Li Ning
Rebeca Andrade
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Li Ning leads 2 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Li Ning at #11 and Rebeca Andrade at #12.
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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.
The case for Rebeca Andrade
The best gymnast Latin America has produced and the only woman to beat Simone Biles in a major all-around final in a decade, taking the world title in Liverpool in 2022 while Biles was on hiatus. Andrade won Brazil's first Olympic gymnastics gold on vault in Tokyo in 2021 along with all-around silver, then returned in Paris in 2024 to win floor exercise ahead of Biles, with silver in the all-around and on vault and bronze with the Brazilian team — six Olympic medals in total, making her the most decorated Olympian in Brazilian history across all sports. She did it after three separate anterior cruciate ligament reconstructions, an injury history that ended most careers before hers began. Her Paris floor gold produced the image of the Games, with Biles and Jordan Chiles bowing to her on the podium, and she has become the single biggest driver of gymnastics participation in South America.