Larisa Latynina
Li Ning
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The verdict
Larisa Latynina leads 4 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Larisa Latynina at #2 and Li Ning at #11.
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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 Li Ning
The Prince of Gymnasts, and the athlete who announced China as a gymnastics superpower. At the 1982 World Cup in Zagreb he won six of the seven gold medals on offer, a haul with no parallel in the sport, and at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 he took six medals from a single Games — gold on floor, pommel horse and rings, silver in the team event and on vault, and bronze in the all-around. He was a specialist rather than an all-around champion, and his floor and rings work in particular set the technical template that Chinese coaching would refine for the next four decades into Olympic sweeps in Beijing. His second act was as consequential as his first: he founded the Li-Ning sportswear company in 1990, built it into one of China's largest brands, and in 2008 was hoisted into the air to run around the rim of the Bird's Nest and light the Olympic cauldron in front of his own country.