Top 10 Most Successful Female Athletes of All Time

These ten athletes were dominant by different, not-quite-comparable measures. In head-to-head individual sports like tennis and golf, dominance shows up as titles and time spent at world No. 1 — Graf's 377 weeks, Navratilova's 59 Grand Slam trophies. In judged sports like gymnastics and figure skating, it shows up as a level of difficulty and execution that forces the judging system itself to adapt, which is effectively what happened around both Biles and Comaneci. In track and field's combined events, it's a single number — Joyner-Kersee's heptathlon world record has stood since 1988. And in a team sport like soccer, an individual's greatness has to be read through a program's success rather than in isolation, which is why Mia Hamm's case rests as much on the World Cups and Olympic golds the US team won around her as on her own goal-scoring record.

Several entries here are ranked as much for what they changed off the field as for what they won on it. Billie Jean King's defeat of Bobby Riggs and her fight for equal prize money did more to legitimize women's professional sport than any single title could have. Martina Navratilova coming out publicly in 1981, while still an active top player, took on real commercial risk at a time when almost no prominent athlete had done the same. Simone Biles' decision to step back from competition at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics shifted how elite sport talks about athlete mental health. None of that shows up in a medal count, but it's a real part of why these particular athletes are remembered as more than their statistics.