Ingemar Stenmark
Lindsey Vonn
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Ingemar Stenmark leads 3 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Ingemar Stenmark at #2 and Lindsey Vonn at #4.
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 Lindsey Vonn
The greatest speed racer in women's history and, until Shiffrin, the winningest woman on the circuit. Vonn's 82 World Cup victories include 43 downhills, a total nobody else in the sport is close to, and she won four overall Crystal Globes in five seasons between 2008 and 2012, a stretch in which she also took downhill and super-G world titles at Val d'Isere in 2009 and Olympic downhill gold at Vancouver in 2010. She collected 20 crystal globes in total across the overall, downhill, super-G and combined standings. Her career reads as a running argument with her own body: a shattered arm, two reconstructed knees, a broken ankle, a fractured humerus, and a retirement in 2019 forced by pain rather than form. She returned to World Cup racing in 2024 at 40 with a partially replaced knee, and podiumed again — the oldest woman ever to do so.