In 1988, a Finnish foreign correspondent named Rauli Virtanen became, as far as anyone can establish, the first person to have set foot in every country on earth. There were 170 of them at the time. He was a reporter; the travelling was largely a byproduct of the job.

By April 2025, roughly 400 people had been verified as having done it, according to NomadMania, the organisation that has appointed itself the sport’s referee. In 2025 alone, 82 people claimed the achievement.

A thing one man did almost by accident is now a queue.

The stat is negotiable, which is the whole problem

Here is where travelmaxxing reveals itself as a maxxing discipline rather than a hobby: nobody agrees on the denominator.

The UN has 193 member states. Add the observers and you get 195. Some record-keepers use 197. The Travelers’ Century Club, founded in 1954 and the closest thing the pursuit has to a founding institution, ignores sovereignty almost entirely and maintains its own list of countries and territories — you need to have visited 100 of them just to join. Enclaves count. Remote island groups administered from thousands of miles away count. Antarctica counts.

So “every country” isn’t a finish line. It’s a choice of scoreboard, and every scoreboard is longer than the last one. This is the same structural comedy that runs through the PSL scale and through card grading: the moment a number becomes achievable, someone produces a finer-grained number underneath it.

Which is how you end up with people who have completed the world and are still, in a meaningful sense, behind.

Speedrunning the planet

Taylor Demonbreun holds the record for the fastest time to visit every sovereign country: one year and 189 days.

Do that arithmetic. Around 195 countries in roughly 554 days is a new country every two and a half days, sustained for a year and a half, including the ones requiring visas obtained in person from embassies in third countries, the ones with no functioning airport, and the ones actively discouraging visitors. There is no version of that itinerary containing an afternoon off.

And it is, unmistakably, a speedrun — the same shape as any other. Route optimisation, glitchless category, a contested ruleset about what counts as “visiting” (airport transit: generally no; a night’s sleep: generally yes), and a community that verifies submissions with the seriousness of a sanctioning body. NomadMania exists precisely because the claim needs auditing. People have been caught inflating.

The New Game Plus

Then there is the detail that makes this piece worth writing.

Four travellers have been confirmed to have visited every country twice. Two more are actively working on it, including an 80-year-old Spaniard, Juan Luis Galatas.

Sit with that. You have completed the map. There is no country left that you have not stood in. The stat is maxed, permanently, and it cannot be taken from you. And the response — for at least six people alive right now — is to go back to the beginning and run it again on a fresh save.

And why wouldn’t you. The first lap is reconnaissance — visas, logistics, a night here and a night there, half of it spent solving problems. The second lap is the one where you actually know what you’re doing: which border post opens late, which country you rushed and owe another week, which people you want to see again. Round two is round one with competence.

That is the part outsiders miss about a completed list. It isn’t a trophy you retire with. It’s a map of everywhere you now have a reason to return to, which is a substantially better object than a bucket list — the Spain crowd found one place worth going all in on, and these people found a hundred and ninety.

The queue keeps growing, the scoreboards keep getting longer, and an octogenarian is somewhere out there on his second time around the planet. Whatever the ruleset says, that’s a magnificent way to spend your eighties, and he got there by treating the world as something you could finish — which is precisely the belief that got him around it twice.