singles champion.
They have the technology
The long jump world record was set on limbs made of materials designed for space flight, and the British wheelchair team will soon have equipment designed by Royal Navy scientists: the Paralympics is home to more hi-tech kit than a City boy's bachelor pad. The danger is that poorer countries can struggle to compete on equal terms, although Pistorius, whose running blades cost £15,000 a pair, claims he has no unfair advantage: 'My blades are passive devices so they can't give out energy,' he says. Britain's David Weir, who will compete in five events from the 400m to the marathon, will race in a custom-built sports chair that weighs less than 7kg.
Murderball revisited
The film Murderball presented wheelchair rugby as one of the most testosterone-fuelled of sports - and Josie Pearson says the men will 'take no prisoners' when she becomes the first woman to compete in the event this month. Pearson, 22, who took up rugby less than three years ago, joins an experienced Britain squad who are tipped for a medal.