Sergey Bubka
Michael Johnson
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Michael Johnson leads 2 of 2 categories. Our all-time ranking places Sergey Bubka at #6 and Michael Johnson at #7.
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 Michael Johnson
Johnson ran with a bolt-upright, short-stride style that coaches said should not work and that no one could beat. In 1996 in Atlanta he became the only man to win the 200m and 400m at the same Olympics, and he did it by demolishing the 200m world record with 19.32 — a mark so far ahead of its time it stood for twelve years until Bolt. His 400m record of 43.18, set in 1999, lasted seventeen years. He won four Olympic golds and eight World Championship titles, and was never beaten in a 400m final at a global championship across a decade. Johnson turned the one-lap sprint into a discipline of controlled, even-paced power rather than lung-bursting panic, and his combination of the 200m and 400m in one body — two events with opposing demands — has no real parallel in the sport's history.