Hermann Maier
Jean-Claude Killy
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Hermann Maier leads 4 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Hermann Maier at #6 and Jean-Claude Killy at #12.
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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.
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.