Ian Thorpe
Alexander Popov
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Ian Thorpe leads 3 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Ian Thorpe at #4 and Alexander Popov at #7.
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The case for Ian Thorpe
The 'Thorpedo', the finest middle-distance freestyler of his generation and a national hero in Australia. Thorpe won five Olympic gold medals and 11 world-championship titles, dominating the 200m and 400m freestyle and repeatedly lowering the 400m world record toward the 3:40 barrier. At his home Sydney 2000 Games, aged 17, he won the 400m freestyle in world-record time and anchored a stunning relay victory over the United States. At the 2001 Fukuoka World Championships he won six gold medals. Renowned for his size-17 feet, immense reach and metronomic stroke, Thorpe combined precocious success with genuine longevity across two Olympic cycles, and remains, statistically and stylistically, one of the most complete freestylers the sport has produced.
The case for Alexander Popov
The 'Russian Rocket', the greatest pure sprint freestyler of the 1990s and a technician of legendary smoothness. Popov won the 50m and 100m freestyle at back-to-back Olympics, Barcelona 1992 and Atlanta 1996, four individual golds and nine Olympic medals in total, along with around six world-championship titles across a long career. Remarkably, he was stabbed in a Moscow street incident in 1996 yet returned to competition and set a 50m freestyle world record of 21.64 in 2000. Coached by Gennadi Touretski, Popov swam with a famously long, relaxed stroke that let him dominate the sprints for a decade, and he remained competitive into his early thirties, an unusual feat for a sprinter, winning world titles in 2003.