The huge publicity given to the Olympic Games and the extraordinary performances achieved by some individuals in Beijing has led to much discussion about who may be the world’s greatest cyclist, swimmer, sprinter and what have you. It has prompted a reader in Leeds to ask who I consider to be the world’s greatest angler. Would I opt for Zyg Gregorek, who was recently described as such after an extraordinary feat as a big-game fisherman? Gregorek’s achievement was reported at length in our news pages.

After 18 years of effort, he had caught all ten game species of billfish, nine species of shark and eight species of tuna - a tally unequalled since records were established more than 50 years ago. A spokesman for the International Game Fish Association, which is based in Florida and regulates these things, hailed Gregorek as “the world’s greatest fisherman”.

My reply to the reader who asked if I agreed is a qualified “don’t know”, bordering “not on your Nellie”.

Gregorek is a competent and enthusiastic big-game angler and, yes, he has had outstanding success with the monsters he pursues. But how many big-game fishermen are there amid the angling world’s millions? The answer, relatively speaking, is very few. How many of these have the resources to range the world over year upon year, as Gregorek’s feat required? That answer is many fewer still. There is more. As anyone who has big-game fished knows, much of the skill in boating a huge marlin or tuna lies not with the angler, but with the crew of the boat. It is local knowledge that establishes where and when the biggest specimens of a given species may be found mid-ocean and it is the boat-handling skills of the skipper who puts the angler in that place precisely, at the right time, and who then handles the boat in a way that helps him to land the fish.

None of this is criticism of Gregorek or is meant unreasonably to diminish what he has achieved, but it is to put the claim made for him into perspective. On angling’s wide ocean, big-game fishers troll a relatively small pool. They have to handle their great fish expertly, but anglers the world over do that every day, on tackle scaled down to match the species they seek.

The truth is that angling is no place for absolutes of any kind, whether greatest, always, never or black or white. Undaunted, the sport’s media seeks such comparisons all the time. Every couple of years some editor will invite readers to nominate “the greatest angler ever”, or some such, without defining what they mean.

Does this greatest angler fish in the sea or fresh water or must it be both? Is he (or she) the one who catches the biggest fish or the most fish or the most big fish? Is he (or she) the most consistently successful? Or, as many nominations suggest, might greatness need have nothing to do with performance at all? Is “the greatest” the man who most significantly advances tackle or technique? Is he the man who most advances our understanding of the quarry? Is he the angling writer who has had more positive and longer-lasting influence than any other, always assuming we can agree on what “more”, “positive” and “longer-lasting influence” mean? Every one of these alternatives changes the nature of the choice, utterly.

Richard Walker, a towering 20th-century figure, is often voted the greatest not only because of his exceptional abilities with a rod but because of his qualities as a naturalist, scientist and writer. By dint of example, by his relentless logic and thanks to exceptional communication skills, Walker saw off much of the myth and potion that had held back angling for so long before him. His full impact, though, was confined to coarse fishing and it is from coarse anglers that his votes tend to come. Trout fishermen might nominate Frederic Halford, the man whose Dry Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice, published in 1889, handed down a system for that branch of the sport that holds good the world over, today. And yet for all his great contribution as researcher and recorder, we know that Halford was an indifferent performer with a rod.

Salmon anglers may opt for A. H. E. Wood, who promoted the greased line, or Robert Pashley, the number-cruncher of the Wye. Big-game anglers in Britain may opt for Gregorek, but others may choose Eric Horsfall Turner, the man who, in the 1940s and 1950s, pioneered big-game fishing around Britain’s shores and who landed a series of giant tuna to make his point. American big-gamers may look back to Zane Grey, anglers elsewhere possibly to others.

The fact is that in deciding greatness, as anything else, we first have to define our terms. There is something else that we need to do: we need to recognise that to be nominated for greatness at any level, an angler has to be known, which means that he has either to promote himself or be brought to attention by others. It is a certainty that the majority of the greatest anglers who lived - greatest performers, anyway - have never been known. They have been close-counselled men who have gone quietly about their business, living unsung lives in the sought-out shadows.

And so again to the question. While Zyg Gregorek is no doubt a remarkable and dedicated angler, I cannot say if he is the “the world’s greatest fisherman” or not because the term is too wide to make a sensible judgment.

On any definition that would fit a sheet of A4, though, I doubt it.

Brian Clarke’s fishing column appears on the first Monday of each month

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