The Greatest Olympic Athletes of All Time

The Olympic Games is sport at its most primal — the fastest, the strongest, the most skilful, competing without the commercial packaging of professional leagues, for medals and for history. It produces, every four years, moments of athletic achievement that transcend sport and become part of shared human memory. These are the athletes who produced the most of those moments.

At Players Couture, we celebrate the icons of every sport. These are the Olympic athletes who defined the Games.

Usain Bolt — The Fastest Human Being

Usain Bolt is the fastest human being who has ever lived. He ran the 100 metres in 9.58 seconds at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin — a world record that stands, seven years after his retirement, and may stand for decades. He ran the 200 metres in 19.19 seconds at the same championships — another world record. He won eight Olympic gold medals across the 2008, 2012 and 2016 Games, in the 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay.

What made Bolt exceptional was not just his speed but the manner of his achievement. At 6ft 5in, he was considered too tall to sprint at elite level — his stride length was an advantage but his start was always slower than his shorter opponents. He overcame that disadvantage through a combination of physical gifts and a relaxed, joyful approach to competition that made watching him run a genuinely pleasurable experience.

His 9.69 second 100m final at Beijing 2008 — run while celebrating before the finish line — is the most extraordinary sprint in history. His final 60 metres were run faster than any human has ever run that distance. He was not trying as hard as he could. The implications of that are almost too extraordinary to process.

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Michael Phelps — The Baltimore Bullet

Michael Phelps won 23 Olympic gold medals — the most by any Olympian in history, in any sport — and 28 Olympic medals in total. He won eight gold medals at a single Games (Beijing 2008), equalling the record set by Mark Spitz in 1972. He competed in five Olympic Games across a career that stretched from Sydney 2000 (aged 15) to Rio 2016.

His physical attributes — long arms, short legs, a double-jointed torso — were ideally suited to swimming in a way that seemed almost designed by nature. But his training regimen was equally important. He trained 365 days a year for years at a time, rarely taking rest days. The combination of natural gifts and extraordinary dedication produced the most decorated Olympian in the history of the modern Games.

Jesse Owens — The Political Athlete

Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics — the Games hosted by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, designed to showcase Aryan athletic superiority. Owens, a Black American from Alabama, won the 100m, the 200m, the long jump and the 4x100m relay. He was the most decorated athlete of the Games.

The image of Owens winning at Berlin — in front of Hitler, in a stadium built to celebrate a racial ideology that denied his humanity — is one of the most powerful in the history of sport. He returned to the United States to a hero's welcome that was complicated by the racism of the America he had returned to. President Roosevelt never congratulated him. He was not invited to the White House.

His athletic achievement was extraordinary. His courage in performing it in that place, at that time, was of a different order entirely.

Steve Redgrave — Britain's Greatest Olympian

Steve Redgrave won five Olympic gold medals in rowing across five consecutive Games, from Los Angeles 1984 to Sydney 2000. His fifth gold, won at Sydney at the age of 38, came four years after he had announced his retirement and told the press that anyone who saw him near a boat should shoot him. He had been diagnosed with diabetes in 1997. He returned, trained obsessively, and won again.

He is the greatest British Olympian and the most decorated male rower in Olympic history. His fifth gold — in the coxless four, with Matthew Pinsent, Tim Foster and James Cracknell — is one of the great British sporting moments of the 20th century.

Simone Biles — The Greatest Gymnast

Simone Biles is the most decorated gymnast in World Championship history and the most physically gifted gymnast the sport has ever produced. She has had four elements named after her in the gymnastics Code of Points — the "Biles," two more "Biles" variations, and the "Biles II." These are moves of such difficulty that the governing body initially rated them conservatively to discourage other gymnasts from attempting them.

Her withdrawal from several events at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, citing mental health and a case of "the twisties" — a dissociation between mind and body in the air — prompted a global conversation about athlete mental health and the demands placed on elite performers. She returned at the Paris 2024 Games to win four more medals, including gold in the floor exercise. She was 27 years old.

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