Steve Redgrave
Olaf Tufte
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Steve Redgrave leads 2 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Steve Redgrave at #1 and Olaf Tufte at #11.
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The case for Steve Redgrave
Five Olympic golds in five Games: the coxed four in 1984, the coxless pair in 1988, 1992 and 1996, and the coxless four in 2000. He also won an Olympic bronze in the coxed pair in 1988, six Olympic medals in all, and nine World Championship golds. No other man has won an Olympic rowing gold at five Games. The partners changed, from Andy Holmes to Matthew Pinsent to the Sydney four, which is the right way to read the record: the constant was the standard he required of the boat, including after a diabetes diagnosis on the way to Sydney.
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.