Mikaela Shiffrin
Hermann Maier
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 Hermann Maier at #6.
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 Hermann Maier
The Herminator, a bricklayer rejected by the Austrian ski academy as a teenager for being too small, who arrived on the World Cup at 23 and immediately rebuilt the sport's idea of how hard a racer could attack. Maier won 54 World Cup races and four overall titles in 1998, 2000, 2001 and 2004, and his 2,000 points in 1999-2000 stood as the men's record for 23 years. His defining week came at Nagano in 1998: a crash in the downhill that launched him through two safety fences at over 100 km/h and was replayed worldwide, followed three days later by super-G gold and giant slalom gold. In August 2001 a motorcycle accident nearly cost him his right leg; he missed two seasons, returned in 2003, won the super-G globe in his comeback season and the overall title the year after. Nobody in the sport's history has recovered from more.