Vera Caslavska
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 Vera Caslavska at #4 and Boris Shakhlin at #9.
The case for Vera Caslavska
The only woman to win the Olympic all-around title twice in the modern era before Simone Biles, taking it in Tokyo in 1964 and again in Mexico City in 1968, and the only gymnast to win an individual Olympic gold on every apparatus of her time. She finished with 11 Olympic medals — seven gold and four silver — and world all-around titles in 1962 and 1966, breaking a Soviet monopoly almost single-handedly. Her 1968 campaign is the most extraordinary in the sport's history: she had signed the Two Thousand Words manifesto, fled to the mountains of Moravia after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and trained by swinging on tree branches and doing floor work in a meadow, then arrived in Mexico City and won four golds. On the podium for the shared beam and floor titles she turned her head down and away during the Soviet anthem, a protest that cost her the right to travel and compete for years afterwards.
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.