Elisabeta Lipă
Emma Twigg
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Elisabeta Lipă leads 4 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Elisabeta Lipă at #2 and Emma Twigg at #12.
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The case for Elisabeta Lipă
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.
The case for Emma Twigg
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.