Vitaly Scherbo
Li Ning
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The verdict
Vitaly Scherbo leads 4 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Vitaly Scherbo at #6 and Li Ning at #11.
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The case for Vitaly Scherbo
In eight days in Barcelona in 1992 he won six Olympic gold medals — team, all-around, pommel horse, rings, vault and parallel bars — the most ever won by a gymnast at a single Games and a haul no athlete in any sport had matched at a Summer Olympics since Mark Spitz. Competing for the Unified Team as the Soviet Union dissolved around him, he was so far ahead of the field that he won four apparatus finals on a single day. He added the world all-around title in Birmingham in 1993 and finished with a record 12 World Championship golds among 23 world medals. Atlanta 1996 came after a car accident that seriously injured his wife and derailed his training; he still returned to win four bronze medals, taking his Olympic total to 10. His peak was short and his consistency never matched Uchimura's, but no male gymnast has ever compressed so much dominance into so little time.
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.