Allyson Felix
Fanny Blankers-Koen
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Allyson Felix leads 2 of 2 categories. Our all-time ranking places Allyson Felix at #11 and Fanny Blankers-Koen at #12.
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The case for Allyson Felix
Felix retired as the most decorated athlete in World Championships history — 20 medals, 14 of them gold — and the most decorated American in Olympic track and field, with 11 Olympic medals including seven golds across five Games from 2004 to 2020. A 200m and 400m specialist who became the sport's greatest relay weapon, she anchored and split for US teams that seemed unbeatable, while also winning individual world titles at both distances. Her longevity was extraordinary: she medalled at global championships in three different decades. Off the track she became an equally important figure, publicly challenging her sponsor over maternity protections after a dangerous pregnancy in 2018 and helping force change across the industry. Judged on sustained excellence and sheer accumulation of championship medals, no woman in the sport's history collected more, and few did so while reshaping its business as profoundly.
The case for Fanny Blankers-Koen
Voted the IAAF Female Athlete of the Twentieth Century, Blankers-Koen produced one of the greatest single Olympics of all time. At the 1948 London Games, a 30-year-old mother of two — mocked in the press as too old to compete — won four gold medals in the 100m, 200m, 80m hurdles and 4x100m relay, the most by any woman at a single Olympics. The tragedy is how much more she might have won: competition rules limited her to four events, yet she simultaneously held world records in the high jump and long jump, and at one point held world records in as many as six different disciplines at once. The Second World War erased what should have been her peak years, from age 22 to 28. That she returned afterward to dominate sprints, hurdles and jumps simultaneously marks her as perhaps the most versatile woman the sport has seen.