You’d think that one of the easier questions for us to answer would be: “How many Olympians have there been”? This simple question is actually quite hard to answer. We do have an answer, of course, but it’s also definitely wrong.

As with many statistical issues, one first has to define what an Olympian is. We could look to the World Olympians Association (WOA), which defines an Olympian as:

An Olympian is an athlete who has been accredited to participate in the Olympic Games in a full medal sport.

This is a useful starting point: it explicitly names athletes (so no coaches, doctors, team leaders, etc.) and also excludes competitors in demonstration sports (which have not been held since 1992), exhibitions (last held in 2008) and other side-events. However, the “accredited” part of the definition is a bit less useful for us.

Among accredited athletes are of course those who eventually compete, but also those who fail to start for any reason (injury, disability, left off the team) or are only brought on a substitutes. In some sports, there are even various levels of accreditation. For example, in football (or soccer if you prefer), each team is nowadays allowed to enter 18 players, which are allowed to stay in the Olympic Village. However, if one of these gets injured, they are allowed to replaced them by one of four players on a separate list. Many of these alternate players don’t actually go to the Olympics, but they do have an accreditation. It seems to us that  being present at the Olympics would be a minimum to qualify as an Olympian.

The 18 Mexican football players that were handed an Olympic gold medal in London 2012.

We could then, of course, use that criterion to decide who is an Olympian. But this is pretty hard. Finding entry lists or accreditation lists is one, but these never say if a person was actually in town or not, which means we would have to figure this out for each athlete personally. And not just for recent years, but also for entrants from 1896, making this a virtually impossible task.

So instead of following the WOA, we’ve used our own definition:

An Olympian is an athlete who has competed in the Olympic Games in a full medal sport.

But that definition still isn’t complete. What exactly is a full medal sport? And what are Olympic Games, even?

Turns out that you can debate about both. While the Olympic Games of the modern era are pretty well-known, there’s an odd-one-out: the 1906 Intercalated Games in Athens. While organized and approved by the IOC at the time, the IOC later decide not to recognize these Games as official – despite their importance to the Olympic Movement. Many Olympic historians disagree with this view, and so do we, so we include these Games in our figures.

Ray Ewry won a total of 10 Olympic gold medals, including two at the 1906 Intercalated Games, which are not currently recognized by the IOC.

Regarding the full medal sports, there is also debate about the early Olympics. In 1900, the Olympics were held in conjunction with the sports events at the World Exposition in Paris. Many events did not use the predicate ‘Olympic’, despite the fact that the we consider them to have been part of the Olympics. Four years later, when the Olympics were a side-show of yet another major exhibition (the Louisiana Purchase Exposition), the organizers did the opposite, and labelled every sporting event “Olympic”, including e.g. track and field championships for elementary school boys from St. Louis, handicap races, and other competitions hardly word the predicate “Olympic”.

One of the more shameful “Olympic” events in St. Louis were the Anthropology Days in St. Louis, were so-called ‘savages’ competed against one another.

Some historians indeed consider all events held in Paris and St. Louis to have been Olympic. The IOC has never officially made a list of Olympic events in 1900 and 1904, although the list of medallists on their website can be taken as such. A clear method by the IOC to decide which events are Olympic, however, is unknown to us. The approach we use was set up by one of us, Bill Mallon, in the late 1990s when writing books about those early Olympics. He applied four criteria to events:

1. the events must be open to amateurs only (this was the IOC opinion at the time)
2. all competitors must compete equally (disallowing handicap events)
3. the events must be open to competitors from all nations (even if only competitors from one nation competed)
4. the events must be open to all (no limitations on age, origin, competency, etc. such as “junior”, “novice”)

This gives a list that excludes many of the fringe events held in these years, but is also slightly longer than the one used by the IOC.

Moving forward in time, there’s another category of events that qualified as full medal events at the time they were held, but that are often omitted: the art, aeronautics and alpinism competitions. From 1912 through 1948, Olympic medals were awarded in art, and between 1924 and 1936, medals were also handed out in alpinism and aeronautics. These medallists are not found on the IOC website, but they definitely received medals, which is why we include them as well.

So, with all that defining out of the way, it’s finally time to give you a number:

128,420

Now, we do have to say that this number is – sadly – wrong. Records books of the Olympics aren’t always complete, and we know for certain that many athletes are missing. For example, the members of the Greek gymnastics teams in 1896 have so far never surfaced, and neither have the names of the art competitors in 1920 that didn’t win a prize. In some cases, we do even know the number of athletes that we’re missing, but we don’t know if these are all “new” Olympians or not.

Even for more recent Olympics, information on who competed isn’t always clear-cut. In handball, all players on the team are listed on the match roster, even if they didn’t play. For recent years, detailed substitution information is available, but this is lacking for earlier years, leaving us to rely alternative sources such as video footage, contact with the athlete in question, etc.

Some of the 128,420 Olympians during the opening of the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo.

Apart from missing data in the sources, we are of course only human, and therefore make errors. For example, we recently figured out we had missed two substitutes in the 1964 4-man bobsled competition (although both were already known as Olympians) – even though this information was in the Official Results.

