Georgeta Damian
Emma Twigg
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 Georgeta Damian at #3 and Emma Twigg at #12.
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The case for Georgeta Damian
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.
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.