Ok, now I get the point you were trying to make. The lottery parallel still doesn't feel the most apt; the definition you specify ensures that you will always

Ok, now I get the point you were trying to make. The lottery parallel still doesn't feel the most apt; the definition you specify ensures that you will always have such a person (who lived to be the oldest, and who had the largest gap with the previous record holder) for n > 1 people. In that sense it is recurrent, unlike winning the lottery, which no one has until someone does (or winning in a raffle, where we know that there will aways be a winner due to the very definition of the game). Regardless, none of that helps us determine any further how plausible Calment's statistically anomalous record is.