Vitaly Scherbo
Svetlana Khorkina
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Vitaly Scherbo leads 4 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Vitaly Scherbo at #6 and Svetlana Khorkina at #10.
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 Svetlana Khorkina
The most successful uneven bars gymnast in history and the last great stylist of the 10.0 era. Khorkina won three world all-around titles — 1997, 2001 and 2003 — a record for a woman until Biles, and took 20 World Championship medals including nine golds. Her two Olympic titles both came on uneven bars, in Atlanta in 1996 and Sydney in 2000, and she finished with seven Olympic medals. At 1.65 metres she was far taller than the sport's template, which made her a liability on vault and beam but gave her uneven bars work an amplitude nobody could copy; several elements in the Code of Points carry her name. Her career also captured the era's controversies, from the miscalibrated vaulting horse that wrecked the 2000 Olympic all-around final to her outspoken and often bitter public criticism of the judging that denied her the one title she wanted most.