Many of the GOATs are missing from the list:
Marta. THE soccer superstar. “Pele in a skirt”
One or more of these four: FloJo, Jackie-Joyner Kersey, Allyson Felix, Wilma Rudolph. One of them is the greatest female track star. I’m going to say it’s Jackie Joyner-Kersey. Wilma Rudolph certainly gets a special mention for having set world records after overcoming polio and the birth of a baby. She gets the profile in courage award.
One or more of these four: Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf, Serena Williams, Althea Gibson. One of them is the greatest female tennis player. I’d say that Serena and Althea both belong on the top ten list, with Martina and Steffi coming in at “close but no cigar,” despite Martina having won 59 majors. Althea won 11 majors. She played some pro golf in her spare time. She did all that in an era when black athletes were neither common nor desired in the country clubs that ruled both sports. It’s difficult to evaluate Althea because of the segregation issue, since we have to speculate on what she could have done, making her the Josh Gibson 1 of women’s tennis. While USTA rules officially prohibited racial or ethnic discrimination in her time, players qualified for the U.S. Open by accumulating points at sanctioned tournaments, most of which were held at white-only clubs. I do know that Bob Ryland, who watched Althea and coached the Williams sisters, said that Althea was better than Venus, Serena and Navratilova. That’s just one opinion, but a highly qualified one, and if true, would make her the GOAT in tennis.
Simone Biles. The linked site has two gymnasts and a ballet dancer on the list. You can get rid of all of them and put Biles on the list. She is the GOAT. Pre-Biles, I would have put Nadia Comaneci on the list, but she has clearly dropped to #2.
Heather McKay A dark horse candidate for the overall #1 spot. She was a professional squash player who was undefeated for twenty consecutive years, which must be the longest undefeated streak of any athlete of either gender.
Babe Zaharias You could easily make the case that in her day she would have won every event she entered in any sport she chose. She was a champion in five very different sports: hurdles, javelin, high jump, basketball and golf. She won two golds and a silver in the Olympics, earned all-American status in basketball, then won ten times on the LPGA tour. She is the only track and field athlete, male or female, to win individual Olympic medals in separate running, throwing, and jumping events. In her spare time she played baseball against the men! Of all the athletes named here, her portfolio was the most encompassing.
Annika Sorenstam. She is probably the best female golfer of all time. Won ten majors. Once shot a 59 in a tournament. Mickey Wright won more tournaments and more majors than Annika, but in a less competitive era.
Mikaela Shiffrin and Yuna Kim. The best female athletes on frozen water: Mikaela on snow, Yuna on ice.
Katie Ledecky The best female athlete on non-frozen water.
Near misses: Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf, Wilma Rudolph, FloJo, Allyson Felix, Nadia Comaneci and Lisa Fernandez. Lisa was the Babe Ruth of softball, both the best hitter and the best pitcher in the world at her peak. She led the NCAA in both ERA and batting average in the same year. (Your move, Ohtani.)
Maybe Caitlin Clark will join the list some day, but it’s too early to say that.
I have no idea in which order they belong, or who should be #1. There are no metrics that help in the decision. How does one compare a golfer to a soccer star to a sprinter to a figure skater to an Alpine skiier? I think it’s obvious that Allyson Felix, who is not on my top ten, was a greater athlete than Annika Sorenstam, who is. Golf doesn’t require superior athleticism. With the possible exception of bowling, it’s the only sport where a champion could look like Craig Stadler. But if we employ that criterion, every track and field star in history would be ahead of Sorenstam, even though Annika was the GOAT in her field. That logic just doesn’t make sense in the proper context.
I think the battle for the best female athlete in history probably boils down to Marta, Simone Biles, Serena Williams, Althea Gibson and Jackie Joyner-Kersey, with Heather McKay as a long shot only because she played in a more obscure sport. I should include Zaharias just because she was great at every sport. There’s just too much subjectivity in the comparison to pick one from the list.
==============================
Footnote follows
Footnote #1. Who was really the greatest baseball player in history? People debate among Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Cy Young, Honus Wagner, Lefty Grove, Barry Bonds, Ted Williams and Willie Mays. Maybe a few others. The correct answer may be Josh Gibson, who may have been more powerful than Ruth or Bonds with a higher batting average than Cobb – and did it all while playing every day as a catcher.
We’re just not sure. But maybe so. He may well be the GOAT.
- The stats currently available show that his lifetime line was .373/.458/.715. That would place him first of all time in batting and slugging and fourth in on-base percentage.
- One year he had a slugging average of .974. (Bonds topped out at .863, Ruth at .847.)
