Jackie Joyner-Kersee
Kenenisa Bekele
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Kenenisa Bekele leads 1 of 2 categories. Our all-time ranking places Jackie Joyner-Kersee at #8 and Kenenisa Bekele at #10.
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 Kenenisa Bekele
Bekele has a claim as the most complete distance runner ever measured. His world records of 12:37.35 for 5000m (2004) and 26:17.53 for 10,000m (2005) stood for roughly fifteen years, only falling in the super-shoe era. He won three Olympic golds — the 10,000m in 2004 and both the 5000m and 10,000m in 2008 — and five world track titles. On the country, he was untouchable: eleven World Cross Country titles between 2002 and 2008, winning the long and short course double in five straight years, a stretch of dominance over the sport's hardest terrain that no one else approaches. Late in his career he ran 2:01:41 in Berlin, at the time the second-fastest marathon in history, two seconds off the world record. Track, cross country and roads — Bekele reached the summit of all three, which almost no distance runner has done.