One thought on “Ranking the Most Dominant Men’s Gymnasts of All Time”

1. I also have Scherbo, Andrianov, and Uchimura as the top 3. I don’t agree, however, with the AA and EF medals being worth the same. Therefore, I would have to propose a more complex ranking system. I also personally have a bronze being worth half of gold and a silver being worth 75% of gold. I have Olympics being worth more than Worlds which are, in turn, worth more than Continentals.

   I no longer have the finished product that I used to, but IIRC my ranking system went something like this, with Olympic AA Gold being worth 100 points, and everything else was fractional based on that. Olympic AA Silver was 75 points with Bronze being worth 50. The EF medals were, for the women, worth 40% of the AA medals so as to say that an EF sweep (really, really rare, of course) would be worth more than 1.5 times its equivalent in the AA, but not as much as 2 times. For the men, that means that EF medals were worth only 30% of the AA medal values. So, for the women, an Olympic EF gold was 40 points, Silver 30 points, and Bronze 20 points. For the men, respectively, I had them at 30 points, 22.5 points, and 15 points. And don’t compare men and women, of course.

   I had World Championship medals along the same scheme as Olympic medals as describe above, but only at 75 or 80% (I don’t remember exactly which), so a World AA Gold was 75 or 80 points and a World EF Gold was 30 or 32 points. Now that I type this, I think I had Worlds at 80% because the 32 points for EF gold is triggering my memory.

   I had continental (I had counted only European, and had separate ranking systems that did and did not include continentals) championships such as Europeans and also USA Nationals which at some point became as competitive, at least for the women, at 50 or 60 percent. I think it was 60 percent. I’m not sure.

   I also included World Cup finals (1975 to, I think 2004), but they were worth more like continental ones rather than World Championships ones.

   Anyway, allowing for a more weighted system allows for considering more nuance and coming up with what I think should be a more accurate reflection, however there should always be similarities between any sensible systems. I think that in my system, both Scherbo and Andrianov were nearly tied, and both were at the top, but I lost my database (on a hard drive that got damaged and that I thought I still had and could perform a data save on, however it seems to have vanished I have recently discovered), and Uchimura hadn’t finished logging his AA wins at the time I last worked on the database before I lost it, so he might have ended up surpassing either or both Scherbo and Andrianov. For the women, I am pretty sure that, overall, Biles has passed Latynina and Khorkina who were the top 2 women. If you look at Biles’s Olympics-only record, she still has a few people ahead of her, including Latynina, most prominently, but if you are talking Olympics AND Worlds combined, she is definitely ahead of Latynina by now.

   But I don’t have the same enthusiasm for this sort of thing as I used to. I learned several years ago that even very inclusive and nuanced “Objective” information can only go so far. If one is REALLY going to get into the history of the sport, we have to take into greater consideration names like Vlasta Dekanova, Natalia Kot, Marjana Bilic, Dianne Durham, and Chen Cuiting, and look for “patterns” related to them and others, and for the men, names like Romeo Neri and how Li Ning might be related to him in a patterned sort of way. One also has to see footage like the “Munich 40 Years Later” footage in order to gain a greater respect for names like Joan Moore and how they SHOULD stack up in comparison even to the likes of the quite legendary Ludmila Tourischeva. And then, once we have, unwittingly or not, discovered and traced those patterns, there are even more deeply-lurking ones like, most especially, at least as far as I have detected, THE HUNGARIAN ONE, and how the years 1931, 1948, 1950, 1952, 1998, and 2002 play a key role in forming at least the basic backbone of that pattern. And by that point, one starts to become overwhelmed, feeling fit for a straitjacket and padded cell, and wishing that they were a much better student of History so as to be able to understand all of the various “Whys?” that should start to form once these patterns are discovered.

   Respectfully,

   William Noel

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