Clara Hughes called ‘greatest female Olympian ever’; is she really?

Bunker down, since the Clara Hughes hyperbole over the next three weeks might do the highly improbable: make people not like Clara Hughes.

A headline writer at The Globe & Mail whose name we might never know got it started on Friday, proclaiming "Clara Hughes: The greatest female Olympian ever" over top of Sean Gordon's beautifully written profile of the six-time medallist who's reached the podium in both the Summer and Winter Games and also inspired untold Canadians by being open about how she's managed being depression. Greatest female Olympian, though, comes off as a bit much. Not to get all inside-basebally, but it comes off as one of those headlines that is committed by a strapped-for-time editor who gets a juicy bison burger of a story dropped in her/his lap and can't decide what to make the focal point.

With Clara Hughes, where do you begin? There's her unmatched distinction of being a multiple medallist as a Summer and Winter Olympian. She donated $10,000 of her own money to Right To Play after the 2006 Olympics. There's the longevity, still getting after it as an amateur athlete with the big four-oh not too far away. There's her advocacy for mental health awareness, notwithstanding that the telecom which launched it evidently had some very cynical motives. There's the I-was-a-teenage-rebel backstory. But greatest?

The Winnipegger sort of defies adjectives. How about...

Sincerest Olympian ever (with apologies to Johan Olav Koss)? The Games' selling point, the one that puts it on a plane about your run-of-the-mill world championship, is that it's about the transformative power of sport. For all the warts of the International Olympic Committee, we are better off as a species for having something uniting in every even-numbered year.

Hughes' selfless support of Right To Play shows she gets that winning a medal means accomplishing something for more than yourself. Everyone would like to do more for people who got the short end of the stick with the world's resources, but here is someone who gets the act locally/think globally deal.

Many other sportspeople probably have the a worldview like Hughes, but she's capitalized on the platform which comes with success.

Most versatile Olympian ever? Say whatever you want about the nichetude of cycling and speed skating, but no one else has at least two medals in the Summer and Winter Games. Hughes' pair of bronzes in Atlanta remain the only ones a Canadian woman has ever won in cycling, although that's likely to change in London. She's managed to re-invent herself several times over, going from the bike to the oval.

Globally, though the Ms. Versatility title belongs to Jackie Joyner-Kersee. She did after all, win the women's heptathlon twice and was also an accomplished college basketball player. Younger readers would be well-advised to Google Babe Didrikson Zaharias.

As far as Canada goes, have people forgotten that Hayley Wickenheiser was also Canada's leading batter in softball at the 2000 Sydney Olympics? If you staged some version of the Superstars competition with Canada's top female athletes, the smart money would be on Wickenheiser or footballer Christine Sinclair.

Most relatable Olympian ever? A lot of athletes put walls up. This is not new; it's been going on for decades, probably since around the time pros started making enough money that they didn't have to work off-season jobs and when Olympic athletes became quasi-professionals. A lot of jocks can come off as automatons. Mordecai Richler, after all, once called Wayne Gretzky the most boring person he ever met, but bear in mind the famed author died in 2001 just before Sidney Crosby became a household name.

Hughes, bearer of a smile that's inevitably called infectious, lets people in. She cops to having been a wayward teen and lets people know that the narrow existence of a world-class athlete leaves no time for a balanced life ("I ended up in a state of depression from pushing myself for so long, so hard beyond any reasonable way a human being should be pushed."). She also goes out of her way to not look jock-like, which is a nice subtle rejoinder to people who wear athletic gear when they haven't darkened the door of a gym in months.

Most super-Canadian Olympian ever? Stuff you cannot make up: Clara Hughes was born Sept. 27, 1972, the off-day between games 7 and 8 of the Summit Series between Canada and the USSR. That's a totally random fact, but it's like the stars aligned to produce a future sports heroine who was born from the centre of the country.

Also randomly, skeleton gold medallist Jon Montgomery is a Manitoban. What is it about that province and charismatic chedderheads? In any event, Hughes, who resides in Quebec, is someone everyone in a fragmented country can identify with, east, west and Quebec. What other public figure is there who does that?

Okay, so ... Canada's greatest female Olympian ever or not? To be called the best, don't you have to have beaten the best on a regular basis? Hughes has one gold medal, one silver (in a team event) and four bronze among her six medals; former teammate Cindy Klassen also won one Olympic gold, but two silver and three bronze. Klassen was also a five-times world champion and has two global marks which are still extant as of the last time her Wikipedia page was updated.

It's a toss-up between the two or Wickenheiser with her three golds and one silver in women's hockey.

Worldwide? Out of the question. Joyner-Kersee should get the nod from the modern era. Larisa Latynina, a 1960s-era Russian gymnast, won 18 medals. Reaching into the wayback machine, Dutch track star Fanny Blankers-Koen, AKA The Flying Housewife, survived a world war and dusted women a decade her junior to win four gold medals in the 'Austerity Olympics' in London in 1948.

But hey, Clara Hughes is great in a way one word can never capture. Maybe the term Hughesian needs to be streamed into the lexion. It has an Olympic ring to it.

Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Contact him at neatesager@yahoo.ca and follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet.