Usain Bolt
Jackie Joyner-Kersee
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 Jackie Joyner-Kersee at #8.
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 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.