Athletes with the Most Olympic Gold Medals

No individual athlete in the history of the Summer Olympics has won more gold medals than Michael Phelps, whose 23 golds stand so far clear of the rest of the field that they belong almost to a different conversation. Behind him sits a four-way tie at 9 golds apiece, a group that spans gymnastics, swimming, and track and field across four different decades. The gap between first and second place is itself one of the most remarkable facts in Olympic history: Phelps has more individual gold medals than all but a handful of entire national delegations have ever accumulated.

This ranking exists to answer a single, specific question: which individual athletes have won the most Olympic gold medals of any color event, relay or individual, across the full history of the Summer Games. It is not a measure of total medals (silver and bronze count for nothing here), nor is it a measure of fame, dominance within a single Games, or influence on a sport. It is a pure count of first-place finishes credited to one person's Olympic career.

How this ranking works

Athletes are ranked strictly by their total number of individual Olympic gold medals won at the Summer Olympic Games. That count includes relay and team-event golds, not just individual events, so a sprinter's relay gold counts exactly the same as a gold in an individual final. Ties are common at this level of competition, and when two or more athletes finish with the same gold-medal total, they are grouped together at the same rank and listed alphabetically rather than being artificially separated.

The underlying data is drawn from medals credited to each athlete by the International Olympic Committee. That distinction matters because the IOC is also the body responsible for formally stripping medals after doping sanctions, and any medal removed from an athlete's record this way is excluded from their total here. In other words, this list reflects each athlete's current, officially recognized medal count, not the count at the moment they originally stood on the podium.

A record built across four Olympic cycles

Phelps assembled his 23 golds over five Olympic appearances between 2004 and 2016, competing at the Athens, Beijing, London and Rio Games. He is also, separately, the most decorated Olympian in history when every medal color is counted, with 28 total medals to his name, a feat covered in more detail in the ranking of the most total Olympic medals. The gold-medal total alone, though, is what sets him apart on this list: no other athlete has climbed above 9.

That group tied at 9 golds is a study in contrasts. Paavo Nurmi of Finland won his across the 1920, 1924 and 1928 Games as a middle- and long-distance runner, in an era when the Olympics looked nothing like the heavily televised, commercially driven spectacle of today. Mark Spitz won his 9 between the 1968 and 1972 Games, 7 of them coming at the Munich Games alone, a single-Games record that stood until Phelps broke it in Beijing in 2008. Larisa Latynina, competing for the Soviet Union in artistic gymnastics from 1956 to 1964, matched that total in a sport built on compiling golds across multiple apparatus finals in a single Olympics. Carl Lewis spread his 9 golds across four separate Games, from Los Angeles 1984 to Atlanta 1996, in sprinting and the long jump. Four athletes, three sports, four different eras, and the same final number.

A count that can still change after the fact

Olympic gold-medal totals are not always permanent the moment the race ends. The clearest example on this list is Usain Bolt, whose total sits at 8 rather than the 9 he actually won on the track. Bolt's ninth gold came in the Beijing 2008 4x100m relay, but that medal was formally stripped from the entire Jamaican relay team in 2017 after a retested sample implicated his teammate, Nesta Carter, in doping. Because the method behind this ranking excludes medals that have been formally annulled, Bolt appears here with 8, reflecting his current, official total rather than what was awarded to him on the day.

This is a useful reminder that an Olympic medal count is not a fixed historical artifact frozen at the moment of competition. It is a living record maintained by the IOC, subject to revision years or even decades later as doping-control science and retesting programs catch up with samples collected long after the original Games concluded.

Comparing across sports and eras

Any list that puts a gymnast, a swimmer, a sprinter and a biathlete side by side has to be read with some caution. Some sports, like swimming and gymnastics, offer many more medal opportunities per Olympics through individual events, relays, and apparatus finals, which structurally favors athletes in those disciplines when it comes to piling up golds within a single Games. Track and field, by contrast, offers fewer realistic gold-medal opportunities per athlete per Olympics, which makes Nurmi's and Lewis's totals arguably even harder achievements relative to their sport's ceiling. The ranking does not adjust for this; it simply counts golds as recorded, and readers comparing a swimmer's total to a sprinter's should keep the structural differences between sports in mind.

It is also worth noting that this list covers the Summer Olympics specifically. Winter Olympians like biathlete Ole Einar Bjørndalen, who also appears further down this ranking with 8 golds, compete in a separate Games with its own medal opportunities, and no attempt is made here to combine Summer and Winter totals into one figure.

Sourcing and verification

All figures in this ranking come from the International Olympic Committee's official medal records. The data was last verified as of February 2026, and reflects medal totals as currently recognized by the IOC, including any post-Games sanctions applied up to that date.

Taken together, this list is less a snapshot of one era than a cross-section of more than a century of Olympic competition, with one swimmer's achievement standing apart from everything that came before or since.