Katarina Witt
Evgeni Plushenko
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Evgeni Plushenko leads 3 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Katarina Witt at #6 and Evgeni Plushenko at #12.
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The case for Katarina Witt
The most watched skater of the television era and the last woman before the quadruple age to defend an Olympic title. Witt won gold at Sarajevo 1984 and Calgary 1988, the first back-to-back women's champion since Sonja Henie, and added four world titles in 1984, 1985, 1987 and 1988 plus six consecutive European championships from 1983. Calgary produced the Battle of the Carmens, in which she and the American Debi Thomas skated to the same score; Witt won on presentation with the more conservative technical content, a result that crystallised the sport's permanent argument between difficulty and performance. She was trained in Karl-Marx-Stadt by Jutta Müller, in the most systematic skating program East Germany ever built, and competed under state surveillance that later filled a Stasi file thousands of pages long. After reunification she became a global commercial figure, and she returned as a reinstated professional to the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics, finishing seventh with a program dedicated to Sarajevo under siege.
The case for Evgeni Plushenko
The last great champion of the 6.0 system and the first to master the one that replaced it. Plushenko won four Olympic medals across four Games: silver at Salt Lake City 2002, gold at Turin 2006, silver at Vancouver 2010 and team gold at Sochi 2014. He added three world titles, seven European championships, four Grand Prix Finals and ten Russian national titles, a haul no male skater of the modern era approaches. He was the first to land a quadruple toe loop, triple toe loop, triple loop combination, in 1999, pushing the era's technical ceiling while retaining the flexibility for a Biellmann spin that almost no man had attempted. His long rivalry with Alexei Yagudin, settled when Yagudin swept Salt Lake City with a free skate that drew perfect 6.0s, produced the most-watched men's competition in Russian skating history. A career shadowed by more than a dozen operations on his back and knees ended at Sochi, where he withdrew from the individual event minutes before he was due to skate.