Sonja Henie
Tessa Virtue & Scott Moir
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Sonja Henie leads 2 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Sonja Henie at #2 and Tessa Virtue & Scott Moir at #10.
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 Tessa Virtue & Scott Moir
The most decorated figure skaters in Olympic history, with five medals across three Games. The Canadians won ice dance gold at Vancouver 2010, the first North American couple ever to take the title and the youngest champions the discipline had produced, then silver in the dance and silver in the team event at Sochi 2014, then gold in both at Pyeongchang 2018. They added three world titles in 2010, 2012 and 2017, three Four Continents titles and eight Canadian championships, having skated together since the ages of seven and nine. Their Pyeongchang free dance to music from Moulin Rouge set a world record and closed a career defined by the deepest partnership the sport has seen, with edges, breathing and body angles matched so precisely that unison effectively became a category of its own. They also survived a mid-career reinvention, moving their training base to Montreal and returning from a two-year competitive break to win everything again.