- His 1937 season, if expanded to 156 games at the same performance level, would produce 80 homers and 292 RBI with a .417 batting average.
- From 1936 to 1939 he played in 162 games, exactly equivalent to the current MLB schedule. He batted .393 with 62 homers, 198 runs scored and 239 RBI.
- He led his league in homers 11 times.
- He once knocked in 109 runs in a 69-game season. That was almost more than the next two guys added together! Look at the top ten that year – the guy who finished tenth in the league had only 29 RBI.
- His lifetime OPS of 1.173 edges out Ruth (1.163) and Williams (1.115).
Another Negro League player in the GOAT conversation is Oscar Charleston, whose line was .365/.449/.615, was a top centerfielder, and could also run (Gibson was no speedster). Oscar batted over .400 three times and threw in a .399 kicker. Through age 30, Charleston’s line was .384/467/.661, but he played until age 44. so long that his percentage stats declined quite a bit.
Katie Ledecky for swimming?
You may be right. As I admitted, there probably should be a swimmer there, but I don’t know swim from shinola. Perhaps she is a better candidate than Wilma Rudolph, if we consider just actual achievements and ignore the obstacles Rudolph had to overcome. I’m not sure.
Much too US centric.
Possibly true, but Marta is absolutely a candidate for #1 overall. (Sorenstam is really not, and would be the first to go if I had a better candidate.) Martina is sort of American, sort of not, but she’s not really in the running for #1 overall, given two better tennis players on the list.
Besides, who do you eliminate among the Americans? There’s really no question about Biles, and that forced some non-Americans off the list. There’s no question about Serena or Althea Gibson.
You could add Yelena Isinbayeva, who is the greatest pole vaulter of all time, and a three-time Female Athlete of the Year. But does she go over FloJo, Rudolph or Joyner-Kersey in track and field? Certainly not over Joyner-Kersey, probably not over FloJo, but maybe you drop Rudolph.
Who is a legit contender for #1 overall? Marta, Althea, Joyner-Kersey, Serena and Biles seem like the big five to me and four of them happen to be Americans.
You’re being jingoistic…I expect if you asked people in other countries you’d get a much different list…see Pelé etc.
Maybe he is, but one would think that you could offer up at least a single person and argument with your complaint.
The female Pele is on the list. Her name is Marta.
The question remains, who would you add and who would you remove? I’m certainly open to suggestions. It would be difficult to budge the top five. Gymnastics is an international sport, and Biles is now considered to be the GOAT by a very wide margin. Tennis is an international sport, and as good as the foreign players are, Serena is unquestionably the GOAT. Soccer is an international sport, and Marta is considered the best.
(Oddly enough, no American men are even in contention to be the GOAT in Tennis. Federer and Joker are the greatest grass players in history, Nadal is #1 on clay, and The Joker is the best of all time on hard courts. The only place where an American is close is on grass, where Sampras is in the discussion.)
Track and field is international, and the top four of all time are all Americans: Flo Jo, Joyner-Kersey, Allyson Felix and Wilma Rudolph.
The newest track superstar is also American: hurdler Sydney McLaughlin.
GOAT swimmer Katie Ledecky is also American.
GOAT alpine skiier Mikaela Shiffrin is also American.
All of these things are pretty clear. I’m pretty sure that an international poll would still place Serena, Marta and Biles as the top three, because they play in the three most visible women’s sports. (People only pay attention to track and field every four years)
If I include some other sports, there would be some other possibilities
Golf is an international sport, and Sorenstam is considered the GOAT.
None of the best badminton players are American
None of the best ping-pong players are American.
The best pole vaulter is a Russian
The best squash player is an Aussie
The best figure skater is probably that South Korean woman.
There are probably some great international volleyball stars, although the USA won both indoor and beach in the last Olympiad.
It’s no accident or jingoism that American women dominate the all-time list. While the American men seem to be treading water on the medal count in each Olympiad, the American women continue to kick butt and have been steadily improving. They now win 60% of the country’s medals.
Here’s a reflection of that: if the American men had all stayed home rather than going to Tokyo, the USA still would have finished second in the medal count, trailing only China!
I wonder if that Australian squash player merits closer scrutiny. Her name is Heather McKay, and after losing a couple of matches early on, she proceeded to go undefeated for 20 years, winning 16 consecutive British Opens and god knows how many hundreds of matches in a row. If there’s a longer unbeaten streak of any individual athlete of either gender, someone point it out to me.
After reading her resume, I feel that she does have to be on the list!!
Mikaela Shiffrin – most world cup wins of any single person, male or female
After I looked at the evidence, I tend to think she’s probably a better choice than Sorenstam.
