Georgeta Damian
Olaf Tufte
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 Olaf Tufte at #11.
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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 Olaf Tufte
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.