Annemarie Moser-Proll
Hermann Maier
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Annemarie Moser-Proll leads 3 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Annemarie Moser-Proll at #5 and Hermann Maier at #6.
The case for Annemarie Moser-Proll
The most complete dominance any woman exercised over the World Cup before Shiffrin. Moser-Proll won five consecutive overall Crystal Globes from 1971 to 1975, retired at 25, came back and won a sixth in 1979 — still the women's record — with 62 race victories in a period when the calendar was far shorter than it is today. Between December 1972 and January 1973 she won eleven consecutive downhills, a streak in a single discipline no racer has matched. She took five world championship golds and, at Lake Placid in 1980 in her final season, the Olympic downhill title that had eluded her through two silver medals at Sapporo in 1972. Contemporaries described a racer who simply attacked terrain other women managed, and her win rate across the seasons she contested remains the highest of any woman in the sport's history.
The case for Hermann Maier
The Herminator, a bricklayer rejected by the Austrian ski academy as a teenager for being too small, who arrived on the World Cup at 23 and immediately rebuilt the sport's idea of how hard a racer could attack. Maier won 54 World Cup races and four overall titles in 1998, 2000, 2001 and 2004, and his 2,000 points in 1999-2000 stood as the men's record for 23 years. His defining week came at Nagano in 1998: a crash in the downhill that launched him through two safety fences at over 100 km/h and was replayed worldwide, followed three days later by super-G gold and giant slalom gold. In August 2001 a motorcycle accident nearly cost him his right leg; he missed two seasons, returned in 2003, won the super-G globe in his comeback season and the overall title the year after. Nobody in the sport's history has recovered from more.