Larisa Latynina
Boris Shakhlin
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Larisa Latynina leads 4 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Larisa Latynina at #2 and Boris Shakhlin at #9.
The case for Larisa Latynina
For 48 years she held the record for the most Olympic medals won by any athlete in any sport. Latynina took 18 across three Games — nine gold, five silver and four bronze in 1956, 1960 and 1964 — a total not surpassed until Michael Phelps in 2012, and still the record for a gymnast. She won the Olympic all-around in Melbourne in 1956 and again in Rome in 1960, added world all-around titles in 1958 and 1962, and finished with 14 World Championship medals including nine golds. She competed the entire 1958 World Championships while several months pregnant and won the all-around. Her era offered more medal opportunities than today's, but she also faced the strongest gymnastics nation on earth in her own selection trials, and after retiring she coached the Soviet women's team to three consecutive Olympic team titles from 1968 to 1976.
The case for Boris Shakhlin
Known as the Man of Iron for a competitive composure that never visibly broke, Shakhlin won 13 Olympic medals across 1956, 1960 and 1964 — seven gold, four silver and two bronze — the second-highest total by any male gymnast. Rome 1960 was his defining Games: he won the all-around, pommel horse, vault and parallel bars, four golds in a single Olympics, and he added the world all-around title in Moscow in 1958 to complete the set. He also collected ten World Championship medals in an era when the Soviet men's team was so deep that selection was harder than the competition itself. Shakhlin's specialism was the apparatus that punish nerve rather than power — pommel horse above all, where he won Olympic gold in 1960 and again in 1964 at the age of 32. His duel with Japan's rising generation defined men's gymnastics through the late 1950s and early 1960s.