Sawao Kato
Boris Shakhlin
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Dead even across the measured categories. Our all-time ranking places Sawao Kato at #8 and Boris Shakhlin at #9.
The case for Sawao Kato
No male gymnast has won more Olympic gold medals. Kato took eight golds and 12 medals in total across Mexico City 1968, Munich 1972 and Montreal 1976, and he is one of only two men to win the Olympic all-around title twice in the modern era, taking it in 1968 and 1972. He was the central figure in the most durable dynasty the men's sport has produced: Japan won five consecutive Olympic team titles from 1960 to 1976, and Kato was on the last three of them. His strength was parallel bars, where he won gold in both 1972 and 1976, but his reputation rested on a technical purity that Japanese coaching has pursued ever since — the priority on line, amplitude and stuck landings that Kohei Uchimura would inherit two generations later. He competed the 1972 Games with a shoulder injury that would have ended most careers and still won three golds.
The case for Boris Shakhlin
Known as the Man of Iron for a competitive composure that never visibly broke, Shakhlin won 13 Olympic medals across 1956, 1960 and 1964 — seven gold, four silver and two bronze — the second-highest total by any male gymnast. Rome 1960 was his defining Games: he won the all-around, pommel horse, vault and parallel bars, four golds in a single Olympics, and he added the world all-around title in Moscow in 1958 to complete the set. He also collected ten World Championship medals in an era when the Soviet men's team was so deep that selection was harder than the competition itself. Shakhlin's specialism was the apparatus that punish nerve rather than power — pommel horse above all, where he won Olympic gold in 1960 and again in 1964 at the age of 32. His duel with Japan's rising generation defined men's gymnastics through the late 1950s and early 1960s.