Marcel Hirscher
Lindsey Vonn
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Marcel Hirscher leads 3 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Marcel Hirscher at #3 and Lindsey Vonn at #4.
The case for Marcel Hirscher
The most dominant season-long racer in the history of the men's circuit. Hirscher won eight consecutive overall Crystal Globes from 2012 to 2019, a run no alpine skier of either sex has approached — Marc Girardelli's five had stood as the men's record since 1993 — and did it against the deepest technical fields the sport has staged, with Austria alone able to field a dozen plausible podium contenders. He finished with 67 World Cup wins, split between giant slalom and slalom, and seven world championship golds. The one gap was Olympic: after a silver in Sochi he finally won giant slalom and combined gold at Pyeongchang in 2018. He retired at 30 in perfect health, then returned in 2024 racing under the flag of the Netherlands, his mother's country, an unprecedented late-career switch that reopened a career everyone assumed was closed.
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.