The "Firsts" series turns its focus to moments in sports history that reshaped our understanding. Behind records, events and figures there are often stories that have never been carefully told—join us now as we step into a time machine and savor them.

Let’s rewind to before 1912. Although athletic marks were constantly being broken, timing methods and venue conditions varied widely, and there was no unified international certification system to define the so-called "fastest" or "farthest"—much less to compare performances worldwide.

Against that backdrop, the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) was formally founded with the aim of establishing global standards, and it immediately affected the 1912 Stockholm Olympic Games.

In the men's 100 m, 19-year-old American Donald Lippincott ran 10.6 seconds in a heat— not only an Olympic meet record but the fastest time recorded on the Olympic stage at that point. His stunning performance drew widespread attention.

Although he only took bronze in the final, that heat became a historical turning point: with the handheld stopwatch the only officially recognized timing tool, 10.6 was established as the first world record, marking athletics’ shift from scattered national logs to a standardized global era.

Contemporary sports publications hailed Donald Lippincott’s run as a "milestone of modern athletics"—not just because he ran fast, but because official recognition by an international body heightened the spectacle of competition and left people wondering when the "next world record" would be set.

Thereafter the men's 100 m world record advanced through rule changes—handheld timing, electronic timing, wind-speed limits—and ultimately reached Jim Hines’ 9.95 in 1968.

That was the first world record officially timed with fully automatic electronic timing and the first officially recognized sub-10-second performance. The record was lowered several times afterward, culminating in Usain Bolt’s 9.58 at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, which has stood for 17 years and is one of the longest-standing sprint records of the modern era.

Currently World Athletics recognizes records for more than 40 Olympic athletics events (22 men’s and 22 women’s events, plus the mixed relay), covering sprints, middle- and long-distance running, hurdles, jumps, throws, combined events and racewalking. These records are continually updated; they symbolize athletes’ efforts and serve as a common benchmark under an established system.