Simone Biles has 11 Olympic medals and 30 world championship medals, more than any gymnast who has ever competed.1 Five skills carry her name in the sport's code of points. She is 29, and this month she is sitting on the deadline her coach Laurent Landi gave her — "you just give me two years" — for a Los Angeles 2028 comeback she has still not committed to.2
She appears in fifteen of the rankings here. Gymnastics accounts for exactly one.
Inside her own sport Biles has no rival worth arguing about. Every list that drops the word "gymnast" puts her back into a field.
Biles vs Comăneci: the greatest Olympic gymnast
This is the ranking Biles was built for, and the single place here where her own sport sets the terms.
Her case is arithmetic. Seven Olympic golds, six world all-around titles — a total tied with Japan's Kohei Uchimura for the most any gymnast has won.3
Nadia Comăneci has the single most famous routine in the sport's history instead. At Montreal in 1976 she scored the first perfect 10 an Olympic gymnast had ever been given, at 14, and the scoreboard could not display it.
The field behind them is not decoration. Larisa Latynina, Olga Korbut and Mary Lou Retton each changed what a gymnast was expected to be. Korbut did it for viewers who had never watched the sport at all.
Serena Williams vs Simone Biles: no shared unit
Widen the question to every women's sport and the medals stop converting.
Serena Williams took 23 major singles titles across two decades, every one of them against an opponent trying to beat her directly. Biles competed against a difficulty score, in a sport judged by panel, in four-year gaps.
There is no exchange rate between those two careers, which is why this ranking is really a vote on what people think greatness is made of: longevity, dominance, or difficulty nobody else will attempt.
Babe Didrikson Zaharias complicates both cases. She won Olympic track golds in 1932 and then took ten major golf titles, the only résumé here that makes the other two look narrow.
Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth and the best American athlete
Thirty-one names, and the gymnast is now sharing a ballot with quarterbacks.
Biles belongs on it by any measure that survives contact with the outside world: no American athlete in any sport has won more world titles in their own discipline.
The problem is that the other thirty names come with television. Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, Tom Brady and LeBron James built their reputations across seasons that ran every week for a decade or more, in front of audiences who watched them lose as well as win.
Gymnastics gives its stars roughly two weeks of national attention every four years. That is the structural handicap in every cross-sport list Biles appears on, and it has nothing to do with how good she is.
Biles vs Bolt: the athletes of the 21st century
Cut the field by era rather than by sport and Biles gains something the all-time lists take away: her entire career fits inside the window.
She started winning world titles in 2013 and was still winning Olympic ones in 2024. Usain Bolt's sprint career, by contrast, was effectively finished in 2017.
Twenty names, and most of the others also spent the century at the top of their sport, which is why this is one of the harder rankings in the article to reason about at all.
Phelps has 28 Olympic medals. Biles has 11.
Medal counts look like the one objective ranking in sport. They are mostly a measurement of how many events a sport offers.
Michael Phelps swam eight finals at a single Games. Swimming lets one athlete enter freestyle, butterfly, medley and three relays over eight days, and it awards a medal for each.
Artistic gymnastics offers six: team, all-around, and four apparatus. An Olympic gymnast who wins everything available still leaves with fewer medals than a swimmer who wins most of what is on offer.
Biles has 11 medals from three Games, seven of them gold.1 Larisa Latynina's 18 stood as the all-time record for 48 years, until Phelps passed it in London. Read the column of totals and you are reading the event schedule as much as the athletes.
Jackie Robinson, Dick Fosbury and the athletes who rewrote a sport
Greatness is not the question here. The question is whether the sport changed shape because you were in it.
Biles has the cleanest technical answer available. Gymnastics builds its difficulty values around what is possible, and several of her elements were rated conservatively on the grounds that other gymnasts attempting them would get hurt.
Jackie Robinson's answer is not technical at all. He integrated Major League Baseball in 1947, and what changed was who was allowed to play.
Dick Fosbury changed the high jump so completely that his surname is now the name of the only technique anyone uses. Between those three the ranking is really asking which kind of change counts, and there is no version of the question where all three answers agree.
The Biles II vs the Fosbury Flop
Here Biles is not a competitor. She is one of the entries.
Five gymnastics elements are named after her, across vault, beam and floor.1 The Biles II is a triple-twisting double backflip on floor, and the naming rule is unsentimental: you get an element under your name by completing it at a world championship or the Olympics before anyone else does.
The Fosbury Flop is the counter-case for how much that honour is worth. Every high jumper alive now uses it. That is a heavier kind of permanence than a skill perhaps five people on earth will ever attempt.
Antonín Panenka's chipped penalty won Czechoslovakia the 1976 European Championship and is now a standard verb in football commentary. Johan Cruyff's turn is taught to children. The Ali Shuffle, by contrast, was mostly theatre, and it survives because Muhammad Ali did it.
Being a move rather than a person is the strangest place Biles turns up in this article, and it may be the most durable one.
Paris 2024 against the Miracle on Ice
Iconic moments are a genre of their own, and they reward story over quality.
Biles enters this one with the Paris 2024 all-around final. In Tokyo three years earlier she had withdrawn from five finals after losing her air awareness mid-skill, returned for the beam and took bronze; in Paris she won the title back at 27.1
The Miracle on Ice is the competing shape: a squad of American college players beating the Soviet team at Lake Placid in 1980, a result nobody involved expected and nobody has stopped retelling.
