Yes, you'd expect records to always keep falling given a fixed distribution, but it will slow down fast. The expected maximum of _n_ random samples is roughly l

Yes, you'd expect records to always keep falling given a fixed distribution, but it will slow down fast. The expected maximum of _n_ random samples is roughly log(n) in size (formulas: https://www.gwern.net/Order-statistics https://www.gwern.net/Order-statistics ), so you need to increase dramatically to noticeably increase the maximum. Or to put it another way, since a record is defined as 'beating all previous samples', the chance of the next sample setting a record is always 1/n. So if you have m entrants per year adding to that total n, the probability is always positive, but it quickly becomes very small.