Yuna Kim
Evgeni Plushenko
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Evgeni Plushenko leads 4 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Yuna Kim at #11 and Evgeni Plushenko at #12.
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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.
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.