Irina Rodnina
Dick Button
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Irina Rodnina leads 4 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Irina Rodnina at #3 and Dick Button at #5.
The case for Irina Rodnina
Undefeated for twelve years, and the only pair skater with three Olympic golds. Rodnina won at Sapporo 1972 with Alexei Ulanov, then, after Ulanov left for another partner, rebuilt from scratch with Alexander Zaitsev and won again at Innsbruck 1976 and Lake Placid 1980. In between she took ten consecutive world titles from 1969 to 1978 and eleven European championships, and she never lost a competition she entered across the whole of that career. Coached first by the ferocious Stanislav Zhuk and then by Tatiana Tarasova, she skated a style built on speed, absolute unison and an attacking tempo that made Soviet pairs the reference standard for four decades. The most famous performance came at the 1973 World Championships in Bratislava, where the music cut out roughly ninety seconds into the free skate; Rodnina and Zaitsev completed the entire program in silence and won anyway. Dismantling a championship partnership and winning two more Olympic titles with a new one is an achievement nobody else on this list attempted.
The case for Dick Button
The man who turned figure skating from a drawing exercise into an athletic event. Button won two Olympic titles, at St. Moritz 1948 and Oslo 1952, five consecutive world championships from 1948 to 1952, seven straight United States titles, and the 1948 European Championship, the only non-European ever to win it before the ISU closed the event to outsiders. He landed the first double Axel in competition at the 1948 Olympics and the first triple jump of any kind, a triple loop, at Oslo in 1952, and invented the flying camel spin still known in some rinks as the Button camel. He retired at 22, took a Harvard law degree, and then spent nearly five decades as American television's voice of the sport, winning an Emmy and shaping how tens of millions of casual viewers understood what they were watching. No skater has combined technical invention, competitive dominance and long-term influence over the audience quite so completely.