Alberto Tomba
Kjetil Andre Aamodt
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Kjetil Andre Aamodt leads 3 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Alberto Tomba at #8 and Kjetil Andre Aamodt at #11.
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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 Kjetil Andre Aamodt
The most decorated Olympian alpine skiing has produced, with eight medals across five Games from Albertville in 1992 to Turin in 2006 — a spread of championship longevity nobody else on this list approaches. Four of them were gold, level with Janica Kostelic at the top of the sport's all-time count, and three came in the same event: he won Olympic super-G in 1992, 2002 and 2006, at 20 and again at 34. He added combined gold at Salt Lake City and five world championship titles. His World Cup record is comparatively modest at 21 wins and a single overall Crystal Globe in 1994, and that gap is the case against him — but it also reflects a racer who contested all five disciplines seriously in an era of increasing specialisation, and who peaked, deliberately and repeatedly, in the weeks that mattered most.