Sonja Henie
Nathan Chen
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Sonja Henie leads 4 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Sonja Henie at #2 and Nathan Chen at #9.
The case for Sonja Henie
The most dominant competitor the sport has produced and the woman who invented its commercial future. Henie won ten consecutive world titles from 1927 to 1936, six European championships, and Olympic gold at St. Moritz 1928, Lake Placid 1932 and Garmisch-Partenkirchen 1936, a total of three matched only by Gillis Grafström and Irina Rodnina. She had finished last at her first Olympics in 1924, aged eleven. Her influence ran well past results: she raised the skating skirt to mid-calf, wore white boots rather than black, and imported ballet training and full choreography into a discipline that had been an exercise in tracing figures on ice, changing what women's skating looked like within a decade. After Garmisch she turned professional, signed with 20th Century Fox and became one of the highest-paid film stars in Hollywood, while her touring ice revues created the template every ice show since has followed. Nobody has matched ten straight world titles in singles, and nobody has converted the sport into that scale of mainstream celebrity.
The case for Nathan Chen
The skater who solved the quadruple era arithmetically. Chen won Olympic gold at Beijing 2022 with a world-record short program of 113.97, took three world titles in 2018, 2019 and 2021, six consecutive United States championships from 2017, and three straight Grand Prix Finals. He did not lose a completed competition between the 2018 World Championships and his Olympic title, a four-year run through the deepest men's field ever assembled. His signature was volume and repeatability rather than a single trick: after a disastrous short program at Pyeongchang 2018 he answered with a free skate carrying six quadruple attempts, the most technically loaded program skated to that point, and climbed from seventeenth to fifth. His 335.30 at the 2019 Grand Prix Final in Turin, built on 110.38 and a free skate of 224.92, set the world-record total under the ISU Judging System. He did much of it while enrolled at Yale, commuting between New Haven and California to train.