Lindsey Vonn
Alberto Tomba
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Dead even across the measured categories. Our all-time ranking places Lindsey Vonn at #4 and Alberto Tomba at #8.
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.
The case for Alberto Tomba
Tomba la Bomba took a sport followed by Alpine villages and made it a national event in Italy. He won 50 World Cup races — 35 slaloms and 15 giant slaloms — and three Olympic golds, taking both technical events at Calgary in 1988 and defending the giant slalom at Albertville in 1992, which made him the first alpine skier to win the same event at two Games. He medalled at three consecutive Olympics. His overall Crystal Globe came late, in 1995, and he closed with a slalom and giant slalom double at the 1996 world championships in Sierra Nevada. The numbers understate him: Tomba raced with a physical, aggressive line built on unusual leg strength, and he turned second runs into theatre, routinely coming from four or five places back. Italian television audiences for his slaloms reached levels the sport has never seen since.