Lindsey Vonn
Vreni Schneider
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Vreni Schneider leads 3 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Lindsey Vonn at #4 and Vreni Schneider at #10.
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 Vreni Schneider
The dominant technical racer of her generation and the owner of the most extraordinary single season in women's skiing before Shiffrin. In 1988-89 Schneider won 14 of the 16 races she entered, a win rate no woman has matched, and she finished her career with 55 World Cup victories and three overall Crystal Globes in 1989, 1994 and 1995. At Calgary in 1988 she won both slalom and giant slalom; at Lillehammer in 1994, six years and a serious knee injury later, she won the slalom again and added silver and bronze, taking her career Olympic haul to five medals from three Games. She was world champion in giant slalom in 1987 and won two golds at Vail in 1989. Her giant slalom technique — quiet, endlessly patient with pressure through the arc — was the model Swiss coaching taught for two decades afterwards.