Pertti Karppinen
Olaf Tufte
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Olaf Tufte leads 2 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Pertti Karppinen at #6 and Olaf Tufte at #11.
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The case for Pertti Karppinen
Three consecutive Olympic golds in the men's single, at Montreal 1976, Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984. He raced on into 1988. The single is the only Olympic boat in which the result cannot be shared, and doing it three times in a row had been done before, by Ivanov, and has not become ordinary since. Karppinen's case is that narrowness: no eight to lean on, no partner to make the middle thousand easier, three Games as the first boat.
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.