Ingemar Stenmark
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 Ingemar Stenmark at #2 and Kjetil Andre Aamodt at #11.
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The case for Ingemar Stenmark
For 34 years the answer to the question of who had won most, and still the men's record-holder. The Swede took 86 World Cup victories — 46 in giant slalom, 40 in slalom — without ever seriously contesting a downhill, which meant he was surrendering an entire half of the points table and winning the overall title anyway, three years running from 1976 to 1978. In 1978-79 he won 13 races in a season. At Lake Placid in 1980 he won both technical golds, coming from well behind in the first run each time, and he added world titles in 1978 and a slalom-giant slalom double at Schladming in 1982. His style was the argument for economy: minimal upper-body movement, no visible effort, a line so precise that his runs look slow on film until the split times appear. He was also the last great champion of the straight ski, retiring in 1989 four years before the shaped ski arrived.
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.