The undisputed king. Roosevelt boxed almost daily in the White House, hosted Japanese judo masters for private instruction in the East Room, and earned a brown belt under Yoshiaki Yamashita, becoming one of the first Americans to hold rank in the discipline. He wrestled with sparring partners well into his fifties, hiked Rock Creek Park at a pace aides described as a punishment, and shot rapids in canoes during state visits.

In 1908, a young military aide threw a punch in a sparring session that detached the retina in Roosevelt's left eye. He went functionally blind on that side and never mentioned it publicly during his presidency. He simply switched to jiu-jitsu and kept training.

The best pure athlete to ever hold the office. Ford started at center on Michigan's 1932 and 1933 national championship teams under coach Harry Kipke, then was voted team MVP in 1934 despite playing for a 1-7 squad that had lost most of its stars to graduation. He played in the 1935 East-West Shrine Game and was drafted by both the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions.

He turned them both down. Ford had been offered an assistant coaching job at Yale that paid $2,400 a year, and he wanted to attend Yale Law School in his spare time. He coached the freshman football team and the boxing team, finished law school in the top quarter of his class, and never publicly second-guessed the decision.

Lincoln was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1992 as an Outstanding American, the only sitting or former president to receive the honor. By tradition his record stands at 299 wins and 1 loss in informal catch-as-catch-can matches across his New Salem and Springfield years. The exact count is the stuff of frontier exaggeration; the dominance is not.

At 6 feet 4 inches and well over 200 pounds of lean farm-built muscle, Lincoln was a freak of physique for the 1830s, when the average American male stood roughly 5 feet 7 inches. The famous trick of gripping an axe by the end of its handle, extending it parallel to the ground, and drinking from a cup hooked over the blade was real. Few men in the country could replicate it.

Captain of Yale's baseball team for the 1947 and 1948 seasons, and the starting first baseman in the first two College World Series ever played. Yale lost both finals, to California in 1947 and to USC in 1948, but Bush was a slick-fielding glove man with a steady bat and a left-handed swing that scouts described as "professionally watchable."

The famous photograph: at Yale Field in 1948, Bush accepts the original handwritten manuscript of Babe Ruth's autobiography from the dying Bambino, who would pass away six weeks later. Before all of that, Bush had volunteered for the Navy on his 18th birthday and become the youngest commissioned pilot in U.S. Navy history. He flew 58 combat missions and was shot down over the Pacific in 1944.

Eisenhower was a starting halfback and linebacker at West Point until November 9, 1912, when he tore knee ligaments in a tackle on Carlisle Indian Industrial School's star running back. The runner he was tackling was Jim Thorpe, fresh off winning gold in the pentathlon and decathlon at the Stockholm Olympics. The knee never recovered. Eisenhower's playing career was over at 22.

He transitioned to coaching, then to golf. As president he installed a putting green on the South Lawn and was photographed there more often than at his desk. He shot in the 80s into his seventies and was, by the estimate of his contemporaries, the most consistent golfer ever to hold the office.

Obama played for Punahou School's 1979 Hawaii state championship basketball team as a senior. He was the eighth or ninth man on a deep roster and saw limited minutes in the title game, but the championship is real and the lifelong commitment to the game was the most genuine sporting passion of any modern president.

As president he had a basketball court installed at Camp David and a half-court added to the White House tennis court. Pickup games with NBA players, friends, and former teammates were a documented routine. In 2010 he took an elbow that opened a cut requiring 12 stitches in his lower lip. He was back on the court inside a week.

Kennedy was a member of Harvard's swim team and an accomplished competitive sailor, twice winning the McMillan Cup as captain of the Harvard sailing crew. He played junior varsity football until a back injury, the first of many, ended his football career.

The athletic record is asterisked by chronic illness. Kennedy battled Addison's disease and a deteriorating spine for his entire adult life, and the touch football games at Hyannis Port were as much for image as for sport. But during the PT-109 incident in 1943, Kennedy towed an injured crewmate three and a half miles to safety by gripping the man's life jacket strap between his teeth and swimming the breast stroke. Few men of any era could have done it.

Reagan played football, swam, and ran track at Eureka College in Illinois. The most consequential athletic chapter of his life, though, came in seven consecutive summers between 1927 and 1933, when he worked as the head lifeguard at Lowell Park beach on the Rock River. Reagan kept a log. By the end of the seventh summer he had personally pulled 77 swimmers from the river, carving a notch into a fallen oak tree for each save.

The local newspaper covered him repeatedly. He never lost a swimmer. Decades later, as president, he would still occasionally reference the count when reporters asked about his fitness routine.

Often forgotten on these lists, often unfairly. Bush played junior varsity baseball at Yale, ran with the Yale rugby club, and famously served as head cheerleader at Phillips Academy Andover, which in 1964 was a serious athletic position. The headline credential is his 1993 Houston Marathon, run at age 47 in 3 hours, 44 minutes, 52 seconds, a time that would qualify him for the Boston Marathon in his age group.

His White House workout routine was the most regimented of any modern president, a mix of road running, weight training, and elliptical work that physicians publicly described as "exceptional" for a man in his late fifties. After leaving office he took up mountain biking aggressively and was photographed crashing more than once.

"The best horseman of his age," Thomas Jefferson said, "and the most graceful figure that could be seen on horseback." Washington stood 6 feet 2 inches and weighed roughly 200 pounds in a country where the average soldier was 5 feet 8. He had worked as a frontier surveyor in the Shenandoah Valley before he was 18 years old, sleeping rough and crossing rivers on horseback in conditions that killed lesser men.

The legend that he threw a silver dollar across the Potomac is geographically impossible, but a stone across the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg, near where he grew up, is plausible and consistent with the strength his contemporaries described. He fox-hunted into his sixties and broke horses other riders refused to mount.