Top 150 Olympic Athletes of All Time - Intro

During the 2024 Summer Olympics, while watching several legendary performances, I started to think about how to determine the greatest Olympic athlete of all time. It couldn't just be determined based on medal count, since some medals are not as impressive as others, and some athletes have more opportunities to win medals than others, based on their sport, the era in which they competed, Games cancelled due to war or boycott, or even their gender. For the past two years, I have been working through all of the data to try to answer this question.

I determined that using the mean and standard deviation to determine how much above average each performance was would be the most fair way to decide how impressive each athlete was in each event. I imported the data for all 175,939 athletes in Olympic history (since 1896), and broke down the scores for all 8013 events for which medals have been awarded, finding the mean and standard deviation in each event, then giving each athlete a score based on how far above the mean they finished. I then removed any low outliers (more than 2 standard deviations below the mean), and tabulated the results for every athlete who had ever finished at least 1 standard deviation above the mean in any event, resulting in 30,161 athletes to rank.

To take care of the issue with athletes who competed in fewer events, I created a multiplier for each athlete based on the total number of events in which they competed, which took into account the number of points they would have been expected to gain if they had performed at the average level of the full list of athletes in subsequent events. I also included a multiplier for each event that helped balance out events that regularly had the highest scores with those that usually were lower in order to prevent a couple dozen events from completely dominating the rankings. 

Over the next several months, I will be revealing the top 150 athletes from my list one at a time in a countdown. As each is revealed, I will include a link to that athlete's profile on this page. Before the countdown begins, here is a breakdown of those athletes by country, sport, gender, and when they competed:

Athletes by Gender

Male - 103

Female - 47

Athletes by Country

United States - 46

USSR - 11

China - 10

Italy - 8

Japan - 8

Russia - 8 (includes independent athletes from Russia in recent games)

Hungary - 6

Jamaica - 6

Norway - 6

Germany - 5

Australia - 4

Cuba - 3

Finland - 3

France - 3

Great Britain - 3

East Germany - 3

Netherlands - 3

South Korea - 2

Switzerland - 2

Sweden - 2

Czechoslovakia - 2

Belarus - 1

Canada - 1

Denmark - 1

Kenya - 1

Romania - 1

Ukraine - 1

Athletes by Sport

Athletics (Track & Field) - 38

Artistic Gymnastics - 26

Swimming - 10

Fencing - 9

Table Tennis - 7

Boxing - 6

Cross Country Skiing - 6

Road Cycling - 5

Wrestling - 5

Basketball - 4

Speed Skating - 4

Archery - 3

Equestrian Dressage - 3

Alpine Skiing - 2

Beach Volleyball - 2

Biathlon - 2

Bobsled - 2

Track Cycling - 2

Diving - 2

Judo - 2

Golf - 1

Field Hockey - 1

Modern Pentathlon - 1

Nordic Combined - 1

Rowing - 1

Sailing - 1

Shooting - 1

Ski Jumping - 1

Snowboard - 1

Tennis - 1

Athletes by Olympic Games

Summer - 131 total

1920 - 4

1924 - 4

1928 - 4

1932 - 3

1936 - 7

1948 - 9

1952 - 14

1956 - 15

1960 - 16

1964 - 10

1968 - 14

1972 - 15

1976 - 11

1980 - 4

1984 - 6

1988 - 11

1992 - 13

1996 - 14

2000 - 20

2004 - 21

2008 - 28

2012 - 31

2016 - 34

2020 - 26

2024 - 19

Winter - 19 Total

1936 - 1

1980 - 1

1984 - 2

1988 - 2

1992 - 4

1994 - 5

1998 - 3

2002 - 5

2006 - 3

2010 - 3

2014 - 5

2018 - 7

2022 - 7

2026 - 6