Usain Bolt
Kenenisa Bekele
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 Kenenisa Bekele at #10.
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 Kenenisa Bekele
Bekele has a claim as the most complete distance runner ever measured. His world records of 12:37.35 for 5000m (2004) and 26:17.53 for 10,000m (2005) stood for roughly fifteen years, only falling in the super-shoe era. He won three Olympic golds — the 10,000m in 2004 and both the 5000m and 10,000m in 2008 — and five world track titles. On the country, he was untouchable: eleven World Cross Country titles between 2002 and 2008, winning the long and short course double in five straight years, a stretch of dominance over the sport's hardest terrain that no one else approaches. Late in his career he ran 2:01:41 in Berlin, at the time the second-fastest marathon in history, two seconds off the world record. Track, cross country and roads — Bekele reached the summit of all three, which almost no distance runner has done.