Top 10 Female Gymnasts of All Time, Ranked

Simone Biles is the greatest female gymnast of all time, with 41 Olympic and World Championship medals to her name and 30 of them gold. Larisa Latynina is second on 32 combined medals and keeps the record no one has touched since 1964: 18 Olympic medals. Nadia Comaneci, Vera Caslavska and Svetlana Khorkina fill out the top five on a ranking built from medal counts, difficulty innovation and career length.

What criteria decide the greatest female gymnast?

Three things, weighted in this order. First, medals at the two competitions that matter, the Olympic Games and the World Championships, counting gold heaviest. Second, difficulty innovation, meaning whether the gymnast pushed the sport past what it thought possible and left named skills behind. Third, longevity across multiple Olympic cycles, because holding form for eight or twelve years is harder in gymnastics than in almost any other sport.

Two adjustments matter before the list starts. Gymnasts from the 1950s and 1960s competed at Games with fewer apparatus finals and no World Cup circuit, so their raw totals understate them. And the Code of Points has been rewritten repeatedly, so a 10.0 in 1976 and a 15.8 in 2024 are not the same currency. Where the numbers are close, the tiebreak is what the gymnast could do that nobody else could.

Top 10 female gymnasts of all time: the medal table

Every figure below is a career total across Olympic Games and World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, verified as of August 2026.

Rank	Gymnast	Country	Olympic medals (G-S-B)	World medals (G-S-B)	Combined	World all-around titles
1	Simone Biles	United States	11 (7-2-2)	30 (23-4-3)	41	6
2	Larisa Latynina	Soviet Union	18 (9-5-4)	14 (9-4-1)	32	2
3	Nadia Comaneci	Romania	9 (5-3-1)	4 (2-2-0)	13	0
4	Vera Caslavska	Czechoslovakia	11 (7-4-0)	9 (4-4-1)	20	1
5	Svetlana Khorkina	Russia	7 (2-4-1)	20 (9-8-3)	27	3
6	Nellie Kim	Soviet Union	6 (5-1-0)	11 (5-4-2)	17	1
7	Ludmilla Tourischeva	Soviet Union	9 (4-3-2)	14 (10-2-2)	23	2
8	Lilia Podkopayeva	Ukraine	3 (2-1-0)	5 (2-3-0)	8	1
9	Shannon Miller	United States	7 (2-2-3)	9 (5-3-1)	16	2
10	Agnes Keleti	Hungary	10 (5-3-2)	3 (1-1-1)	13	0

Why Simone Biles ranks first without argument

Biles has more gold medals than any gymnast has medals of any colour. Her 23 World titles and seven Olympic golds give her 30 golds against Latynina’s 18, and her 41 combined medals sit nine clear of the field. She won the Olympic all-around in 2016 and again in 2024, eight years and one withdrawal apart.

The difficulty case is stronger still. Five skills carry her name in the Code of Points, including the Yurchenko double pike vault that no other woman has landed in competition. She competed at Paris 2024 having taken most of two years away from the sport after Tokyo, and won three more golds on her return.

Which Soviet-era gymnasts still hold up?

Latynina, Caslavska, Tourischeva, Kim and Keleti all belong on merit rather than nostalgia. Latynina’s 18 Olympic medals came from three Games and she medalled in the all-around at all three, which no other woman has done. Caslavska is the only gymnast of either sex to win Olympic gold on every individual apparatus, and she won four golds at Mexico City 1968 weeks after signing the Two Thousand Words manifesto against the Soviet invasion of her country.

Tourischeva is the only woman to hold the Olympic, World, European and World Cup all-around titles at once, a sweep completed in 1975. Nellie Kim scored the first perfect 10 on vault and floor at Montreal 1976 on the same afternoon Comaneci was rewriting the bars. Keleti won four golds at Melbourne 1956 at 35, still the oldest woman to win Olympic gymnastics gold, and lived to 103.

Which gymnasts changed what the sport allowed?

Comaneci, Khorkina and Biles each forced a rule change. Comaneci’s seven 10s in Montreal made the perfect score achievable and pushed the sport towards the open-ended difficulty scoring it uses now. Khorkina, at 1.65m unusually tall for the era, built a bars repertoire that the Code had to absorb, and at one point held eight named skills, more than any gymnast before her.

Biles pushed difficulty far enough that the FIG has repeatedly assigned her skills lower values than their risk implied, a decision the federation defended on safety grounds and gymnasts have argued about since. Comaneci’s nine Olympic medals look modest beside Latynina’s 18, but she won five golds in two Games as a teenager and remains the reference point non-gymnastics fans reach for first.

Where the all-time list stands in 2026

Nothing has changed at the top since Paris 2024. Biles did not compete at the 2025 World Championships in Jakarta and has not competed since the Paris Games, though she has not retired. Angelina Melnikova won the 2025 World all-around title in Jakarta, and Algeria’s Kaylia Nemour became the first African gymnast to win a world title with her uneven bars gold there, a year after taking Olympic gold on the same apparatus.

The next chance for the list to move is the 2026 World Championships in Rotterdam from 17 to 25 October. No active gymnast is within 20 medals of Biles, and no one is inside eight Olympic medals of Latynina, so the top two are safe through Los Angeles 2028 at least. On the men’s side, our ranking of the greatest male gymnasts explains why Kohei Uchimura ranks first even though Nikolai Andrianov owns the 15-medal Olympic record.

How we ranked them, and who just missed

Medal count did most of the work, but it is not the only input. Podkopayeva ranks eighth on eight combined medals because she won the World all-around in 1995 and the Olympic all-around in 1996, a double no woman had completed since Tourischeva. Shannon Miller’s seven Olympic medals were the American record for 20 years and she won back-to-back World all-around titles in 1993 and 1994.

Gina Gogean, Daniela Silivas, Oksana Chusovitina and Aly Raisman were the closest omissions. Chusovitina’s case is longevity alone: she competed at eight Olympic Games between 1992 and 2021 for three different countries. Gymnastics finals are staged in arenas rather than the vast bowls covered in our guide to the largest stadium in the world, which is part of why the sport’s greatest performances reach far more people on screen than in the seats. More all-time lists and verified figures sit in the sports records hub.