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