Records are supposedly made to be broken. These have watched generations of challengers come and go — and each has a reason it refuses to die.

The oldest individual track world record dates to 1983.

Jarmila Kratochvílová's 800-meter time of 1:53.28 has now survived more than four decades, the longest-standing individual world record in athletics. No one in the professional era has come truly close.

Florence Griffith-Joyner still owns the 100 and 200 meters.

Flo-Jo's 10.49 and 21.34 from 1988 remain the fastest times ever run by a woman — though the 10.49 carries a famous dispute, since the wind gauge read dead calm while flags whipped nearby. Either way, nearly four decades on, both records stand.

The long jump record has moved five centimeters since 1968.

Bob Beamon's 8.90-meter leap in Mexico City's thin air beat the old record by a staggering 55 centimeters and stood for 23 years; Mike Powell's 8.95 from 1991 has now stood even longer. Beamon's jump remains the Olympic record to this day.

Uwe Hohn's javelin throw can never officially be broken.

His 104.80-meter monster in 1984 flew so far it threatened the safe limits of stadium infields, so the javelin itself was redesigned in 1986 to fly shorter. His mark is frozen forever as the so-called eternal record.

Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, sitting since 1941.

In the decades since, no one has come closer than Pete Rose's 44 games in 1978. Statisticians have called it one of the most improbable feats in sports — the math suggests it more or less should never have happened at all.

Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game has no film.

It happened on March 2, 1962, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, preserved only in audio, photos, and box scores. Kobe Bryant's 81 points in 2006 is the closest anyone has come in the decades since.

Cy Young won 511 games, and nobody will ever win 400 again.

The runner-up, Walter Johnson, sits 94 wins behind him, and modern pitchers start far fewer games with far fewer decisions. Baseball named the pitching award after him partly because chasing the number itself is hopeless.

The hottest air temperature on record is from 1913.

Furnace Creek in Death Valley hit 134 degrees Fahrenheit — still the official world record, though some meteorologists argue the reading was flawed and Death Valley's modern 130-degree days may be the true ceiling. Either way, the record's home address has not changed.

Secretariat's 1973 Belmont Stakes is still untouchable.

He won by 31 lengths in 2:24 flat, a time no horse has approached at that distance on dirt in more than half a century. Remarkably, he still holds the Kentucky Derby record too.

And somewhere, a redesigned javelin quietly guarantees that Uwe Hohn wins forever on a technicality.