Simone Biles
Boris Shakhlin
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Simone Biles leads 2 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Simone Biles at #1 and Boris Shakhlin at #9.
The case for Simone Biles
The most decorated gymnast in the sport's history and the only one whose skills forced the rulebook to respond to her. Through Paris 2024 Biles holds 41 Olympic and World Championship medals, 30 of them gold: 11 Olympic medals including seven titles, and a record 30 world medals with a record 23 golds. She won six world all-around titles between 2013 and 2023 plus Olympic all-around golds in 2016 and 2024, and did not lose an all-around competition she completed for over a decade. Five elements bear her name across vault, beam and floor, including the triple-twisting double somersault on floor and the Yurchenko double pike vault, valued at 6.4 and never performed in competition by another woman. Her 2024 return, three years after withdrawing from the Tokyo team final with the twisties, added team, all-around and vault golds at 27 — an age at which almost every predecessor had retired.
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.