🚣GOAT Rankings

Five Olympic golds and eight Olympic medals across six Games, from Los Angeles 1984 to Athens 2004. She raced in more than one boat class as Romanian women's rowing rebuilt itself around a small group of athletes who simply kept qualifying. The five golds match Redgrave's. The eight medals do not: nobody in the sport has a longer Olympic medal list. A ranking that only counts men's sweep rowing misses the most decorated career the regatta has produced.

Five Olympic golds in three Games. In Sydney she won the women's pair and the eight. In Athens she won the double and the eight. In Beijing she won the eight again. The career is shorter than Lipă's and just as heavy in gold. It is also a reminder that rowing medals are boat results: Damian's five golds include races she could not have won as a single athlete, and races the Romanian eight kept winning after the rest of the sport had started to plan against them.

Four Olympic golds, all of them, from the coxless pair with Redgrave in 1992 and 1996 to the coxless fours of 2000 and 2004. He is the other half of the pair that carried British rowing from Barcelona to Atlanta, and then the stroke-side constant of the fours that followed. Four golds in four Games, with no Olympic medal of another colour, is as clean a sweep career as the sport has. Redgrave's fifth gold is the reason Pinsent sits fourth rather than beside him.

Four Olympic golds in German sculling, across the double and the quad, from Barcelona 1992 to Athens 2004. Where Redgrave and Pinsent owned sweep boats, Boron owned the two-oar side of the regatta through the same years. The career sits inside the German programme that followed unification, and it is the women's sculling counterpart to Pinsent's four-for-four. Count golds and Games and she belongs in this group. Count only British pairs and she disappears, which is a bad way to rank the sport.

Three consecutive Olympic golds in the men's single, at Montreal 1976, Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984. He raced on into 1988. The single is the only Olympic boat in which the result cannot be shared, and doing it three times in a row had been done before, by Ivanov, and has not become ordinary since. Karppinen's case is that narrowness: no eight to lean on, no partner to make the middle thousand easier, three Games as the first boat.

The first man to win three consecutive Olympic single-scull golds, in 1956, 1960 and 1964. World Championships were not there for the start of the run. The achievement is the Olympic one, and it is the template Karppinen later matched. Ivanov sits just behind him here because the later streak came against a deeper international field and a settled 2,000-metre championship. That is a judgement about eras, and it is open to the opposite reading: Ivanov did it first.

With Eric Murray he won the men's coxless pair at London 2012 and Rio 2016, after world titles in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014 and 2015. The pair became the example of a boat other countries tried to copy and could not catch on the day. Bond then moved to the eight and won a third Olympic gold in Tokyo. Murray's Olympic tally is the two pair golds. The ranking uses Bond's name because the third gold is his; the achievement the sport actually remembers is the pair.

Two Olympic golds in the women's single, at Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000, then silver in 2004 and 2008 and bronze in 2012. Five Olympic medals in the event that offers nowhere to hide. The golds are fewer than Boron's or Lipă's. The years on the podium are the argument: five Games, five medals, in the single. A list that only promotes undefeated crews underrates a sculler who stayed in the medals while the rest of the field changed.

Olympic bronze in the men's single in 2008, silver in 2012, gold in 2016, when he held off Damir Martin in a photo finish. He also won world titles in the single in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009 and 2011. The Olympic gold came last, which is the awkward shape of a single-scull career: the world titles proved the speed, and Rio was the race the sport had been waiting for him to close. One Olympic gold does not top a five-gold crew career. Five years as the world single, plus a full Olympic medal set, is why he is on this list.

Olympic champion in the men's single in 2004 and again in 2008, with a bronze in the same boat in 2016. Two Olympic titles in the single, a Games apart, is a rarer double than a pair that stays together, because the single is reselected from the whole world every year. Tufte's place behind Drysdale is the one-gold difference plus Drysdale's world-title run, not a claim that Athens and Beijing were small races. They were the event.

Olympic champion in the women's single at the Tokyo Games, raced in 2021, after years of being close at world level and after earlier Olympic starts that did not produce a medal. The entry is the most recent on the list and the thinnest in metal, which is the right way to treat a one-gold career next to Lipă. It is here because the single is the hardest boat in which to time a peak, and because a list of twelve that stopped in 2016 would pretend the event ended with Rio.