Kohei Uchimura
Nikolai Andrianov
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Dead even across the measured categories. Our all-time ranking places Kohei Uchimura at #3 and Nikolai Andrianov at #5.
The case for Kohei Uchimura
King Kohei won every all-around competition he entered from 2009 to 2016 — six consecutive world titles from 2009 to 2015 and Olympic golds in London and Rio — the longest unbroken run of all-around dominance in the sport's history, on the six-apparatus men's program where a single weak event ends a campaign. He finished with seven Olympic medals, three of them gold, and 21 World Championship medals including ten titles, and he did it in the open-ended era against fields deliberately built to attack his difficulty. His signature was the opposite of the arms race: he carried competitive but not extreme D-scores and won on execution, routinely posting the highest execution marks in the field on high bar and floor. In Rio 2016 he anchored Japan's first men's team gold in 12 years and won the all-around by 0.099 after Oleg Verniaiev led going into the final rotation.
The case for Nikolai Andrianov
The most decorated male gymnast in Olympic history, with 15 medals across three Games — seven gold, five silver and three bronze between 1972, 1976 and 1980 — a total that stood as the record for any male Olympian in any sport until Michael Phelps. Montreal 1976 was his masterpiece: he won the all-around, floor, rings and vault, taking four golds at a single Games in an era when Japan owned the men's team title. He added the world all-around crown in Strasbourg in 1978 and finished with 12 World Championship medals. Andrianov was the first great male all-arounder of the television age, technically complete across all six apparatus at a time when the Soviet system generally produced specialists, and he combined the vaulting power of a tumbler with the shoulder strength required for rings — a combination that remains rare. He later coached in Japan, where his influence fed directly into the country's subsequent revival.