Cristina Neagu
Andrey Lavrov
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Andrey Lavrov leads 2 of 2 categories. Our all-time ranking places Cristina Neagu at #5 and Andrey Lavrov at #9.
The case for Cristina Neagu
The only player of either sex to win the IHF World Player of the Year award four times, in 2010, 2015, 2016 and 2018, and the all-time leading scorer in the EHF Champions League. Neagu is the argument that individual greatness and team silverware are separable. Romania have not won a major senior title in her lifetime, and their best result in her era was World Championship bronze in 2015, a tournament in which she was both top scorer and most valuable player. At club level she won three Champions Leagues, with Buducnost in 2012 and 2015 and CSM Bucuresti in 2016, and she has scored more than 1,000 goals for Romania. A left back who shoots from a standing position with a whip-like release rather than a jump, she twice ruptured a cruciate ligament, in 2012 and 2018, and both times came back to win the world award. In a sport dominated by a handful of federations, she is its most celebrated individual from outside them.
The case for Andrey Lavrov
Three Olympic gold medals, won under three different flags, across twelve years. Lavrov kept goal for the Soviet Union when they won in Seoul in 1988, for the Unified Team in Barcelona in 1992, and for Russia in Sydney in 2000, then added a bronze in Athens in 2004 at the age of 42 - a span of Olympic relevance no other handball player has matched. In between he won world titles with Russia in 1993 and 1997 and the European Championship in 1996, the peak of the post-Soviet Russian side. He was a goalkeeper of extreme physical courage in an era when defenders were permitted more contact and shots arrived harder and flatter, and his reading of wing shooters was considered untouchable. He later coached and worked in the Russian federation. For most of the sport's history his three Olympic golds were simply the record, and only Karabatic and Katrine Lunde have since equalled them.