Ingemar Stenmark
Marco Odermatt
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 Marco Odermatt at #7.
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 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.