Sonja Henie
Yuna Kim
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 Yuna Kim at #11.
Head-to-head FAQ
Who leads more shared metrics?
How do the published ranks compare?
Are these live stats?
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 Yuna Kim
The most complete competitor of the pre-quadruple women's era, and the skater who built a sport in a country that did not have one. Kim won Olympic gold at Vancouver 2010 with a world-record 228.56, finishing 23 points clear of Mao Asada in the largest winning margin the modern system has produced at a Games, and took silver at Sochi 2014 in a result still disputed by judges and federations alike. She won world titles in 2009 and 2013 and the 2009 Four Continents, and was the first woman to pass 200 points overall, scoring 207.71 at the 2009 World Championships in Los Angeles. She never finished off the podium at a senior ISU championship. South Korea had almost no figure skating infrastructure when she began; by Vancouver her free skate commanded a national audience share that emptied streets, and rink construction and youth registration followed within a few years. Textbook technique, and a competition record close to flawless.