Alberto Tomba
Jean-Claude Killy
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Alberto Tomba leads 2 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Alberto Tomba at #8 and Jean-Claude Killy at #12.
Head-to-head FAQ
Who leads more shared metrics?
How do the published ranks compare?
Are these live stats?
The case for Alberto Tomba
Tomba la Bomba took a sport followed by Alpine villages and made it a national event in Italy. He won 50 World Cup races — 35 slaloms and 15 giant slaloms — and three Olympic golds, taking both technical events at Calgary in 1988 and defending the giant slalom at Albertville in 1992, which made him the first alpine skier to win the same event at two Games. He medalled at three consecutive Olympics. His overall Crystal Globe came late, in 1995, and he closed with a slalom and giant slalom double at the 1996 world championships in Sierra Nevada. The numbers understate him: Tomba raced with a physical, aggressive line built on unusual leg strength, and he turned second runs into theatre, routinely coming from four or five places back. Italian television audiences for his slaloms reached levels the sport has never seen since.
The case for Jean-Claude Killy
The shortest great career on this list and one of the most concentrated. Killy won the first two World Cup overall titles in 1967 and 1968, taking 12 of 16 races in the inaugural season — a proportion of a calendar no racer has since approached — and then swept downhill, giant slalom and slalom at the Grenoble Olympics in 1968, matching Toni Sailer as the only men to win all three at one Games. He finished with 18 World Cup victories in a circuit that barely existed yet, plus the world combined titles of 1966 and 1968. He retired at 24 and became the sport's first modern commercial star, later co-presiding over the 1992 Albertville Games and sitting on the IOC. His ranking here reflects an obvious limitation of era rather than of talent: there simply was no long circuit for him to dominate.