Larisa Latynina
Nadia Comaneci
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 Nadia Comaneci at #7.
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 Nadia Comaneci
The most famous single moment in gymnastics belongs to her. On 18 July 1976 in Montreal, aged 14, she scored the first perfect 10.00 in Olympic gymnastics history on the uneven bars; the scoreboard, built to display three digits, showed 1.00 because nobody had programmed it for the possibility. She recorded seven perfect tens at those Games and won the all-around, beam and uneven bars, becoming the youngest Olympic all-around champion ever — a record permanently protected by the age minimum introduced in 1997. In Moscow in 1980 she added beam and floor golds and a disputed all-around silver, finishing with nine Olympic medals, five of them gold. She also won the world beam title in 1978 and a world team gold with Romania in 1979, competing the beam final from a hospital bed with an infected hand. Her Montreal routines redefined what precision on the apparatus looked like.