The official record of cubing sets down everything that has ever happened in the sport. Without meaning to, it also sets down the times when nothing happened at all, and no stretch of nothing compares to the one in the middle of the chart above. In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic closed the world's venues, the number of competitions fell from a normal hundred-plus a month to 29. Then, for three whole months, the record stops. April 2020: no competitions, anywhere on earth. May: none. June: none.
Cubing had not gone even one month without a competition anywhere since February 2006. It now went a full quarter of a year without a single official solve.
The record book felt it too. The last world records of the old world were set on 25 January 2020 at Houston Winter 2020, where Max Park broke the 5×5, 6×6 and 7×7 records in a single weekend. After that: silence for 223 days, the longest the record book has gone without a new world record in the whole modern history of the sport. The silence was finally broken on 4 September 2020, at the Danish Championship, when Martin Vædele Egdal turned a Square-1, the sliced puzzle that changes shape as it turns, through a solve of 4.59 seconds.
Denmark, in fact, had already restarted the sport. The first competition anywhere on earth after the three lost months ran on 11 July 2020, with 38 competitors, and its name in the official record is a small monument to the whole period: Lonely Denmark 2020.
The scale of what went missing is easiest to see in three pairs of numbers. In 2019 there were 1,328 competitions; in 2020 there were 240, and in 2021, 242. In 2019, 48,407 people competed; in 2021, 9,465. And in 2019, 27,871 people entered their first ever competition, a figure that collapsed to 4,608 and 4,438 in the two years that followed. Had the sport merely stood still at its 2019 rate, roughly 46,696 more people would have made a debut in those two years. They are the missing generation: solvers who would today be three or four years into their careers, and who instead appear in the database later, or not at all.
Then comes the strangest fact of the whole period. The sport came back faster than it left. The typical competition final of 2019 was won with an 8.58 average; by 2021, among the couple of hundred competitions that dared to run, it took 7.63. Two years of solvers stuck at home with a timer raised the standard instead of freezing it. Part of that is an accident of geography, because the competitions still running were in the fastest scenes on earth. But when the full calendar returned, the level stayed. The winning standard, examined elsewhere in this edition, never went back.
The crowds came back bigger still. From 242 competitions in 2021, the calendar rebounded to 1,082 in 2022, then 2,134 in 2023, then 2,713 in 2024, the biggest year in the history of the sport and double the size of 2019. The two lost years now sit in the middle of the sport's census as a strange flat notch, the only interruption since the sport woke in 2003.
The record book has no asterisks and offers no explanations. A reader in 2050, scrolling this database, will simply find a quarter of a year in which the whole sport records nothing, one Danish competition named Lonely, and a 223-day hole in the world-record timeline between Max Park's Houston weekend and a Square-1 in Roskilde. The gap deserves its caption.
Competition, competitor and debut counts from the WCA results export of 6 September 2026; record-gap computed across all world-record dates. Recomputed nightly.