She is not new and she is not unknown. Yet she never ceases to dominate the headlines.

Svetlana Pankratova, the former Russian basketball player has become a talking matter once again after Falls Church News-Press published a feature about 41-year-old Pankratova who married Jack Gosnell in 2011, a resident of Falls Church, Virginia, and is now an assistant coach for the George Mason high school basketball team.

But that is not what she will always be known for. Pankratova holds the Guinness World Record for the longest legs of any woman living in the world. She is 6 feet 5 inches tall and her legs alone are 4 feet 4 inches (132 centimeters) long. She also has very large feet of size 13 (US) or 46 (EU). Considering that the average shoe size of woman is about 9, her feet seem to be considerably larger than the normal size.

The Guinness World Record held a round of publicity events before her record of the longest female legs were featured in its 2009 publication. According to the Guinness world record website, Pankratova from Russia was verified as having world's longest female legs in Torremolinos, Spain, July 8, 2003.

Born in Volgagrad in the erstwhile USSR in 1971, she was known as a record setting women's basketball player at Virginia Commonwealth University in Virginia from 1992 to 1995.

She appeared in Trafalgar Square in London in September 2008 with the then smallest man in the world, He Pingping, before his death in 2010. The event was held to promote the 2009 edition of Guinness World Records in which she was featured for the first time.

Pankratova told the News-Press that it had taken almost six years' work with the Guinness World Records team to achieve the task of naming her the woman with longest legs after a friend told her about the possibility that she could set the record. 

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