🤸GOAT Rankings

For 48 years she held the record for the most Olympic medals won by any athlete in any sport. Latynina took 18 across three Games — nine gold, five silver and four bronze in 1956, 1960 and 1964 — a total not surpassed until Michael Phelps in 2012, and still the record for a gymnast. She won the Olympic all-around in Melbourne in 1956 and again in Rome in 1960, added world all-around titles in 1958 and 1962, and finished with 14 World Championship medals including nine golds. She competed the entire 1958 World Championships while several months pregnant and won the all-around. Her era offered more medal opportunities than today's, but she also faced the strongest gymnastics nation on earth in her own selection trials, and after retiring she coached the Soviet women's team to three consecutive Olympic team titles from 1968 to 1976.

King Kohei won every all-around competition he entered from 2009 to 2016 — six consecutive world titles from 2009 to 2015 and Olympic golds in London and Rio — the longest unbroken run of all-around dominance in the sport's history, on the six-apparatus men's program where a single weak event ends a campaign. He finished with seven Olympic medals, three of them gold, and 21 World Championship medals including ten titles, and he did it in the open-ended era against fields deliberately built to attack his difficulty. His signature was the opposite of the arms race: he carried competitive but not extreme D-scores and won on execution, routinely posting the highest execution marks in the field on high bar and floor. In Rio 2016 he anchored Japan's first men's team gold in 12 years and won the all-around by 0.099 after Oleg Verniaiev led going into the final rotation.

The only woman to win the Olympic all-around title twice in the modern era before Simone Biles, taking it in Tokyo in 1964 and again in Mexico City in 1968, and the only gymnast to win an individual Olympic gold on every apparatus of her time. She finished with 11 Olympic medals — seven gold and four silver — and world all-around titles in 1962 and 1966, breaking a Soviet monopoly almost single-handedly. Her 1968 campaign is the most extraordinary in the sport's history: she had signed the Two Thousand Words manifesto, fled to the mountains of Moravia after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and trained by swinging on tree branches and doing floor work in a meadow, then arrived in Mexico City and won four golds. On the podium for the shared beam and floor titles she turned her head down and away during the Soviet anthem, a protest that cost her the right to travel and compete for years afterwards.

The most decorated male gymnast in Olympic history, with 15 medals across three Games — seven gold, five silver and three bronze between 1972, 1976 and 1980 — a total that stood as the record for any male Olympian in any sport until Michael Phelps. Montreal 1976 was his masterpiece: he won the all-around, floor, rings and vault, taking four golds at a single Games in an era when Japan owned the men's team title. He added the world all-around crown in Strasbourg in 1978 and finished with 12 World Championship medals. Andrianov was the first great male all-arounder of the television age, technically complete across all six apparatus at a time when the Soviet system generally produced specialists, and he combined the vaulting power of a tumbler with the shoulder strength required for rings — a combination that remains rare. He later coached in Japan, where his influence fed directly into the country's subsequent revival.

In eight days in Barcelona in 1992 he won six Olympic gold medals — team, all-around, pommel horse, rings, vault and parallel bars — the most ever won by a gymnast at a single Games and a haul no athlete in any sport had matched at a Summer Olympics since Mark Spitz. Competing for the Unified Team as the Soviet Union dissolved around him, he was so far ahead of the field that he won four apparatus finals on a single day. He added the world all-around title in Birmingham in 1993 and finished with a record 12 World Championship golds among 23 world medals. Atlanta 1996 came after a car accident that seriously injured his wife and derailed his training; he still returned to win four bronze medals, taking his Olympic total to 10. His peak was short and his consistency never matched Uchimura's, but no male gymnast has ever compressed so much dominance into so little time.

