Hermann Maier
Marco Odermatt
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Hermann Maier leads 3 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Hermann Maier at #6 and Marco Odermatt at #7.
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 Marco Odermatt
The best all-round male racer since Maier and the man who broke his points record. Odermatt won four consecutive overall Crystal Globes from 2022 to 2025, and in 2022-23 scored 2,042 points, passing the 2,000 Maier set in 1999-2000, while winning globes in giant slalom, super-G and downhill in the same seasons — the rarest achievement in modern racing, since the technical and speed disciplines now demand almost separate training programmes. He won Olympic giant slalom gold at Beijing in 2022 and world titles in downhill and giant slalom at Courchevel-Meribel in 2023, adding a further giant slalom world title at Saalbach in 2025. As of the end of the 2024-25 season he had passed 40 World Cup victories while still in his twenties, and he carries the Swiss team's speed programme, the strongest in the sport, on his results.