World records dazzled me from childhood because they seemed like works of fiction. One of the first ones my dad told me about was Jim Hines' 9.99 seconds, which for a kid made no sense: A man ran 100m faster than it took for me then to tie both my shoelaces?
Such acts leave us speechless, a predicament best articulated by a Visa ad after Michael Phelps won eight gold medals in Beijing: "One gold medal is amazing. Two is, well, incredible. Three? Practically unbelievable. But eight?... That's, well, we're going to need some new adjectives for whatever that is."
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