5. Lance Armstrong
Winning seven straight championships in the biggest event in your respective sport is certainly dominance at its finest. Doing it after just after recovering from cancer isn’t just dominance, it is superhuman. Lance Armstrong won cycling’s biggest race, the Tour de France, every year from 1999 to 2005. Unfortunately, those victories were stripped from Armstrong in 2012 after a long doping scandal blemished his name. Still, Lance Armstrong is likely the only cyclist most of us have ever even heard of, and you’d have to be living under a rock not to know who he is.
4. Roger Federer
Before Roger Federer, the record for the most consecutive weeks ranked number one in the world was 77 weeks. Jimmy Connors was one of the best tennis players of all time, and spent a year and a half dominating the sport. Federer blew that number out of the water, and spent 237 consecutive weeks ranked as the world’s best tennis player. The Swiss man also holds the male record for most Grand Slam titles with 16, and unlike all of the other athletes on this list, has not made bad life decisions that could taint his career.
3. Michael Phelps
One summer in 2008 is all it took for Michael Phelps to cement his name in history. He won eight gold medals for the United States and broke eight World Records. Does Phelps really even need justification here? He is one of the best athletes of all time. Period.
2. Tiger Woods
Tiger Woods is yet another athlete on the list that we were lucky to grow up watching. He was so good that many of us never gave his reign on top of the world of golf much attention. For a little over 10 years, Tiger Woods was seemingly a man playing amongst boys. There really was no second best player in the world during Tiger’s reign. There was Woods, and then there was everyone else. By the time he was 34, Tiger had won 14 Majors and it seemed certain that he would go down in history as the best golfer of all time. Sadly, personal problems and horrible decisions not only ruined the Tiger Woods name and brand, but it also helped ruin his dominance on the course.
1. Barry Bonds
Ninety-nine percent of sports fans believe that he is a cheater, liar, and cancer to the game of baseball whose name does not deserve to be mentioned in the same page as any of the sports legends on the rest of this list. The other one percent probably believes he is the greatest hitter of all time. Barry Bonds had eight 40+ home run seasons, 12+ 100 RBI seasons, 17 .400+ OBP seasons, 762 career home runs, and seven MVP awards. Pitchers were more afraid of him than of any other baseball player in history. He was intentionally walked 120 times in 2004, which is more than twice as much as any other player ever. Without steroids, Bonds would be considered the best baseball player of all time. However, with his tainted record, he likely will never find himself in the Hall of Fame.
