Greatest Female Gymnasts of All Time, Ranked by Medals

Simone Biles is the most decorated gymnast in history with 41 combined Olympic and World Championship medals, but Larisa Latynina still holds more Olympic golds (nine to seven) and more Olympic medals in total (18 to 11). Which of them ranks first depends entirely on what you decide to count. This list states its criteria before the names, because a ranking that hides its scoring is just a preference.

How this list is scored

Four measures, in this order of weight:

1. Olympic gold medals. The scarcest currency in the sport. One Games every four years, a handful of titles available, and a career window that historically lasted two cycles at most.
2. Total Olympic medals. Rewards depth across apparatus and the ability to peak on a fixed date.
3. World Championship medals. Weighted lower than Olympic medals, and adjusted for era — see the final section for why that adjustment matters more than any other judgement here.
4. Eponymous skills and longevity. A skill in the Code of Points means a gymnast expanded what the sport could do rather than executing it better than anyone else.

Anything not on that list — degree of difficulty by modern standards, cultural impact, comeback narratives — is excluded. Those arguments are real, but they cannot be measured against each other.

The all-time list at a glance

Gymnast	Country	Olympic golds	Total Olympic medals	World medals	Signature skill or feat
Simone Biles	USA	7	11	30 (23 gold)	Biles II on vault, a Yurchenko double pike
Larisa Latynina	Soviet Union	9	18	14 (9 gold)	Nine Olympic titles across 1956–64
Vera Caslavska	Czechoslovakia	7	11	8 (4 gold)	Four individual golds at a single Games, 1968
Nadia Comaneci	Romania	5	9	4 (2 gold)	Comaneci salto; first perfect 10, 1976
Nelli Kim	Soviet Union	5	6	11 (5 gold)	First perfect 10s on vault and floor, 1976
Ludmilla Tourischeva	Soviet Union	4	9	11 (7 gold)	World all-around champion 1970 and 1974
Svetlana Khorkina	Russia	2	7	20 (9 gold)	Khorkina on uneven bars; three world all-around titles
Shannon Miller	USA	2	7	9	Most decorated American gymnast; world all-around 1993 and 1994

Simone Biles

Eleven Olympic medals, seven of them gold, and 30 World Championship medals, 23 of them gold. Olympics.com records the combined total of 41 as the most by any gymnast, male or female. Five elements in the Code of Points carry her name: two on vault, two on floor and one on beam, the last of them the Yurchenko double pike she landed at the 2023 World Championships.

The case for placing her first is that she leads on volume, on difficulty and on innovation simultaneously, and did it across three Olympic cycles either side of a withdrawal at Tokyo 2020 and a two-year absence from competition. The case against is Latynina’s nine Olympic golds, a number Biles has not reached and, at 31 by the 2028 Games, may not.

Larisa Latynina and Vera Caslavska

Latynina’s 18 Olympic medals across Melbourne, Rome and Tokyo stood as the record across every Olympic sport for 48 years, until Michael Phelps passed her in London. Nine golds, five silvers, four bronzes, plus 14 World Championship medals per the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame. She won the all-around in 1956 and 1960.

Caslavska is the most underrated name in the sport. She won the all-around in 1964 and 1968, taking four golds and two silvers at Mexico City alone. She had signed the Two Thousand Words manifesto before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that August, trained in hiding in the mountains before travelling, then turned her head away during the Soviet anthem on the podium — twice. Britannica records seven Olympic golds and four world titles across a career that Czechoslovak authorities ended by refusing her permission to travel.

Between them, Latynina and Caslavska are the only women to have retained the Olympic all-around title. That is the strongest counterweight to raw medal totals.

Comaneci, Kim and the 1970s

Nadia Comaneci scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics on the uneven bars at Montreal in 1976, aged 14, and the scoreboard displayed 1.00 because it had not been built to show it. She finished with five Olympic golds and nine medals across 1976 and 1980. Her World Championship record is thin by modern standards — four medals — because the World Championships were held only every four years until 1979.

Nelli Kim scored two perfect 10s at the same Games, on vault and floor, and finished with five Olympic golds from six medals. Ludmilla Tourischeva won the all-around in 1972 and took nine Olympic medals across three Games, plus seven world titles.

Khorkina and Miller

Svetlana Khorkina held the record for World Championship medals by a woman before Biles: 20 in total, nine of them gold, including three all-around titles. Her Olympic record is comparatively modest at two golds from seven medals, both on uneven bars, where the element named after her is still performed.

Shannon Miller remains the most decorated American gymnast with 16 Olympic and World medals, and the only American to win consecutive World all-around titles, in 1993 and 1994. Her 1996 team gold with the Magnificent Seven changed American gymnastics as a programme.

If you want the same argument run across both genders, our ranking of the best gymnasts in the world covers the men’s side too, and our look at the most popular Olympic sports explains why gymnastics carries the viewing figures it does.

Why raw medal counts mislead

Most rankings skip the adjustment that matters most. The World Championships were held every four years until 1979, every two years from then, and almost annually from 1991. Latynina competed in three World Championships in her entire career, in 1954, 1958 and 1962. Biles has had the opportunity to compete at ten.

That is not a knock on Biles, who converted those chances at a rate nobody else has. It is a warning against the arithmetic that treats 30 world medals and 14 world medals as a four-fold gap in achievement. Adjusting for available events, Latynina’s 14 from three championships and Comaneci’s four from a single cycle look very different.

The Olympic programme has been far more stable. Women’s artistic gymnastics has offered the same six titles — team, all-around, vault, uneven bars, beam and floor — since the 1960s, so Olympic golds are the one currency that compares cleanly across all eight gymnasts here. That is why this list weights them first, and why Latynina’s nine remain the hardest number on the page to argue with.