Mikaela Shiffrin
Alberto Tomba
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Mikaela Shiffrin leads 3 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Mikaela Shiffrin at #1 and Alberto Tomba at #8.
The case for Mikaela Shiffrin
The most successful racer the World Cup has produced. Shiffrin won her first World Cup race at 17, took her first world slalom title at 17 and Olympic slalom gold at 18, and then kept accelerating: she passed Lindsey Vonn's women's record of 82 wins at Kranjska Gora in January 2023, passed Ingemar Stenmark's all-time record of 86 at Kronplatz days later, and won her 100th World Cup race in the Sestriere slalom on 23 February 2025, months after a serious abdominal injury in a crash at Killington. Her 2018-19 season — 17 victories and 2,204 points — is the single most dominant campaign in the history of either tour. She has five overall Crystal Globes, eight world championship golds, more than 60 slalom wins, and victories in all six World Cup disciplines including downhill and the parallel event. The only line on her record that stays open is Olympic gold beyond her two, in a sport where a single morning decides everything.
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.