Kohei Uchimura
Vitaly Scherbo
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Vitaly Scherbo leads 4 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Kohei Uchimura at #3 and Vitaly Scherbo at #6.
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 Vitaly Scherbo
In eight days in Barcelona in 1992 he won six Olympic gold medals — team, all-around, pommel horse, rings, vault and parallel bars — the most ever won by a gymnast at a single Games and a haul no athlete in any sport had matched at a Summer Olympics since Mark Spitz. Competing for the Unified Team as the Soviet Union dissolved around him, he was so far ahead of the field that he won four apparatus finals on a single day. He added the world all-around title in Birmingham in 1993 and finished with a record 12 World Championship golds among 23 world medals. Atlanta 1996 came after a car accident that seriously injured his wife and derailed his training; he still returned to win four bronze medals, taking his Olympic total to 10. His peak was short and his consistency never matched Uchimura's, but no male gymnast has ever compressed so much dominance into so little time.