Three of the most incredible unbeaten streaks in sport
Asked by host Sam Quek to pick their greatest unbeaten streaks in sport, The Question of Sport Podcast’s panel of experts – QS bossman Gareth Edwards, question setter Michael Bryan-Jones and 大象传媒 Sport journalist Miriam Walker-Khan – opted for records set by an athletics megastar, the greatest squash player of all time, and a legendary football team.
Ed Moses - 400m Hurdles - 122 races
If we talk about consecutive race wins in athletics, thoughts might turn to the likes of Usain Bolt in the 100m and Michael Johnson in the 400m. But Bolt’s 45 and Johnson’s 58 wins in a row are dwarfed by the winning streak of American 400m hurdler Edwin Moses.
Moses won an unfathomable 122 consecutive races between 1977 and 1987 and in quite a lovely piece of symmetry his winning streak ran for a total of nine years, nine months and nine days.
He was born in Dayton, Ohio in August 1955 he attended college in Atlanta on an academic scholarship but incredibly there was no track at his college so he trained at high schools around the city. He initially focussed on the 110m hurdles before stepping up to the 400m. In fact, prior to March 1976 he had only competed in one 400m hurdles race.
That was the year he completely turned his focus to the 400m hurdles - in June he won the US Olympic trials in a national record time of 48.30 seconds, then a month later Moses beat compatriot Michael Shine by more than a second in the Olympic final in Montreal to win gold.
Not only that, he did it in a world record time of 47.64 seconds. Even more incredibly that was his first ever international meet.
In 1977 he broke the world record again, at the US Championships, running 47.45 seconds, then on 26 August that year he competed in Berlin and lost to Harold Schmid, a West German athlete who over the next few years would become his closest rival. This was the last time Moses would lose for almost a decade as he embarked on his amazing winning streak.
Due to the US boycott of the Moscow Games he did not, however, take gold at the 1980 Olympics. He did prove a point the following year when he beat the then Olympic champion Volker Beck in a race held in Rome – by a full 15 metres.
At the inaugural Athletics World Championships in Helsinki in 1983, Moses beat Schmid (who had also taken part in the Olympic boycott) in the final by a distance of 10 metres.
After winning World gold, Moses would come very close to breaking the 47 second barrier as he posted a time of 47.02 seconds in Koblenz in Germany to break the world record for the final time in his career.
He won a second Olympic gold in 1984 in LA, 18-year-old compatriot Danny Harris taking silver with Schmid in third and Moses would then continue his winning streak for a further three years.
It all came to an end in June 1987 at a meeting in Madrid. He ran a very respectable time of 47.69 seconds but the now 23-year-old Harris ran the race of his life to beat him in 47.56 seconds.
So he achieved an incredible 122 consecutive race wins and within those he won 107 finals and was undefeated for almost a decade.
Jahangir Khan - Squash - 555 games
Jahangir Khan, who was born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1963, is widely regarded as the greatest squash player of all time. He dominated his sport to such an extent that he was literally unbeatable from 1981 to 1985 as he racked up 555 wins in a row.
But when Khan was born he was so physically weak that doctors told his parents he shouldn't take part in any physical activity. His father Roshan, who had been a successful squash player himself, had other ideas and ended up coaching him at the start of his career.
He was also coached by his brother Torsam, who was both a top level player with a career-high world ranking of 13 and also president of the International Squash Players’ Association.
Tragically Torsam had a heart attack during a tournament in Australia in 1979, and died at the age of 27. Khan has said since that he nearly gave up the sport completely after his brother's death but he decided to carry on as a tribute to him, living out all the family’s dream.
That tribute then became the incredible streak of 555 matches: the longest winning streak by any professional athlete.
In his career Khan would win the World Championships six times, the British Open a record 10 times and he was he was ranked world number one for six years. He was so dominant like he was nicknamed The Conqueror.
Although a 2016 book has suggested that Khan’s 555 could not be verified due to limited records of squash matches during that period, Jahangir himself has said that it could actually be more because he played invitational, exhibition and challenge matches that he never included in the 555.
The run came to an end, ironically, in Toulouse. Khan was playing the 1986 World Open in the French city when he lost to a man called Ross Norman from New Zealand. Norman had been desperate to be the man to end Khan’s streak and had previously said that one day Khan would have to be slightly off his game and he’d be able to beat him.
In the end that's what happened. But it took 555 matches before anyone found Khan even a little off his game.
Steaua Bucharest - Football - 104 matches
The 49 game unbeaten run of Arsenal’s Invincibles and Celtic’s 69 game streak, which ended in 2017, are small fry compared with an achievement from Eastern European football in the late 1980s.
From 1986 to 1989 Steaua Bucharest of Romania were undefeated for a world record 104 league matches.
Unsurprisingly, between 1985 and 1989 they won the Romanian League title five times. They also won four cups along the way.
However, those league wins were not always as comfortable as their record would suggest.
In the 1987-88 season Steaua’s big local rivals, Dinamo Bucharest, only lost once themselves and that wasn’t to Steaua, against whom they drew both home and away. Dinamo’s one loss was against Politechnic Timisora, who ended up getting relegated but helped Steaua win the title by a single point.
That illustrates that Steaua were not just winning an easy league each season. In fact, they were an incredible force both at home in Romania, and in Europe.
They won the European Cup in 1986 by beating Barcelona on penalties. Amazingly Barca, under manager Terry Venables, didn’t scored a single penalty in the shootout, with Bucharest keeper Helmuth Duckadam saving their four taken while Steaua scored two to lift the trophy.
It was something of a golden period for Romanian football. Dinamo reached a European Cup semi-final in 1984 then later Steaua lost one to Benfica in 1988. In 1989 they reached another final, where they lost to AC Milan. But that was the Milan team of Van Basten, Gullitt, Rijkaard, Baresi and Maldini...
That ‘unbeatable’ Steaua team included the likes of George Hagi, Dan Petrescu, Gheorghe Popescu, Ilie Dumitrescu and Marius Lacatus, many of who went on to great fame in the West after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989.
Hagi went on to Real Madrid and then Barcelona. Petrescu starred for Chelsea and Sheffield Wednesay. Popescu went to PSV, Spurs and Barcelona.
These were the players who took the Romanian national team to three successive World Cups in the 1990s, with a quarter final at USA ’94. Before that the nation had only once qualified for the World Cup since 1938.
But Steaua’s 104 match streak was surely their greatest collective achievement.
