Thierry Omeyer
Andrey Lavrov
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Dead even across the measured categories. Our all-time ranking places Thierry Omeyer at #7 and Andrey Lavrov at #9.
The case for Thierry Omeyer
Routinely named by his peers as the best goalkeeper the sport has had, and the spine of the most successful national team ever assembled. Omeyer won Olympic gold in 2008 and 2012 and silver in 2016, four world titles with France (2009, 2011, 2015 and 2017) and three European Championships (2006, 2010 and 2014), and was IHF World Player of the Year in 2008, an award goalkeepers almost never win. At club level he took the Champions League four times, once with Montpellier and three times with THW Kiel, including the 2011-12 season in which Kiel won all 34 of their Bundesliga matches. His method was minimalist: a low, wide stance, almost no early commitment, and a willingness to leave one corner visible in order to invite the shot he had prepared for. He regularly finished major tournaments with save rates near forty percent, the informal threshold that separates a very good goalkeeper from a tournament-winning one.
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.