The Greatest Gymnasts of All Time

1. How greatness is judged in gymnastics

Gymnastics greatness is judged on four things. The first is Olympic medals: the Games are the sport's highest stage, and the number of medals a gymnast wins there, and their colour, is the simplest measure. The second is World Championship medals, which measure consistency across a career, since the World Championships are held most years while the Olympics come only every four. The third is innovation: whether a gymnast performed skills that no one had performed before, and whether those skills were named after them in the sport's Code of Points. The fourth is influence: whether a gymnast changed how the sport is performed, or who performs it. A gymnast can lead on one measure and trail on another, and the debate is, as in other sports, an argument about which measure matters most.

The sport also has a complication that other sports do not: its scoring system changed. Before 2006, routines were scored out of ten, and a perfect ten was the ultimate achievement; after 2006, the system became open-ended, with separate scores for difficulty and execution, and the perfect ten disappeared. Comparing a gymnast from the era of the perfect ten with one from the open-ended era requires care, and this article does not pretend that the comparison is exact. It presents the consensus names, with the documented case for and against each, and it treats the women's and men's competitions as the separate disciplines they are.

2. Simone Biles: the greatest of the modern era

Simone Biles was born on 14 March 1997 in Columbus, Ohio, and she is the most decorated gymnast in the history of the sport. She has won eleven Olympic medals, including seven gold, across the Rio, Tokyo and Paris Games, and thirty World Championship medals, including twenty-three gold — more than any gymnast, male or female, in history. She has five skills named after her in the Code of Points, more than any other gymnast, including the Biles II vault, a Yurchenko double pike that no other woman has performed in competition. Her dominance is not only a matter of medals: she has performed skills of such difficulty that the sport's governing body has at times given them lower difficulty values than her coaches argued they deserved, on the grounds that awarding the full value would encourage other gymnasts to attempt skills they could not perform safely.

The case for Biles as the greatest gymnast of all time is the strongest in the sport. No other gymnast matches her combination of Olympic medals, World Championship medals, longevity and innovation, and her performances at the Paris Olympics in 2024 — where she won three gold medals after returning from the break she took following the Tokyo Games — are widely regarded as one of the great comebacks in sporting history. The case against her, such as it is, is that she has competed in an era when the sport's difficulty has risen sharply, and that comparisons with gymnasts of earlier eras, who performed under different rules, are uncertain. That is a fair caution, but it is not a serious challenge: by any measure that counts medals and innovation, Biles stands alone.

As of November 2026, Biles has not competed since the Paris Olympics. She took a break from elite competition after Paris, and she has not announced her retirement, but she has also not committed to returning. In April 2026 she told NBC Sports that she was still undecided about the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, describing her feelings as fifty-fifty, and in an interview with the Associated Press in September 2026 she said she was beginning to consider which direction to take. In October 2026 she attended the World Championships in Rotterdam as a spectator, watching from the stands as a new generation of American gymnasts competed. Whether she returns for Los Angeles, where she would be thirty-one, remains the most interesting open question in the sport.

Her comeback in Paris also deserves a closer look, because it is the part of her story that is most often simplified. Biles withdrew from several events at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, citing the disorientation gymnasts call the twisties, and her decision to step back was widely discussed as a moment in the sport's history — a champion choosing her safety over a medal. Her return to competition in 2023, her world titles in Antwerp that year, and her three gold medals in Paris in 2024 turned that story into a comeback, and it is the comeback, as much as the medals, that has shaped how she is remembered. Whatever she decides about Los Angeles, the Paris performance already stands as one of the great second acts in Olympic history.

3. The women's pioneers: Latynina, Comaneci and Korbut

Before Biles, the most decorated gymnast in Olympic history was Larisa Latynina of the Soviet Union, who won eighteen Olympic medals, including nine gold, across the Melbourne, Rome and Tokyo Games between 1956 and 1964. Latynina's record stood for nearly half a century, and it remains the second-highest total in Olympic gymnastics. Her case rests on volume and on longevity across three Games; the case against her is that she competed in an era when the sport was less global and less competitive than it is now, and when the Soviet system gave its gymnasts advantages that their rivals did not have. Even with those qualifications, her record is one of the great achievements in Olympic history.

Nadia Comaneci of Romania is the gymnast who changed the sport's public image. At the Montreal Olympics in 1976, at the age of fourteen, she became the first gymnast in Olympic history to score a perfect ten, and she scored seven perfect tens in Montreal, winning three gold medals. The scoreboard at the time was not programmed to display a ten, and it showed 1.00 instead, an image that has become one of the most famous in Olympic history. Comaneci won five Olympic gold medals in total, across Montreal and Moscow, and her success made gymnastics a global television sport. Olga Korbut, also of the Soviet Union, had done something similar four years earlier in Munich, where her daring performances on the uneven bars and the balance beam made her the star of the Games and changed the sport from a display of grace to a display of athletic daring. Both women are remembered less for their medal totals than for the way they changed what gymnastics looked like, and that is a different kind of greatness — one that the numbers do not capture.