To compensate for that, we sometimes unearth information that isn’t even in the Official Results. For example, last year, we found out two missing divers in the 1960 women’s diving event, and an hitherto unknown substitute in the 1920 water polo match Brazil – Sweden.

So, it is with full confidence we can say that 128,420 is the wrong number. But we dare you to come up with a better one!

So we know who holds the Olympic records for most medals won and most gold medals won – that’s an easy one, Michael Phelps, who has won 22 medals and 18 gold medals (and is probably not done yet).

But Phelps won 9 medals in relay races, winning a medal in every swim relay race in 2004, 2008, and 2012, so he had a little help. What about winning individual medals? Who has won the most individual medals and individual gold medals? Is it still Phelps?

Not quite. The most individual medals title still belongs to Larisa Latynina, the Soviet gymnast who won 18 medals in all, the records that Phelps broke in London. Latynina won 14 of those medals by herself. Here is the list of all those winning 9 or more individual medals, and women who won 8 or more:

Larysa Latynina
As you can see, Latynina is the only woman with more than 8 individual medals, with 4 women tied at that level. Two people on this list, Ray Ewry and Martin Sheridan, won some of their medals in 1906 (Ewry 2, Sheridan 5), so purists may demur and drop them from this list.

As to individual golds, yes, Phelps does lead this list with 11. And again, Ewry presents a problem with 10, including 2 in 1906, but he would still be second with 8, if you skip the 1906 Intercalated Olympics. Here is the list of all Olympians with 5 or more individual gold medals:

The women’s leader is Czechoslovak gymnast Věra Čáslavská with 7 individual gold medals, followed by Latynina, and Soviet speed skater Lidiya Skoblikova, both with 6. Among Winter Olympians, Skoblikova is tied with Norwegian cross-country skiier Bjørn Dæhlie, with 6 individual gold medals, followed by 4 Winter Olympians with 5: Norwegian biathlete Ole Einar Bjørndalen, Finnish speed skater Clas Thunberg, and American speed skaters Bonnie Blair and Eric Heiden.

So who has won the most Olympic medals, without ever winning an individual medal? I dare say nobody in the twitterverse would ever get this trivia question correct, except for possibly the athlete herself, and even she may not know it. It is the Hungarian canoeist Katalin Kovács, who has won 8 Olympic medals from 2000-12, but never an individual one. Here are all those who won 6 or more Olympic medals, but never won an individual medal. As you would expect, they tend to be in sports with no, or few, opportunities to win individual medals.

Katalin Kovács

Now who has won the most Olympic gold medals but never won an individual gold? This one some people may get, as Jenny Thompson won 12 medals and 8 golds in swimming for the United States and leads the list, and is fairly well known. Her frustration at not winning an individual gold was well publicized (as was the same for her frequent teammate, Dara Torres – of note, Thompson and Torres were, and are, not friends). In fact this is not even close, as she leads 5 athletes with 5 team gold medals, with another 21 winning only 4 team golds. Here is the list of all those with 4 or more Olympic gold medals, but no individual gold medals:

So what does this all mean? Hell, we don’t know, but it was fun doing these lists!

We know that American swimmer Michael Phelps won 6 medals in London in 2012, giving him a total of 22 Olympic medals. We also know that this broke the record for the most Olympic medals all-time, breaking the record of 18 that had been held since 1964 by Soviet gymnast Larysa Latynina. Who held the record before Latynina? In baseball, track & field, and several other sports, the list of record progressions is well studied. Is there such a list of the progression of most Olympic medals? Well, we’ve never seen one before but we decided to provide these lists for you, in various permutations.

Here is the overall list for most Olympic medals won. Note that everyone on the list was male except Latynina, so we have also provided the male progression by adding in Nikolay Andrianov.

Two marks for men on this list lasted for 32 years – Paavo Nurmi’s 12 medals, which stood from 1928-60, and Nikolay Andrianov’s 15 medal mark for men, which stood from 1980-2012. Of course, Latynina’s mark lasted for 48 years until Phelps broke it in 2012.

Here is the list for women only, all at the Summer Olympics:

Latynina’s record for women, with 18 medals, will have stood for 52 years in Rio de Janeiro, and will likely stand for many more Olympiads.

Now at the Winter Games, the progression actually entails a combination of men and women:

Following are the winter lists for men and women separately:

Now what about gold medals and the progression lists for them? Here is the list for men at the Summer Olympics – here again we have the problem with the 1906 Olympics so we have listed Ray Ewry, both with and without those Games:

One thing to note above, if one disregards the 1906 Olympics, is how long Paavo Nurmi’s record of 9 gold medals lasted, fully 44 years, until tied in 1972 by Mark Spitz.

Now the women’s Summer Olympic gold medal record progression:

Note that Latynina still holds this record, and has held it since 1960 – which will be 56 years in Rio.

Following are the gold medal record progressions for men and women at the Winter Games:

Note here how long Clas Thunberg’s 5 gold medal record lasted – from 1928 until 1980 when it was tied by Eric Heiden, and until 1998 when it was broken by Bjørn Dæhlie.

Again, two long-lasting records, with Sonja Henie leading the list from 1936-64, and Lidiya Skoblikova leading the list from 1964 through 2014, although her 6 gold medals have been tied twice.