Marcel Hirscher
Vreni Schneider
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 Vreni Schneider at #10.
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 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.