quite a few athletes are shit people, but it's about athleticism, not being a great person

There only exists two possibilities.

We judge ranks and hall of fames as "inspirational heroes" and make constant moral judgements about who gets in, which comes at the expense of any talk about how good they are being useless because you never know how many got cut for being assholes.

The other is we just keep it objective and simple. Whatever metric the ranking uses is sufficient and the only disqualifiers are things that are blatantly against the rules of the time, and if rules change (like with roids) then you make a second list with/without or asterisk it. This gives you always the best, but you have to acknowledge shitty people instead of unpersoning them like our society prefers to do.

I can see an argument for the first option. That's one that is important to teach and sell to kids, because sports stars do have tremendous pull with them across the nation. But that's also a dangerous subjective road that you need extremely trustable authorities to decide.

While option two means a lot of awkward conversations and explanations, but gives us the raw data we care about it.