Paavo Nurmi
Haile Gebrselassie
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 Paavo Nurmi at #3 and Haile Gebrselassie at #9.
The case for Paavo Nurmi
The Flying Finn defined distance running for a generation. Between 1920 and 1928 Nurmi won nine Olympic gold medals and three silvers — twelve in all, still the most any track and field athlete has won at the Games — across distances from 1500m to the 10,000m and cross country. At the 1924 Paris Olympics he won five golds, including the 1500m and 5000m finals barely an hour apart, running each with a stopwatch in his hand to hold an exact pace. Over his career he set 22 official world records at distances from 1500m to 20 kilometres. Nurmi ran with a metronomic, even-paced style that was revolutionary in an age of erratic racing, and his mastery of tempo effectively invented modern pacing. The Finnish state built its athletic identity around him, and the flame at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics was lit by Nurmi himself — the sport's first true international superstar.
The case for Haile Gebrselassie
For a decade Gebrselassie was distance running, and then he reinvented himself on the roads. On the track he won the Olympic 10,000m in 1996 and 2000 — the second in one of the greatest races ever, edging Paul Tergat by nine hundredths of a second — and took four consecutive world 10,000m titles from 1993 to 1999. Across his career he set 27 world records at distances from 2000m to the marathon, an astonishing spread of speed and endurance. Moving up to the marathon, he ran 2:03:59 in Berlin in 2008 to become the first man under 2:04. His duels with Tergat and his beaming, arms-pumping finishing sprint made him one of the sport's most beloved figures. Few athletes have owned both the 10,000m and the full marathon at world-record level; Gebrselassie owned everything in between too.