⛷️Competitions

The circuit that turned alpine racing into a professional sport, conceived by journalist Serge Lang with coaches Bob Beattie and Honore Bonnet. Roughly forty men's and forty women's races run from the traditional October glacier opener at Solden to the March finals, with points awarded to the top 30 and the overall Crystal Globe going to the highest season total. Small globes are awarded in each discipline. Only the top 25 per discipline qualify for the finals. For racers and coaches this, not the Olympics, is the sport's true championship.

Alpine skiing joined the Olympic programme at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1936 with a single combined event, added giant slalom in 1952 and super-G in 1988. It is the sport's largest audience by an enormous margin, and the results are decided by a single run or two on unfamiliar snow, which is why the Olympic and World Cup honour rolls diverge so sharply. The 2026 Games returned alpine racing to Italy, with the men's events at Bormio's Stelvio course and the women's on the Olympia delle Tofane at Cortina d'Ampezzo.

First staged at Murren in 1931, where Britain's Esme Mackinnon became the sport's first world champion, and now held in odd-numbered years. The programme covers all four disciplines plus a combined event and a mixed team parallel competition. Winners earn the right to wear the rainbow-striped bib, and no World Cup points are awarded, so the championships sit outside the season narrative entirely. Recent editions include Cortina 2021, Courchevel-Meribel 2023 and Saalbach 2025, with Crans-Montana in Switzerland hosting in 2027.

The most feared race in skiing, run on the Streif — 3,312 metres of course with 860 metres of vertical drop, opening with the Mausefalle, where the gradient exceeds 85 percent and racers fly up to 80 metres. The Kitzbuhel weekend, held every January since 1931, draws around 85,000 spectators and the winner's cheque is roughly 100,000 euros, but the money is not the point: a Streif victory outranks most world titles in the sport's internal hierarchy. Didier Cuche's five downhill wins lead the all-time list.

The longest downhill on the circuit at roughly 4.5 kilometres, taking about two and a half minutes and demanding an entirely different physiology from the 90-second courses — racers finish the Lauberhorn genuinely exhausted. The course threads through the Hundschopf jump, the Wasserstation and the Haneggschuss, where Johan Clarey was clocked at 161.9 km/h in 2013, the fastest speed ever recorded in a World Cup race. Kristian Ghedina's 1997 course record of 2:24.23 has never been beaten.

The Planai slalom, run under floodlights since 1997, is the loudest event in the sport: around 45,000 spectators pack the finish arena in a small Styrian town, most of them arriving hours before the first run. The atmosphere makes it the slalom racers most want to win, and it is one of the few alpine events whose television numbers rival a downhill classic. Schladming has also hosted the world championships twice, in 1982, where Ingemar Stenmark won a slalom and giant slalom double, and again in 2013.

The circuit's anchor event outside Europe, built for the 1999 world championships and hosting World Cup speed and giant slalom races each December. The Birds of Prey course has a genuinely difficult top section, the Brink, and has produced some of the sport's better American moments — Bode Miller and Daron Rahlves both won here repeatedly. Its December slot makes it an early season indicator, and it is one of the few venues where jet lag and altitude, at over 3,400 metres at the start, materially affect results.

Para alpine skiing has been on the programme since the first Winter Paralympics at Ornskoldsvik in 1976 and covers the same four disciplines plus combined events. Athletes compete in standing, sitting and vision-impaired categories, with sit-skiers racing on a monoski and vision-impaired racers following a guide who skis ahead calling the line. Results use a factored time system that multiplies raw times by a coefficient for each impairment class, allowing racers with different classifications to be ranked in a single event.