Sixteen moments spanning nine decades sit in this ranking, from Jesse Owens in Berlin to Derek Redmond finishing a semi-final on a torn hamstring with his father holding him up. One of the sixteen is three years old, which is either recency bias or evidence that the moment was that large.
Rio 2016 vs Mark Spitz in Munich
Shrink the frame from a whole career down to a fortnight, and Biles' strongest entry becomes her first Games.
At Rio in 2016 she was 19 and took gold in the team event, the all-around, the vault and the floor, plus a bronze on beam. Four golds at a debut Olympics is the ceiling for a gymnast under the current event programme.
Mark Spitz won seven at Munich in 1972, all in world-record time, and that stood as the single-Games record for 36 years. Vitaly Scherbo took six gymnastics golds in Barcelona in 1992, four of them on the same day.
Gold counts do not settle this category either. Jim Thorpe took the pentathlon and the decathlon in 1912 wearing borrowed shoes.
Jesse Owens, Michael Phelps and the greatest Olympian
Thirteen names, and the shortlist gets brutal quickly.
Jesse Owens took four golds at the 1936 Berlin Games with Adolf Hitler in the stadium, a claim no medal table competes with. Carl Lewis matched the programme in Los Angeles in 1984 and added six more Games' worth of context.
Biles has more world titles than anyone on the list and fewer Olympic ones than several of them, because the Olympics rewards the sports that hold their championships there.
Spring, Texas: Biles, Nolan Ryan and Jack Johnson
Geography produces the least predictable ranking in the article.
Biles grew up in Spring, north of Houston, and trained at World Champions Centre, the gym her family built. That makes her Texan by the only definition that matters here: the work happened there.
Nolan Ryan threw seven no-hitters and struck out 5,714 batters across 27 seasons, a strikeout record that is not seriously threatened. Jack Johnson, born in Galveston, became the first Black world heavyweight champion in 1908 and was prosecuted for it.
Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, Earl Campbell and Sheryl Swoopes are on the same list. Texas is the rare category where Biles is neither the most decorated entry nor the most historically loaded one.
Muhammad Ali and influence past the scoreboard
This ranking stops counting medals, and Biles' case gets stronger rather than weaker.
President Biden awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom on 7 July 2022, at 25, making her the youngest recipient in the award's history; the citation named her advocacy for mental health and for survivors of sexual abuse alongside the sport.4 Netflix built a four-part series, Simone Biles Rising, around the Tokyo withdrawal and the return.5
Muhammad Ali refused the draft in 1967 and lost three and a half years of his prime to the ban that followed. Jackie Robinson and Billie Jean King changed who was allowed into their sports at all.
Against that company the honest question is whether an athlete's influence has to be legislative to count, or whether changing what elite sport is permitted to say about its own athletes is the same category of act.
Courage to Soar vs Andre Agassi's Open
Biles published Courage to Soar in 2016, written with Michelle Burford, covering foster care, adoption and the road to Rio.
It is a good book by the standards of athlete memoirs and an ordinary one by the standards of this ranking, which contains Andre Agassi's Open — a book whose first chapter is about hating tennis, and which is routinely described as the best sports autobiography written.
Ball Four made Jim Bouton unwelcome in baseball for years, because he wrote down what players actually did. Jackie Robinson's I Never Had It Made opens by saying he cannot stand for the anthem.
Fifteen books, and this is the section of the article where Biles is plainly a small name.
Pelé, Ali, Jordan: the shortlist that shrinks
Fourteen names for the whole of sport, and the selection stops being about achievement.
Pelé won three World Cups. Muhammad Ali is the most written-about athlete of the twentieth century. Babe Ruth changed what baseball looked like as a game.
Biles is on the list on merit and is competing against sports with a hundred times the audience, which is a structural fact rather than a verdict on her.
Cristiano Ronaldo and the popularity question
The last ranking asks who people actually like, which is not the same question as who is best.
The field runs to thirty-two, weighted heavily towards football and cricket, sports followed weekly by billions. Biles competes in one followed intensely for a fortnight every four years.
Popularity is a distribution problem before it is a merit one.
Fifteen questions, fifteen different Simone Biles
Across these fifteen rankings Biles is a gymnast, an Olympian, an American, a Texan, an author, an advocate and a named element in a rulebook. The medals are the same in every one of them; what moves is what the list decided to measure.
That is what happens when you compare things two at a time instead of scoring them on a single scale — the category does the work, and the category keeps changing.
If she does go back to the gym this autumn, half of these lists will need rewriting by 2029. Start with whichever one you disagree with most.
More rankings, more angles
- Serena Williams Won 23 Majors. The Lists Still Can't Place Her — the same cross-sport problem, from tennis
- Ronda Rousey Had Four Careers. Every List Picks a Different One — Olympic judo, UFC, WWE, Hollywood
- What is pairwise comparison? — why head-to-head beats a star rating
Sources
- Wikipedia — Simone Biles: Olympic and world championship medal totals, results at Rio 2016, Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024, and the five elements named after her: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-08-09)
- Gymnastics Now — Biles on the Today Show, 17 February 2026, describing coach Laurent Landi's "you just give me two years" and the LA 2028 timeline: gymnastics-now.com (checked 2026-08-09)
- NBC Olympics — career totals, including six world all-around titles, tied with Kohei Uchimura: nbcolympics.com (checked 2026-08-09)
- NPR — Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony, 7 July 2022: npr.org (checked 2026-08-09)
- Netflix Media Center — Simone Biles Rising, the four-part documentary series: media.netflix.com (checked 2026-08-09)