For me one of the strongest bit against this is that her daughter would have had to pull the wool over everyone in their towns eyes, or they would have had to have been in on it too.
After the mother's death, she keeps going about her life as usual, goes by her original name, does all the normal things she did before. On official documents she lists her mother's name but around friends or neighbours goes by whatever they want to call her. Maybe a lot of the neighbours know what's going on, but hey, we all want to avoid taxes, right? So it goes.
And gradually she starts going by the other name instead. People nod and understand if she corrects them. And eventually everyone around her that might prove otherwise dies off, moves away, or loses contact. Decades go by. Soon everyone remembers that older spritely woman who's always been around here.
Any photos or evidence that might prove her story false, well they go missing. The ones that confirm it stick around.
This is how all legends start, really.
Actually, the curious thing in this case is it kind of was:
"Curiously, her death certificate was issued on the basis of testimony of a sole witness, a 71-year-old unemployed woman (i.e. not a doctor or nurse) who “saw her dead”"
https://yurideigin.medium.com/jaccuse-why-122-year-longevity...
In France at the time (and maybe now?) there was no inheritance tax between spouses, but there is otherwise. The theory is that the father sees that his wife is dead and knows he only has so many years, but doesn't want to give the tax man any of his money. So they say "ah no, this is my daughter who has died- my wife is right here beside me". Then when he dies, well it's a spouse inheritance to his "wife".
Raffray is the biggest sticking point in this fwiw - he had time and incentive to debunk Calment's age, and had some preexisting relationship with her before they entered their contract.
When her extraordinary claims of old age became famous many decades later, well, have you ever seen family members arguing what really happened many decades ago? Doubts would have been hard to sustain.
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/rej.2018.2167 digs into this a bit.
The fallacy of thinking that winning a lottery is rare is common and has horrible effects like sending innocent people to jail on a regularly basis. For example, if you search Clearview AI for someone who is a 99.99% match for a surveillance picture of someone committing a crime, you should expect tens of thousands of matches. If the AI really did its job, it would return many hits along with a prominent warning that, with very high probability, any given one of these people did not commit a crime!
And, of course, someone always wins the lottery, since that’s the whole point.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Clark
>> Sir Roy Meadow, who testified that the chance of two children from an affluent family suffering SIDS was 1 in 73 million. He had arrived at this figure by squaring his estimate of a chance of 1 in 8500 of an individual SIDS death in similar circumstances. The Royal Statistical Society later issued a statement arguing that there was no statistical basis for Meadow's claim, and expressed concern at the "misuse of statistics in the courts".[3]
Give me a plausible and ordinary way to cheat the lotto and I guarantee you there will be a lot of cheats. But I don't know of any plausible way to cheat the lotto.
Also, yes, the probability that at least one person on earth was the 10 billion to 1 chance is high, but that doesn't mean the chances of her being that person is high. There's simply too much "fog of war" in her past, such as the "daughter" dying of tuberculosis at a convenient time.
Furthermore, the population of cricketers is not sampled randomly, but by selectors