At the beginning of this video, you'll see it takes me exactly 9.85 seconds to get from one end of the beach to the sandcastle.
Next, what you want to do is go into Sky World (you can glitch inside the same way you glitch inside the boss' lair if you don't have enough stars) and head to the left.
What this blue powerup is supposed to do is give you flight which would kill you since there's lava right above you. Instead, we teleport to spawn and wait for the cooldown.
You see my time from one end of the beach to the other went from 9.85 seconds to 7.77 seconds. This difference will obviously increase in longer runs.
Credit to SnivyGames for originally showing me this.
When I made this leaderboard years ago, I made the leaderboard look... pretty damn ugly. Now, after all this time, I've changed the panel colour back to the default, I've updated the background to a screenshot of Grassy Hills, and I've given icons to 1st/2nd/3rd place in the form of the star in-game