Simone Biles
Nadia Comaneci
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Simone Biles leads 4 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Simone Biles at #1 and Nadia Comaneci at #7.
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 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.