Kathrin Boron
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 Kathrin Boron at #5 and Olaf Tufte at #11.
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The case for Kathrin Boron
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.
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.