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Sport is often defined by mistakes — fumbled catches, missed penalties, duffed putts — but what about its moments of perfection?
Every game has its own version of nirvana in which, put simply, a performance could not be improved. Some may define a match or earn a medal, others may simply be brilliant individual achievements, regardless of whether they were in a winning cause.
But what constitutes the best? We asked a group of our writers to nominate their favorites — but feel free to suggest your own in the comments.
In Germany, for a hat-trick — scoring three goals in the same game — to be considered ‘genuine’, all three have to be scored in the same half, and without any other goals interrupting yours. It’s known as a ‘lupenreiner’, which translates roughly as ‘pure’, but that’s slightly different to a ‘perfect hat-trick’.
For that, the order in which the trio of goals are scored doesn’t matter — it’s more the method: one has to be scored with the player’s right foot, one with the left foot and one with their head.
There’s no greater satisfaction in sport than carefully caressing a little white ball into a slightly larger hole in the ground with a metal stick.
A hole-in-one, also known as an ace, is the most difficult accomplishment in golf as it requires a combination of perfect distance control and pinpoint accuracy.
There’s no better feeling than watching darts perfection, hammering that treble bed of dreams with a sharp tungsten tip lobbed from a couple of metres away as the crowd goes increasingly berserk.
A perfect passer rating is not a perfect statistic — it is messy, an equation which requires players to attempt at least 10 passes, not throw an interception, have a minimum completion rate of 77.5 per cent, a minimum average of 12.5 yards per attempt, and to throw a touchdown roughly once every eight passes.
A buzzer-beater in the play-off game is fairly common. So to make this a little bit more special, let’s only focus on play-off games in the NBA.
Free soloing is when a climber summits a route a) alone and b) without using ropes. It’s extreme bodies doing extreme things in extreme situations.
But at the same time, achievements of this ilk are vanishingly rare. And that is because, unlike every other entry on this list, free soloing is perfect in two ways. The first is an aesthetic perfection, a simplicity and purity, in which the climber, shorn of equipment, faces nothing more than the challenge of the rock itself.
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