4. The modern women's greats: Andrade, Nemour and the Rotterdam generation

The women's sport in the 2020s has been shaped by gymnasts who followed Biles, and the 2026 World Championships in Rotterdam showed how deep the field has become. Rebeca Andrade of Brazil, who won the vault and floor exercise gold medals at the Paris Olympics, returned to competition in 2026 after a break and won her third world vault title in Rotterdam, on 24 October 2026, ahead of the Americans Claire Pease and Skye Blakely. Kaylia Nemour of Algeria, who won the Olympic uneven bars gold in Paris, won two gold medals in Rotterdam, on the uneven bars and on the balance beam, the latter on a tie-break over China's Zhang Qingying. Skye Blakely of the United States won the women's all-around title in Rotterdam, completing a comeback from the Achilles injury that had cost her a place at the Paris Olympics, and China won the women's team title.

Andrade's career deserves attention in its own right. She is Brazil's most decorated Olympian, with six Olympic medals, and her return to competition in 2026 after a two-year break was one of the stories of the season. Nemour, at nineteen, is the first gymnast to win a world title for Algeria, and her two gold medals in Rotterdam confirmed her as one of the leading gymnasts of the new generation. Blakely's all-around victory, at twenty-one, showed that the United States team has depth beyond Biles, and the fact that the American women's team at Rotterdam competed without a single gymnast with previous Olympic experience, for the first time since 2011, underlines how quickly the sport turns over. The women's game in 2026 is not a one-woman sport, and that is a sign of its health.

5. The men's greats: Uchimura, Hashimoto and the all-around kings

The men's competition has its own greats, and its own debate. Kohei Uchimura of Japan won the Olympic all-around gold medal in 2012 and again in 2016, and he won six consecutive world all-around titles between 2009 and 2015, a run of dominance that has no parallel in the men's sport. His case rests on consistency and on the quality of his execution: he was known for performing the most difficult routines with a precision that judges rewarded, and he is widely described as the greatest male gymnast of the modern era. The case against him is that his medal total, while impressive, does not match the totals of the great women, and that the men's sport has always had a smaller audience — which is a comment on the sport's history, not on Uchimura's achievement.

Daiki Hashimoto, also of Japan, is Uchimura's successor, and his career is still being written. He won the Olympic all-around gold in Tokyo in 2021, and at the 2026 World Championships in Rotterdam he won his fourth consecutive world all-around title, with a score of 85.998, the largest margin of victory since 2013. His dominance of the all-around, like Uchimura's, is built on consistency across all six apparatus rather than on a single spectacular skill, and it has made Japan the leading nation in the men's sport. Other great male gymnasts include Vitaly Scherbo of Belarus, who won six gold medals at a single Olympics in Barcelona in 1992; Alexei Nemov of Russia, who won twelve Olympic medals across two Games; and the American Fred Richard, who won the men's floor exercise title in Rotterdam in 2026. The men's sport has never had a single figure to match Biles, but it has had a succession of all-around champions whose dominance is, in its own way, just as impressive.

6. The skills that carry a name

One of the distinctive features of gymnastics is that new skills are named after the gymnast who first performs them in major competition, and the list of named skills is itself a kind of hall of fame. Biles has five: two on vault, two on floor and one on balance beam. Comaneci has a skill named after her on the uneven bars. Korbut has two, including the Korbut flip, a release move on the uneven bars that was later banned for safety reasons. On the men's side, the list includes skills named after gymnasts from many countries, and the naming of a skill is a permanent record: long after the medals are forgotten, the skill remains in the Code of Points, performed by gymnasts who may never have heard of the person it is named after.

This is worth emphasising because it is a measure of greatness that other sports do not have. A footballer does not have a goal named after them; a tennis player does not have a shot named after them. In gymnastics, the innovation is recorded in the rules themselves, and the gymnasts who innovated are remembered in the language of the sport. Biles's five named skills are the most of any gymnast, and they are the strongest single argument for her place at the top of any list.

7. A shortlist, with the criteria stated

A shortlist of the greatest gymnasts of all time, with the criteria stated, looks like this. Among women: Simone Biles, for medals, innovation and longevity; Larisa Latynina, for the Olympic medal record that stood for half a century; Nadia Comaneci, for the perfect ten and for changing the sport's image; and Olga Korbut, for the same reason. Among men: Kohei Uchimura, for six consecutive world all-around titles and two Olympic golds; Daiki Hashimoto, whose fourth consecutive world title in 2026 places him in the same conversation; and Vitaly Scherbo, for six gold medals at a single Games. Among the gymnasts of the present: Rebeca Andrade and Kaylia Nemour, whose medals in Rotterdam in 2026 show that the sport's future is in good hands. This is not a ranking presented as fact; it is a summary of the consensus, and it will change as the gymnasts of Rotterdam add to their records.

The reader who wants to understand why these gymnasts matter should watch a single routine: Biles's Yurchenko double pike, Comaneci's perfect ten, Uchimura's high bar. The numbers are the record, but the routines are the evidence, and the sport's greatness is visible in a way that no list can capture.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Simone Biles
• Wikipedia — Simone Biles
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Nadia Comaneci
• Wikipedia — Nadia Comaneci
• NBC Sports — 2026 World Gymnastics Championships results
• Wikipedia — 2026 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships

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• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.