All Time Greats

The daughter of a professional football player and a former World Champion in Rhythmic Group Gymnastics, Anna Bessonova was a star from the beginning, winning a surprise bronze at her debut World Championships in 2001. The star of the Ukrainian team from that moment on, she was one of the few high-level gymnasts to win golds both as a member of the Group and as an individual on the World stage.

Irina Deriugina’s two World All-around titles, captured in 1977 and 1979, made her the face of Rhythmic Gymnastics in Soviet Ukraine. While Deriugina was influential as a gymnast, paving the way for the Ukrainian stars of the 1990s and 2000s, she has had even more success as a coach: she and her mother Albina now guide the country’s best at the Deriugina School in Kiev.

One of the early protégées of the celebrated Bulgarian Rhythmic school of the 1960s and 1970s, Mariya Gigova was the first gymnast from her country to win the coveted World All-around title, which she did three times (1969, 1971 and 1973). Gigova’s speciality was the Hoop, the apparatus with which she won four World golds, a feat still unprecedented today.

Alina Kabayeva was a smiling sensation. No matter how hard the skills she performed or how much flexibility was required, when she was before the judges, her smile never wavered. The Uzbek-born phenomenon had plenty of reasons to grin during her decade-long international career: After winning bronze at the 2000 Olympics, she captured the ultimate prize in Athens in 2004 before retiring gracefully, still at the top of her game, three years later.

In the realm of Rhythmic Gymnastics, Evgeniya Kanaeva's accomplishments outshine those of any other competitor. The only two-time Olympic champion to date in Rhythmic Gymnastics, Kanaeva became the sport's latest ingenue when she won the Olympic crown in Beijing in 2008, and solidifed her status as its most legendary figure when she successfully defended it four years later. Nothing stopped her in the interim, either: at the 2009 Worlds, she became the first ever to sweep all five individual golds, a feat she repeated in 2011.

In the precocious Yana Kudryavtseva, Rhythmic Gymnastics found its new "It" girl following the retirement of the legendary Evgenia Kanaeva. A three-time World champion (2013-15) at just 18, Kudryavtseva, the "Angel with Iron Wings," became the youngest gymnast ever to win the World All-around title in 2013, when she was just 15. She is the heavy favorite for Olympic gold in Rio, the only jewel not in her crown of accomplishments.

An integral part of the “Golden Girls” generation of Bulgarian Rhythmic Gymnastics during the 1980s, Bianca Panova is famous for being the first gymnast ever to sweep all five individual gold medals at a World Championships, which she accomplished in Varna in 1987, to the delight of the home crowd.

Maria Petrova’s dominance on the World and European level endured from 1992 to 1996, as she racked three World (1993-95) and two European (1992, 1994) All-around titles. Petrova is one of only four gymnasts to have won three World All-around golds, a select group that includes her countrywoman Maria Gigova.