Sergey Bubka
Jackie Joyner-Kersee
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 Sergey Bubka at #6 and Jackie Joyner-Kersee at #8.
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.
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.