Usain Bolt
Haile Gebrselassie
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Usain Bolt leads 2 of 2 categories. Our all-time ranking places Usain Bolt at #1 and Haile Gebrselassie at #9.
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 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.