Jackie Joyner-Kersee
Fanny Blankers-Koen
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Dead even across the measured categories. Our all-time ranking places Jackie Joyner-Kersee at #8 and Fanny Blankers-Koen at #12.
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The case for Jackie Joyner-Kersee
Widely called the greatest female athlete of the twentieth century, Joyner-Kersee dominated the most demanding event in the sport. Her heptathlon world record of 7,291 points, set at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, still stands nearly four decades later and remains one of the most durable marks in athletics. She won three Olympic golds — heptathlon in 1988 and 1992, long jump in 1988 — plus a silver and two bronzes across four Games, and added four World Championship titles. She was simultaneously a world-class long jumper, with a best of 7.49m that ranks among the finest ever, and a sub-13-second hurdler, a range of abilities almost no one else has combined. Battling asthma throughout her career, she set the standard for the multi-event athlete: fast enough to sprint, strong enough to throw, springy enough to jump, and tough enough to do all seven over two exhausting days.
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.