Vera Caslavska
Li Ning
Stat by stat
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The verdict
Vera Caslavska leads 3 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Vera Caslavska at #4 and Li Ning at #11.
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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 Li Ning
The Prince of Gymnasts, and the athlete who announced China as a gymnastics superpower. At the 1982 World Cup in Zagreb he won six of the seven gold medals on offer, a haul with no parallel in the sport, and at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 he took six medals from a single Games — gold on floor, pommel horse and rings, silver in the team event and on vault, and bronze in the all-around. He was a specialist rather than an all-around champion, and his floor and rings work in particular set the technical template that Chinese coaching would refine for the next four decades into Olympic sweeps in Beijing. His second act was as consequential as his first: he founded the Li-Ning sportswear company in 1990, built it into one of China's largest brands, and in 2008 was hoisted into the air to run around the rim of the Bird's Nest and light the Olympic cauldron in front of his own country.