Nadia Comaneci

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• Top 6 Olympic Athletes of All Time

  Currently #5 · score 0

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• Michael Phelps

  Michael Phelps competed at five Olympic Games between 2004 and 2016 and finished with 28 total medals, 23 of them gold — both figures the most of any Olympian in any sport in the history of the Games, and by a margin so large that no other athlete's total is realistically within reach of either record. His most dominant single Games came in Beijing in 2008, where he won eight gold medals, breaking Mark Spitz's 1972 record of seven golds in a single Olympics. One of those eight, the 4x100m medley relay, came down to a margin of one-hundredth of a second, the closest possible finish in Olympic swimming. Phelps's core events were the butterfly and individual medley, disciplines that reward an unusually broad combination of strength, technique, and endurance across different strokes, and his 6-foot-7 wingspan paired with a comparatively short torso gave him a widely discussed physical advantage in the water that biomechanics researchers have studied extensively since. Phelps retired for good after the 2016 Rio Games and became an outspoken advocate for athlete mental health afterward, discussing his own struggles with depression following major competitions — a topic that's since become a more openly acknowledged part of elite athletes' post-Olympic experience.

• Usain Bolt

  Usain Bolt won eight Olympic gold medals across the 2008, 2012, and 2016 Games, completing what's known as the "triple-triple" — gold in the 100m, 200m, and 4x100m relay at three consecutive Olympics — a level of sustained dominance in sprinting that no other athlete has come close to matching across that many Games. His 100m world record of 9.58 seconds, set at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, and his 200m world record of 19.19 seconds, set at the same meet, both still stand more than 15 years later, a rare case of sprinting records lasting this long given how much training science has advanced in the sport since. Bolt's 2008 Beijing 100m final became legendary for how it was won: he began celebrating and slowed visibly in the final 20 meters, chest-thumping before the line, and still set a world record despite not running the race flat-out to the finish — a moment that became as much a piece of his showman reputation as the time itself. Standing 6-foot-5, unusually tall for a sprinter, Bolt combined an enormous stride length with a start that was never his strongest phase, meaning much of his dominance came from an ability to keep accelerating deeper into races than his competitors, a trait sprint coaches still study when developing tall sprinters today.

• Simone Biles

  Simone Biles has won more world and Olympic medals combined than any gymnast in history, a career built across the 2016, 2020 (held in 2021), and 2024 Olympics along with more than a decade of World Championship dominance, and she's widely regarded as having permanently raised the sport's technical ceiling. Biles has five skills named after her across four different apparatuses — a rule requiring a gymnast to land a new skill cleanly at a major competition before it can bear their name — a total no other gymnast, male or female, has matched, reflecting a level of difficulty she's introduced that judges and rivals alike have had to adjust to. At the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Biles withdrew from several event finals after experiencing "the twisties," a disorienting loss of spatial awareness mid-air that made continuing dangerous, and her public explanation of the condition and prioritization of her own safety became a widely discussed moment for athlete mental health in elite sport. She returned at the 2024 Paris Olympics to win three more gold medals, a comeback that added to an already record-setting medal count and reinforced her case, already strong before Tokyo, as the most statistically dominant gymnast the sport has ever produced.

• Carl Lewis

  Carl Lewis competed at four Olympic Games between 1984 and 1996 and won nine gold medals across sprinting and the long jump, a combination of events few athletes have ever tried to dominate simultaneously given how different the training demands are between pure speed and jumping technique. His long jump gold at the 1984 Los Angeles Games began a streak of four consecutive Olympic long jump titles, stretching all the way to the 1996 Atlanta Games — a 12-year span of gold-medal dominance in a single field event that remains unmatched in track and field history. Lewis matched Jesse Owens's feat of winning four gold medals at a single Olympics when he did it in 1984, in the 100m, 200m, 4x100m relay, and long jump, drawing deliberate comparisons to Owens's 1936 performance in Berlin. His rivalry with Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson at the 1988 Seoul Olympics became one of the sport's most consequential doping scandals — Johnson beat Lewis in the 100m final but was disqualified days later for a positive steroid test, handing Lewis the gold medal retroactively and making Lewis's own anti-doping advocacy a notable part of his post-race legacy.

• Jesse Owens

  Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics — in the 100m, 200m, long jump, and 4x100m relay — competing in front of Adolf Hitler and a Nazi regime that had built the Games as a showcase for its racial ideology, and undermined that message simply by being the most dominant athlete on the track. His long jump gold came after a tense qualifying round in which Owens nearly failed to advance, having fouled on his first two attempts before German rival Luz Long reportedly advised him on his takeoff mark — a moment of cross-national sportsmanship, in the middle of a highly politicized Games, that Owens spoke about for the rest of his life. Owens returned to the United States as a national hero but faced ongoing racial discrimination at home, including not being invited to the White House by President Franklin Roosevelt and having to enter hotel receptions honoring him through service entrances — a stark contrast to the international spotlight his Olympic performance had just generated. Owens's four golds in Berlin remain one of the most politically resonant athletic performances in Olympic history, a direct rebuttal delivered on the track to an ideology built around denying it was possible, and his long jump world record from that same year stood unbroken for 25 years.