He’s Known as ‘El Terrible’—and He Might Be the Greatest Olympic Athlete of All Time
PARIS—With a list of accomplishments longer than a swimming pool, Michael Phelps has a strong claim to be considered the greatest athlete in Olympic history. After all, his 23 gold medals is more than twice as many as anyone else.
But it turns out there’s another athlete, barely known to most of the sports world, who might have a better claim to that title. He stands at 6-foot-5, weighs about 290 pounds and has dedicated his life to overpowering some of the strongest men on the planet.
His name is Mijaín López—and he might be the most dominant Olympian of all time.
López is a 41-year-old Greco-Roman wrestler from Cuba who seems less like an athlete than a tall tale: as solid as a mountain, as ungraspable as air. He can’t match Phelps’s overall medal count, but he looks set to achieve one feat that neither Phelps nor anyone else at the Games has ever done before. With a victory in Tuesday’s match against Chile’s Yasmani Acosta, López would become the first person ever to win gold in the same individual Olympic event five times.
“To be able to do that, it’s unheard of,” said Phelps, one of the small group of athletes to have won four times in a row. “There’s a reason why no one’s ever done it before.”
To the people unfortunate enough to have stepped into the ring with López, the remarkable streak of medals is just the beginning of his legend. Forget losing a match or settling for silver—entering the Paris Games, it had been more than a decade since he’d so much as given up a single point at the Olympics. His last gold medal, in Tokyo, came when his final opponent chose to stop competing, standing to one side and letting López raise his arms in victory.
