The Most Important Athletes of All Time: Who Changed Sport

In 1936, Jesse Owens ran and jumped his way to four gold medals in Berlin, in a stadium built to showcase Nazi racial theory, with Hitler watching from the stands. No trophy case captures what that moment did. That’s the gap this list is trying to name: the difference between winning a lot and actually changing something.

Greatness and importance aren’t the same thing in sport. Plenty of athletes have swept every trophy on offer and left barely a mark outside their own discipline. The 12 names below did something different — they moved how people thought about race, gender, class, or what a human body could do, and several paid a real career cost for it.

At a Glance: The 12 Most Important Athletes

Athlete	Sport	Era	Defining Legacy
Muhammad Ali	Boxing	1960s–1970s	Draft refusal, Muslim conversion, global conscience
Jesse Owens	Track and field	1930s	Four golds undercut Nazi racial propaganda at Berlin 1936
Jackie Robinson	Baseball	1940s–1950s	Broke MLB’s color line in 1947
Billie Jean King	Tennis	1960s–1970s	”Battle of the Sexes,” equal prize money fight
Pelé	Soccer	1950s–1970s	Three World Cups; globalized the sport
Michael Jordan	Basketball	1980s–1990s	Made the individual athlete a global brand
Serena Williams	Tennis	1990s–2020s	23 Grand Slam singles titles; equal-pay advocacy
Sachin Tendulkar	Cricket	1980s–2010s	Most international runs and centuries in history
Arthur Ashe	Tennis	1960s–1970s	First Black man to win Wimbledon; HIV/AIDS advocacy
Nadia Comăneci	Gymnastics	1970s	First perfect 10 in Olympic history
Colin Kaepernick	American football	2010s	Anthem protests against police violence, career cost
Babe Didrikson Zaharias	Track and field, golf	1930s–1950s	Multi-sport dominance; founding LPGA member

The Criteria for Importance

A few things separate importance from a strong career record.

• Being first. The athlete who broke into a sport or league that had excluded people like them.
• Reach well past the fanbase, into people who never watched the sport.
• Using a platform to push for change, sometimes at real personal cost.
• Staying relevant decades after the last game or match.
• Recognition that crosses borders, not just national fame.

Muhammad Ali

Ali tops nearly every version of this list, and not just for what he did in the ring across three separate heavyweight title reigns. He refused induction into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War in 1967 on religious grounds, was stripped of his title and boxing license for three years, and won a unanimous Supreme Court reversal of his conviction in 1971. He had converted to Islam and changed his name from Cassius Clay years earlier, at real commercial cost. By the time he lit the Olympic cauldron in Atlanta in 1996, hands trembling from Parkinson’s, he had become a global symbol independent of boxing, more so than any name on this site’s own ranking of the greatest boxers.

Jesse Owens

Owens’ four golds at the 1936 Berlin Olympics — 100m, 200m, long jump, and the 4x100m relay — did more than win medals. They undercut Nazi claims of Aryan racial superiority in front of the regime making them, on German soil, with Hitler in the stadium. Owens returned home to a country that still denied him full citizenship rights and equal opportunity, a contradiction that has followed his legacy ever since. His performance remains one of the most cited entries in any Olympic medal record, not for the count alone but for what it meant in that specific room, at that specific moment.

Jackie Robinson

Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color line on April 15, 1947, with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and kept performing at an elite level — Rookie of the Year that season, NL MVP by 1949 — while absorbing abuse, death threats, and hotel and restaurant refusals that would have broken most people. Commissioner Ford Frick retired his number 42 across all of MLB in 1997, the only number ever honored league-wide. What he opened stretched well past baseball, into the broader civil rights movement he later worked alongside.

Billie Jean King

King beat Bobby Riggs in the nationally televised 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” and spent years afterward fighting for equal prize money, work that helped make the 1973 US Open the first Grand Slam to pay men and women equally. She founded the Women’s Tennis Association the same year and won 39 Grand Slam titles across singles, doubles, and mixed doubles over her career. That combination of on-court excellence and off-court organizing reshaped the economics of women’s sport far beyond tennis, a legacy this site also traces in its list of the greatest tennis players of all time.

