Most Successful Winter Olympic Athletes

Last Updated 2014-05-12

This is a list of the most successful Winter Olympic athletes, sorted by the number of gold medals. Note that different sports have a different number of events where medals are available. Therefore athletes in some sports, e.g. cross country skiing have the opportunity to win more medals than athletes in other sports. Also note that the number of events has increased in recent years, which favours athletes that have competed during the last decades. After the Sochi Olympics 2014, the top three athletes are from Norway.

Ranking	Athlete	Nation	Sport	Years Competing	Gender	Gold Medals	Silver Medals	Bronze Medals	Total
1.	Ole Einar Bjørndalen	Norway	Biathlon	1998–2014	M	8	4	1	13
2.	Bjørn Dæhlie	Norway	Cross-country skiing	1992–1998	M	8	4	0	12
3.	Marit Bjørgen	Norway	Cross-country skiing	2002–2014	F	6	3	1	10
4.	Lyubov Yegorova	Russia	Cross-country skiing	1992–1994	F	6	3	0	9
5.	Viktor Ahn	Russia	Short track speed skating	2006–2014	M	6	0	2	8
6.	Lidia Skoblikova	Soviet Union	Speed skating	1960–1964	F	6	0	0	6
7.	Claudia Pechstein	Germany	Speed skating	1992–2006	F	5	2	2	9
8.	Larisa Lazutina	Russia	Cross-country skiing	1992–1998	F	5	1	1	7
8.	Clas Thunberg	Finland	Speed skating	1924–1928	M	5	1	1	7
10.	Thomas Alsgaard	Norway	Cross-country skiing	1994–2002	M	5	1	0	6

Sources: wikipedia.org, cc search