Usain Bolt
Carl Lewis
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 Usain Bolt at #1 and Carl Lewis at #2.
The case for Usain Bolt
The clearest number one in the sport's history. Bolt won the 100m and 200m at three consecutive Olympics — Beijing 2008, London 2012 and Rio 2016 — a sprint treble no one else has come close to, finishing with eight Olympic golds and eleven world titles. His 2009 World Championships in Berlin produced the two most extraordinary marks in track: 9.58 for 100m and 19.19 for 200m, both improved from his own records and both still untouched more than fifteen years later. He anchored Jamaica's 4x100m to 36.84 in 2012, another surviving world record. Beyond the numbers, Bolt did what no athlete had managed since Owens — he made track and field appointment television across the planet, filling stadiums and drawing hundreds of millions to the 100m final. He lost only a handful of finals in his prime and never lost one that mattered on the biggest stage. The margin at the top of any athletics ranking is his.
The case for Carl Lewis
Voted Sportsman of the Century by the IOC, Lewis bridged sprinting and jumping like no one before or since. He won nine Olympic golds across four Games from 1984 to 1996, including the long jump at all four — a twelve-year reign in a single event — plus the 100m, 200m and sprint relays. His long-jump dominance was almost absurd: he went unbeaten in the event for a decade, winning 65 consecutive competitions between 1981 and 1991 before Mike Powell finally beat him with a world record. He added eight World Championship golds and a 100m world record of 9.86 in 1991. The knock on Lewis is that many of his sprint titles came in a doping-riddled era and that he never broke the long-jump world record himself, but his combination of range, longevity and championship temperament — he rarely lost when a medal was on the line — puts him second on nearly every serious list.