Kjetil Andre Aamodt
Jean-Claude Killy
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Kjetil Andre Aamodt leads 4 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Kjetil Andre Aamodt at #11 and Jean-Claude Killy at #12.
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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.
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.