Pelé

Pelé won three World Cups with Brazil — 1958, 1962, and 1970, the only player to do so — and gave the sport a global identity that needed no translation. He is credited with popularizing soccer commercially in markets like the United States during his time with the New York Cosmos in the 1970s, and later served as Brazil’s Extraordinary Minister for Sport. He isn’t just a great player in the site’s own ranking of the greatest soccer players; he’s closer to an institution, the reference point every subsequent global superstar of the sport gets measured against.

Michael Jordan

Jordan won six NBA championships and five MVP awards with the Chicago Bulls, but his larger significance is commercial and cultural: his partnership with Nike, beginning with the Air Jordan line in 1985, built the template for the modern athlete-as-global-brand that basketball stars, and stars in other sports entirely, have followed ever since. He turned the NBA into a genuinely international product during the 1990s in a way this site’s own ranking of the greatest NBA players still measures every successor against.

Serena Williams

Williams retired with 23 Grand Slam singles titles, the most of the Open Era, won while also becoming one of the most recognizable athletes in the world regardless of sport. She has spoken publicly about near-fatal complications after childbirth in 2017, using that platform to push for better maternal health outcomes for Black women, and has built a venture capital firm, Serena Ventures, investing specifically in founders overlooked by traditional funding. She changed what young girls, across backgrounds, believed was possible for them in a sport with a long history of exclusion.

Sachin Tendulkar

Tendulkar retired in 2013 holding the record for most runs and most centuries in both Test and one-day international cricket, records that still stand. Over a 24-year international career for India, he became something close to a religious figure for over a billion cricket fans, widely called cricket’s “God” in the Indian press. In 2014, he became the first sportsperson ever awarded India’s highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna — a level of formal national recognition few athletes anywhere have matched.

Arthur Ashe

Ashe became the first Black man to win Wimbledon in 1975, having already won the US Open in 1968 and the Australian Open in 1970. He contracted HIV from a blood transfusion during heart surgery in 1983, disclosed his status publicly in 1992 after a newspaper was preparing to report it, and spent his final year building global AIDS awareness before dying in 1993. His career and its final chapter turned a private illness into a public cause that outlasted every title he won.

Nadia Comăneci

At the 1976 Montreal Olympics, 14-year-old Comăneci became the first gymnast in Olympic history to score a perfect 10.0, a mark the scoreboard wasn’t even built to display. She won five golds across the 1976 and 1980 Games and reset what precision in gymnastics was assumed to look like, launching the modern elite era that still measures routines against her standard.

Colin Kaepernick

Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem in 2016 as a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, protesting police violence against Black Americans. He opted out of his contract after that season and was never signed by another NFL team, an outcome he and others have argued amounted to blackballing. Nike made him the face of the 2018 “Just Do It” 30th-anniversary campaign, and his protest reshaped how American sports leagues, players, and sponsors talk about athlete activism nearly a decade on.

Babe Didrikson Zaharias

Didrikson Zaharias won two golds and a silver in track and field at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics at a time when women were actively discouraged from competing seriously in multiple sports. She then rebuilt herself as a dominant golfer, winning 10 LPGA major championships and becoming a founding member of the LPGA Tour itself in 1950. Few athletes in history, male or female, have been genuinely elite in two entirely different sports; almost none did it while fighting the era’s assumptions about what women’s bodies could do.

How We Ranked Them

This list weighs five factors, roughly in this order: whether the athlete was first through a barrier that had excluded people like them; how far their reach extended past people who actually followed the sport; whether they used their platform for change at real personal or career cost, not just symbolic gestures; how their relevance has held up decades after retirement; and whether recognition of their impact crosses national borders. Ali, Owens, and Robinson rank at the top because they satisfy all five clearly. Comăneci and Didrikson Zaharias rank slightly behind mainly on reach — enormous within their sports and eras, narrower globally than Ali’s or Pelé’s. No ranking here survives contact with a different country’s perspective: Ali reads differently in the United States than Tendulkar does in India or Pelé does in Brazil. What connects all 12 is the size of the audience each reached outside the scoreboard; more debates like this one live in our Records & Rankings hub.