the greatest winning streak

The UConn women went for their 89th straight victory last night when they squared off against Florida State. With their win, they passed John Wooden’s famous UCLA men’s teams of the 1970s that put together the 88-game win streak that served as the gold standard in college basketball before Geno Auriemma’s women began their run. Yet neither of these two teams have the greatest winning streak in sports history.

With a streak that is nearly eight years long and counting, Dutch wheelchair tennis starlet Esther Vergeer has persevered from a spinal cord surgery at 8 years old which rendered her paraplegic to dominate the tennis courts like no other.

No matter the surface, Vergeer has known nothing but victory when she hits the court. Heading into next month’s Australian Open, the Dutchwoman is at 401 straight singles victories and counting. During that streak, further, Vergeer went over two years (from August 2004 to October 2006) without losing a single set — a stretch of 250 sets in which she was pushed to a thirteenth-game tiebreaker but once. Vergeer has won every Grand Slam tournament in which she’s competed in singles and all but her first (the 2002 Australian Open) in doubles. She’s taken seven singles and six doubles titles on the hard courts of Melbourne, all four editions of the French Open wheelchair tournament in both singles and doubles, both of the Wimbledon doubles tournaments held on the lawns of the All-England Club, and all five editions of the U.S. Open for both singles and doubles.