Who is the greatest Sportsman in the world? Its too hard to judge

jim Faulkner by Correspondent Written on September 08, 2008
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Michael Phelps (Swimmer), born in Baltimore, USA. Phelps has won 14 Olympic gold medals in swimming, and 8 at one Olympics, the most ever achieved. Phelps also holds seven world swimming records. He is already touted as the greatest swimmer ever and by shear numbers alone earn's his place on this list.

....SCORES.... Fitness 5.0, Skill 4.0, Brutality or ROH 0.5, Achievements and dominance 5.0, impact on their sport 4.0, longevity 2.5 (career still running), public image 2.5/3, sport on a world stage 2/2. TOTAL.. 25.5

 

So there you have it, obviously a lot more sportsmen could be on this list, people like John Eales may have been left out but i tried to cover all the major world sports, i needed a rugby player and he stood out overall to me.

I would rank most other greats higher than Eales but with this system he still came out rather high. I could of put an NFL or NBL player here too obviously, but those sports have little following outside the USA.

Soccer, Cricket, Tennis, Golf, Boxing and Rugby are the major sports of the world, so i tried to have one sportsman from each represented here. Jordan, Gretsky and Slater stood out, so i included them, and i added Phelps for spice.

The abserdity of this is, no-one will ever be the greatest sportsman of all time. It is just stupid to single out any one great athlete, but we do, and we can still have fun with it, so for the purpose of this criteria, these ten athletes came in as follows;

1.  Muhammad Ali 33.5

2.  Kelly Slater 33.0

3.  Rod Laver 28.5

4.  Michael Jordan 28.5

5.  Donald Bradman 28.0

6.  Pele  28.0

7.  John Eales  27.5

8.  Wayne Gretsky 27.5

9.  Jack Nicklaus  25.5

10. Michael Phelps  25.5 

Others who could of easily been on this list are; Hermann Meier (skiing), Joe Montana (NFL), Carl Lewis (Athletics), Babe Ruth (Base ball), Jona Lomu (rugby), Sachin Tendulker(cricket), Mark Spitz (swimming), Lance Armstrong (cycling) and Wally Lewis (Rugby League) and many many more. 

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written on September 08, 2008 Rankings/List


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