Sports recordThe founding father of the Olympic Movement, Pierre de Coubertin, referred to the sports record as having the same function in the ideology of Olympism as the principle of gravity in Newtonian mechanics ( Loland 1995). The record was, so to speak, the eternal axiom of sport. No doubt Coubertin was right on many points. The fascination with records is a key part of our fascination with sport. Records are the stuff of legends and myths. Johnny Weissmuller's sub-minute hundred meter freestyle swim in 1924, Wilma Rudolph's fabulous sprint records of the early 1960s and Michael Johnson's explosive two hundred meter record at the 1996 Atlanta Games are all paradigmatic examples of Coubertin's ideals. The record presents itself as a symbolic message of human greatness and infinite possibilities. However, as we will show in this article, the disk idea is not without its problems. First, sports records are set. Second, based on critical conceptual analyses, the logic of the archive is examined and the possible consequences of the continued search for new archives are discussed. Finally, some thoughts are presented on alternative lines of development of the sport in which the status of the idea of ​​the record is considerably reduced. Record sports, near-record sports and games A sports record is a performance, measured in exact mathematical and physical entities (meters, seconds or kilograms) in a standardized spatio-temporal framework defined by the rules of sport, better than all previous performance measured in the same way. Typical record sports are track and field, swimming and weightlifting. Record-breaking sports must meet strict requirements for standardizing conditions and measuring performance accurately. A series of sporting disciplines meet one of these two criteria. In marathon running and cross-country skiing, performances are measured and compared according to precise timing, but there are no standardized arenas. The Boston Marathon is quite different from the Oslo Marathon. Cross-country ski racing conditions and trails vary from race to race. We sometimes talk about records here, but in an inaccurate way. Disciplines with exact performance metrics but without strictly standardized frameworks might perhaps be better described as near-record sports. Other sports disciplines have well-defined standardized spatial frameworks but do not measure performance accurately. In terms of arenas, football and tennis are more or less the same from match to match. Performance, however, is measured in non-specific entities such as goals, points, sets and games. Furthermore, performance is in a sense relative because it depends on social interaction with other competitors..