Larisa Latynina
Kohei Uchimura
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Kohei Uchimura leads 3 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Larisa Latynina at #2 and Kohei Uchimura at #3.
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 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.