Why they rank here
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.
Career profile
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