The most famous single moment in gymnastics belongs to her. On 18 July 1976 in Montreal, aged 14, she scored the first perfect 10.00 in Olympic gymnastics history on the uneven bars; the scoreboard, built to display three digits, showed 1.00 because nobody had programmed it for the possibility. She recorded seven perfect tens at those Games and won the all-around, beam and uneven bars, becoming the youngest Olympic all-around champion ever — a record permanently protected by the age minimum introduced in 1997. In Moscow in 1980 she added beam and floor golds and a disputed all-around silver, finishing with nine Olympic medals, five of them gold. She also won the world beam title in 1978 and a world team gold with Romania in 1979, competing the beam final from a hospital bed with an infected hand. Her Montreal routines redefined what precision on the apparatus looked like.

No male gymnast has won more Olympic gold medals. Kato took eight golds and 12 medals in total across Mexico City 1968, Munich 1972 and Montreal 1976, and he is one of only two men to win the Olympic all-around title twice in the modern era, taking it in 1968 and 1972. He was the central figure in the most durable dynasty the men's sport has produced: Japan won five consecutive Olympic team titles from 1960 to 1976, and Kato was on the last three of them. His strength was parallel bars, where he won gold in both 1972 and 1976, but his reputation rested on a technical purity that Japanese coaching has pursued ever since — the priority on line, amplitude and stuck landings that Kohei Uchimura would inherit two generations later. He competed the 1972 Games with a shoulder injury that would have ended most careers and still won three golds.

Known as the Man of Iron for a competitive composure that never visibly broke, Shakhlin won 13 Olympic medals across 1956, 1960 and 1964 — seven gold, four silver and two bronze — the second-highest total by any male gymnast. Rome 1960 was his defining Games: he won the all-around, pommel horse, vault and parallel bars, four golds in a single Olympics, and he added the world all-around title in Moscow in 1958 to complete the set. He also collected ten World Championship medals in an era when the Soviet men's team was so deep that selection was harder than the competition itself. Shakhlin's specialism was the apparatus that punish nerve rather than power — pommel horse above all, where he won Olympic gold in 1960 and again in 1964 at the age of 32. His duel with Japan's rising generation defined men's gymnastics through the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The most successful uneven bars gymnast in history and the last great stylist of the 10.0 era. Khorkina won three world all-around titles — 1997, 2001 and 2003 — a record for a woman until Biles, and took 20 World Championship medals including nine golds. Her two Olympic titles both came on uneven bars, in Atlanta in 1996 and Sydney in 2000, and she finished with seven Olympic medals. At 1.65 metres she was far taller than the sport's template, which made her a liability on vault and beam but gave her uneven bars work an amplitude nobody could copy; several elements in the Code of Points carry her name. Her career also captured the era's controversies, from the miscalibrated vaulting horse that wrecked the 2000 Olympic all-around final to her outspoken and often bitter public criticism of the judging that denied her the one title she wanted most.

The Prince of Gymnasts, and the athlete who announced China as a gymnastics superpower. At the 1982 World Cup in Zagreb he won six of the seven gold medals on offer, a haul with no parallel in the sport, and at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 he took six medals from a single Games — gold on floor, pommel horse and rings, silver in the team event and on vault, and bronze in the all-around. He was a specialist rather than an all-around champion, and his floor and rings work in particular set the technical template that Chinese coaching would refine for the next four decades into Olympic sweeps in Beijing. His second act was as consequential as his first: he founded the Li-Ning sportswear company in 1990, built it into one of China's largest brands, and in 2008 was hoisted into the air to run around the rim of the Bird's Nest and light the Olympic cauldron in front of his own country.

The best gymnast Latin America has produced and the only woman to beat Simone Biles in a major all-around final in a decade, taking the world title in Liverpool in 2022 while Biles was on hiatus. Andrade won Brazil's first Olympic gymnastics gold on vault in Tokyo in 2021 along with all-around silver, then returned in Paris in 2024 to win floor exercise ahead of Biles, with silver in the all-around and on vault and bronze with the Brazilian team — six Olympic medals in total, making her the most decorated Olympian in Brazilian history across all sports. She did it after three separate anterior cruciate ligament reconstructions, an injury history that ended most careers before hers began. Her Paris floor gold produced the image of the Games, with Biles and Jordan Chiles bowing to her on the podium, and she has become the single biggest driver of gymnastics participation in South America.