Mark Spitz
Kosuke Kitajima
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Mark Spitz leads 3 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Mark Spitz at #3 and Kosuke Kitajima at #8.
The case for Mark Spitz
For 36 years the standard by which all Olympic swimmers were judged. At the Munich 1972 Games, Spitz won seven gold medals in seven events, every single one in world-record time, a perfect performance not surpassed until Phelps in 2008. Across two Olympics he collected nine golds and 11 medals in total, and over his career he set 33 world records in freestyle and butterfly. He retired at just 22, at his peak, before the World Championships even existed (the first were held in 1973), which is why his title tally sits outside that column. His combination of sprint speed and butterfly power, and the sheer perfection of Munich, keeps him among the immortals despite his short career.
The case for Kosuke Kitajima
The greatest breaststroker of his era and a Japanese national icon. Kitajima achieved a feat no other man has managed, winning both the 100m and 200m breaststroke at two consecutive Olympics, Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008, a breaststroke double-double, for four individual golds and seven Olympic medals overall. He set multiple world records in the 100m and 200m breaststroke and won world-championship titles across the 2000s. Famous for his aggressive, powerful pull-out and racing intensity, Kitajima's Athens victory came amid a controversy over an illegal underwater dolphin kick that helped prompt the 2005 rule change legalising a single kick in the pull-down. He defined breaststroke for a decade before Adam Peaty raised the event to another level.