Breaking down the data for the 31 times a gymnast won an All-Around medal without doing the same in Event Finals
After recently publishing a list of gymnasts who won a medal in the All-Around (AA) without winning a medal in Event Finals (EF), I’ve decided to also publish my personal notes analyzing the data for specific trends. Below are a series of “quick facts” about the data.
There have been 174 All-Around medals in women’s gymnastics from 1950-present when gymnastics permanently switched to the modern format of five individual events. Only 31 of 174 went to gymnasts who failed to medal in EF. Meaning this trend occurrs 17.8% of the time.
Of the 31 times it happened, only five gymnasts (16%) were AA gold medalists. Those gymnasts were:
Olga Bicherova (1981 World Championships)
Natalia Yurchenko (1983 World Championships)
Svetlana Khorkina (2003 World Championships)
Bridget Sloan (2009 World Championships)
Gabby Douglas (2012 Olympics)
Of those five gymnasts, four of them finished their careers without ever winning an EF medal at the Olympic or World Championships. The lone exception was Svetlana Khorkina.
Whereas only 16% of instances were AA gold medalists, for the remaining 26 instances they were split evenly down the middle with 13 being silver medalists and another 13 being bronze medalists. In the end 16% were gold medalists, 42% silver, and 42% bronze.
This trend has occurred 31 times, but only amongst 27 different gymnasts as there were 4 gymnasts who have done it twice. Those four gymnasts were:
Lavinia Milosovici (1995 & 1996)
Svetlana Khorkina (2003 & 2004)
Zhang Nan (2003 & 2004)
Gabby Douglas (2012 & 2015)
No repeat gymnast has done it more than two times, but every repeat gymnast has done it once each at the Olympics and World Championships. Gabby Douglas was the only gymnast to do it in non-consecutive years.
On six occasions has the trend occurred multiple times in a single competition. Those competitions were:
1981 World Championships: Maria Filatova & Olga Bicherova
2003 World Championships: Svetlana Khorkina, Carly Patterson & Zhang Nan
2004 Olympics: Svetlana Khorkina & Zhang Nan
2007 World Championships: Jade Barbosa & Vanessa Ferrari
2012 Olympics: Gabby Douglas & Viktoria Komova
2015 World Championships: Gabby Douglas & Larisa Iordache
The 2003 World Championships was the only occasion in which this trend occurred with all three members of the AA podium. But the trend went further, none of them advanced to Event Finals on any event!
The 2003 AA podium of Khrokina, Patterson, and Zhang Nan were the first three ever to win an AA medal while simultaneously not appearing in Event Finals on any event. They were the first of 7 total gymnasts to do it. The other 4 were the following:
Jiang Yuyuan (2010 World Championships)
Larisa Iordache (2015 World Championships)
Tang Xijing (2019 World Championships)
Leanne Wong (2025 World Championships)
Carly Patterson famously won a medal on beam at the 2004 Olympics. It was the only time a gymnast won both an AA & EF medal in the 2-year stretch from 2003-2004.
There were no World Championships held in 1998 and no AA contested in 2002. This means that every competition in-between the 1997 World Championships and 2006 World Championships had an AA podium where this trend occurred.
Angelika Hellmann (East Germany) was the first gymnast to ever accomplish this trend, doing so at the 1974 World Championships. But Angelika is arguably the most unique of the 31 examples and needs her own separate subsection of unique facts.
Hellmann was the only example of these 31 instances to occur before the era where Event Finals was expanded to include 8 gymnasts. In Angelika Hellmann’s era only 6 gymnasts competed in EF. Despite that, Angelika was also the only one of these 31 instances where the gymnast competed in EF on all four events. She was the only one to do this while simultaneously being the only gymnast to compete under the more rigid requirement of a 6-person cutoff.
But the most baffling Hellmann stat of all is she competed at the 1974 World Championships during the iconic “double sweep” that has never occurred before or since. This was when two gymnasts (Ludmilla Turischeva & Olga Korbut) each won a medal on every event. Not only has this never occurred elsewhere, even a single sweep is so incredibly rare that Simone Biles is the only gymnast to do it since the 1980s and it has occurred only three times since the 1974 World Championships.
Angelika Hellmann is the unluckiest gymnast in the entire data based purely on what she had to compete against.
Whereas Hellmann’s success meant only 1 of 31 examples was from a gymnast who competed in EF on every event (3%). Another 7 of 31 instances were from a gymnast that didn’t compete in EF on any event at all (22.5%). In total, only 4% of all AA medalists since 1950 did not appear in Event Finals on any event, the most recent example of which occurred at the 2025 World Championships. But the trend has become more common in recent years and occurred with 12% of all AA medalists since the 2015 World Championships.
Not all of these 31 instances led to a gymnast walking away from the competition with only a single medal. In 18 of 31 instances the gymnast won a team medal (58%). But of the 13 remaining instances 6 were linked to post-Olympic World Championships where no team event was held.
The final percentage breakdown is 58% won a team medal, 23% did not win a team medal, and 19% competed in competitions where no team competition was held.
The gymnasts who lost out on both a team medal and an EF medal despite winning an AA medal were the following.
Svetlana Khorkina (2003)
Zhang Nan (2003 & 2004)
Vanessa Ferrari (2007)
Jade Barbosa (2007)
Larisa Iordache (2015)
Tang Xijing (2019)
At the 2015 World Championships Larisa Iordache infamously failed to qualify for the 2016 Olympics while simultaneously winning an AA medal. The primary goal of this project was to determine if Iordache-2015 was a unique stat line that has never occurred before or since.
The answer: Yes it was.
Iordache is one of only 7 examples (listed above) of an AA medalist winning no EF medals and no team medals in the same competition. But of the other six examples, they finished 4th, 4th, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th in the team competition whereas Iordache’s team finished 13th. This meant Larisa Iordahce-2015 is the only instance in all of women’s gymnastics history to have a combination of winning an AA medal, not winning an EF medal, and not advancing into team finals.
But it was even more extreme than that. Whereas Iordache was already the only gymnast ever to win an AA medal with neither an EF medal or an appearance in Team Finals to go along with it, even under more lenient benchmarks she still would be the only gymnast in history to have the combination of an AA medal, not having her team make the 12-team cutoff, and not appearing in event finals on any event.
The heartbreaking circumstances of 2015 were the result of the Olympic qualification rules not being able to account for a scenario so unusual, it has never occurred before or since. And the gymnast who had the combination of events creating this scenario had an even more extreme version of the combination than what would have been needed to qualify for the Olympics.
Link to the data this article was based on
