Carl Lewis
Sergey Bubka
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Carl Lewis leads 2 of 2 categories. Our all-time ranking places Carl Lewis at #2 and Sergey Bubka at #6.
The case for Carl Lewis
Voted Sportsman of the Century by the IOC, Lewis bridged sprinting and jumping like no one before or since. He won nine Olympic golds across four Games from 1984 to 1996, including the long jump at all four — a twelve-year reign in a single event — plus the 100m, 200m and sprint relays. His long-jump dominance was almost absurd: he went unbeaten in the event for a decade, winning 65 consecutive competitions between 1981 and 1991 before Mike Powell finally beat him with a world record. He added eight World Championship golds and a 100m world record of 9.86 in 1991. The knock on Lewis is that many of his sprint titles came in a doping-riddled era and that he never broke the long-jump world record himself, but his combination of range, longevity and championship temperament — he rarely lost when a medal was on the line — puts him second on nearly every serious list.
The case for Sergey Bubka
Bubka owned the pole vault so completely that he made a business of the record book. He broke the world record 35 times — 17 outdoors and 18 indoors — famously raising it a centimetre at a time to collect appearance bonuses, and became the first human to clear both 6.00m (in 1985) and 6.10m. His outdoor record of 6.14m, set in 1994, stood for 26 years until Armand Duplantis surpassed it in 2020. He won six consecutive World Championship titles between 1983 and 1997, an unmatched run of global dominance. The paradox is his single Olympic gold, in Seoul 1988: freak weather, injury and one catastrophic no-height in Barcelona 1992 denied a vaulter who was, on any given day, untouchable. Judged on the event he transformed and the records he stockpiled, Bubka is the most dominant field-event athlete the sport has produced.