Paavo Nurmi
Sergey Bubka
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 Sergey Bubka at #6.
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 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.