Anja Andersen
Jackson Richardson
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Jackson Richardson leads 2 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Anja Andersen at #8 and Jackson Richardson at #12.
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The case for Anja Andersen
Handball's great disruptor. Andersen played centre back for Denmark with a combination of technical genius and open provocation - she talked, she gestured, she attempted shots nobody else would consider - and she was the engine of the team that changed the women's game. Denmark won the European Championship in 1994 and 1996, Olympic gold in Atlanta in 1996 and the world title in 1997, the year Andersen was named IHF World Player of the Year. Then it stopped: a heart condition forced her retirement in 1998 at 29, at the peak of her powers. She moved straight into coaching and was just as successful and just as combustible, building Slagelse into a European power that won successive Champions League titles in 2004 and 2005 while collecting bans of her own along the way. Denmark's women went on to win three consecutive Olympic golds from 1996 to 2004; Andersen started it.
The case for Jackson Richardson
The face of French handball before France became a superpower. Born on Reunion, Richardson was a centre back of dazzling acceleration and improvisation who was named IHF World Player of the Year in 1995, the year Les Barjots won France's first world title in Iceland. He won a second with the next generation, Les Costauds, in 2001 on home soil, and bracketed his career with Olympic medals sixteen years apart: bronze at Barcelona in 1992 and, at 39, gold at Beijing in 2008 in his final tournament, the medal that three decades of French handball had been building toward. His dreadlocks, his refusal to leave the French league for most of his prime and his status as the first genuinely famous handball player in France made him a national figure well beyond the sport. Everything France won in the decade after 2008 was built on foundations he laid.