Not sure about Missy Copeland and Katherine Switzer being on that original list. They are notable because Copeland was the first black and Switzer was the first woman to do something, but that doesn’t mean they should be considered one of the greatest athletes in their respective sports. If you consider ballet a sport.
On the other hand, gymnastics and ice skating shouldn’t be considered sports either. There’s no ball.
And swimming isn’t a sport, it’s a way to keep from drowning!
I’m OK with swimming because: (1) it requires tremendous conditioning; (2) it is measured objectively. Given that, it’s comparable to sprinting.
I’m far less enthusiastic about diving, or any other “sport” that is “measured” by people’s opinions.
Despite that caveat, one simply can’t ignore Biles, who is obviously the Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Babe Ruth or Lionel Messi of her own … er … sport.
Both gymnastics and swimming obviously require more athleticism than golf. (Even though golfers do have a ball, per your requirements.) Any sport where Craig Stadler can be a superstar is maybe not a sport at all, but just a game. If you include golfers, you might as well include video gamers.
Yeah, in that sense gymnastics and ice skating should not be sports, because they can’t be measured in any way except by human judges, who tend to be French or Russian and susceptible to… shenanigans. There is no doubt that they require feats of physical ability that normal humans wouldn’t have, but is it something you should compete with? It would be like competitive ballet or competitive Irish step dancing.
On the other hand, there are hula competitions, where they probably automatically deduct a 1/10th of a point for every non-Hawaiian in the halau.
Yup. This is a source of friction between me and my significant other. My point is that gymnastics and ballet are basically the same thing. Either they are both sports or they are both arts that require precision and physical fitness, but you can’t separate them. If gymnastics is an Olympic sport, then ballet should be as well. If ballet is not a sport, then why is gymnastics?
The same general logic also applies to diving, synchronized diving, figure skating, ice dancing, synchronized swimming, rhythmic gymnastics …
Those are kinda the swanky bullshit events of the sporting world.
BTW, Golf isn’t considered a sport either because it’s boring AF.
Actually, these are standards according to George Carlin. Not necessarily mine. Although I do agree with him for the most part.
It was far more than boringness that peeved George:
Golf courses are land that is currently being wasted on a meaningless, mindless activity engaged in primarily by white, well-to-do male businessmen who use the game to get together to make deals to carve this country up a little finer amongst themselves. I am getting tired, really getting tired, of these golfing cocksuckers in their green pants, and their yellow pants, and their orange pants, and their precious little hats and their cute little golf carts! It is time to reclaim the golf courses from the wealthy and turn them over to the homeless! Golfing is a arrogant, elitist game which takes up entirely too much room in this country. Too much room’ in this country! It is an arrogant game on its very design alone, just the design of the game speaks of arrogance. Think of how big a golf course is – the ball is that fucking big! What do these pin-headed pricks need with all that land?!
My biggest takeaway from that list is, fuck Jock Semple, who decided to assault someone running a marathon. I hope that he was injured when being shoved away from her.
Lifetime track fan. Flo Jo has to join Armstrong and Barry Bonds. It was never proven that she juiced but the visual and statistical evidence is pretty strong. She died before she could be confronted.
Serena Williams (Tennis) has got to be on the list for longevity and how she changed the women’s game from the boring lob and volley.
Hey Scoop, I know there is an American bias, but have a look at Hayley Wickenheiser. Granted, women’s ice hockey tournaments are mostly Canada and the US beating on the world like a snare drum until they meet in the final, but Wickenheiser was a force of nature, and maybe the most dominant figure in a sport like hockey for 20 years. That maybe counts for something.
Re: Graf if ifs and buts were candy and nuts ie Chris and Martina played each other 80 times. 😮
Graf had no discernible competition besides Seles who was stabbed in the back literally.
Re: soccer ~ meh
Katie Ledecky GOAT !!! Swim one lap in an Olympic size pool and get back to me re: how hard swimming is! Babe Didrikson Zaharias notwithstanding.
carry on …
No contest, It’s Babe Zaharias. She won the U. S. Open by 15 shots wearing a colostomy bag. Her company won a national track meet when she was the only person on the team. She is the only Olympian, man or woman, to win gold in running, throwing and jumping events.
Not exactly. She is the only Olympian, man or woman, to win A MEDAL in individual running, throwing and jumping events. They were not all gold.
(Her high jump medal was a silver., but she kinda got screwed out of the gold. She tied the gold medalist and ended up finishing second on a disputed DQ,)
But the point is basically the same. She was amazing. Her performance in that AAU meet was one for the ages. She finished first in six very different events, including throwing a baseball 272 feet.