The most successful summer Olympians

Gold or bust – that seems to have been the Jamaican sprinter's Olympic motto. Bolt won eight Olympic medals in his career, and they were all gold. He won the 100m and 200m double in Beijing 2012 and 4x100m relay gold completed a hat trick in London 2012 and and Rio de Janeiro 2016.

Just like Bolt, Ewry's Olympic record demonstrates that he wasn't prepared to settle for second best. Despite suffering from polio as a child and being confined to a wheelchair at times, the American won the standing long jump and standing high jump competitions three times in a row between 1900 and 1908. He also collected two golds in the standing triple jump.

The US swimmer won five of his eight Olympic gold medals at the 1988 Games in Seoul. He won the 50m and 100m freestyle before going on to win three more with the American relay team. That came after another relay success in 1984 before he added two more team golds in 1992 in Barcelona.

Jenny Thompson was a phenomenon: she won Olympic gold eight times between 1992 and 2000, making her one of the most successful athletes in Olympic history. Unusually though, she never won as an individual athlete, only as part of a relay team. She won silver in the 100m freestyle in 1992 and bronze in 2000.

The Japanese gymnast is one of only four athletes who managed to win sucessive Olympic gold medals in the all-around discipline. Kato competed three times at the Olympics between 1968 and 1976 and won a total of 12 medals, eight of them gold. After his time as an active gymnast, he taught as a professor of health and sports sciences at the University of Tsukuba.

Germany's most successful athlete, the canoeist won a total of eight Olympic gold medals and four silver medals for East Germany, and then Germany. Fischer took part in six Olympic Games between 1980 and 2004 but was unable to compete in 1984 after the Eastern Bloc boycotted the Los Angeles Games. She is both the oldest and the youngest person to win gold in the canoe.

The American dominated the long jump and sprint in the 1980s and 90s. In 1999, he was honored as track-and-field athlete of the century by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). However, in 2003, he admitted having taken banned substances before qualifying for the 1988 Olympics but was acquited by the US federation.

Mark Spitz would almost make this list based on the 1972 Olympics alone, winning a record seven golds in Munich. Four years earlier in Mexico City, he had won two relay gold medals, as well as silver and bronze. He then retired at 22 after the Munich Games before making a late comeback attempt, at the age of 41, in 1992. But Spitz failed to qualify for Barcelona.

The Finnish track and field athlete won 12 Olympic medals between 1920 and 1928 and stood atop the podium nine times. Nurmi set 24 world records at a number of different distances. In 1931, he endorsed the drug Rejuven, which is now considered an illegal anabolic steroid. A year later, the Finn was banned for life for violating his amateur status.

She actually dreamed of becoming a ballet dancer, but when her ballet teacher moved away, Larysa Latynina switched to artistic gymnastics at the age of 11. She promptly became the most successful athlete in her new sport. She stood on the podium at the Olympic Games 18 times, and on top of it nine times, between 1956 and 1964. After she retired, she worked as a coach.

The most successful Olympian of all time, by almost any measure. Phelps has the most gold medals, the most individual golds (16) and the joint-most medals of any color at a single Games (eight, of which six were gold, at Beijing in 2008). He initially called it quits after the London 2012 Games, but then launched a comeback that brought him five more golds and one silver medal in Rio in 2016.