Olaf Tufte
Emma Twigg
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Olaf Tufte leads 4 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Olaf Tufte at #11 and Emma Twigg at #12.
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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.
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.