Elisabeta Lipă
Olaf Tufte
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Elisabeta Lipă leads 4 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Elisabeta Lipă at #2 and Olaf Tufte at #11.
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The case for Elisabeta Lipă
Five Olympic golds and eight Olympic medals across six Games, from Los Angeles 1984 to Athens 2004. She raced in more than one boat class as Romanian women's rowing rebuilt itself around a small group of athletes who simply kept qualifying. The five golds match Redgrave's. The eight medals do not: nobody in the sport has a longer Olympic medal list. A ranking that only counts men's sweep rowing misses the most decorated career the regatta has produced.
The case for Olaf Tufte
Olympic champion in the men's single in 2004 and again in 2008, with a bronze in the same boat in 2016. Two Olympic titles in the single, a Games apart, is a rarer double than a pair that stays together, because the single is reselected from the whole world every year. Tufte's place behind Drysdale is the one-gold difference plus Drysdale's world-title run, not a claim that Athens and Beijing were small races. They were the event.