Mikaela Shiffrin
Ingemar Stenmark
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Mikaela Shiffrin leads 4 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Mikaela Shiffrin at #1 and Ingemar Stenmark at #2.
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 Ingemar Stenmark
For 34 years the answer to the question of who had won most, and still the men's record-holder. The Swede took 86 World Cup victories — 46 in giant slalom, 40 in slalom — without ever seriously contesting a downhill, which meant he was surrendering an entire half of the points table and winning the overall title anyway, three years running from 1976 to 1978. In 1978-79 he won 13 races in a season. At Lake Placid in 1980 he won both technical golds, coming from well behind in the first run each time, and he added world titles in 1978 and a slalom-giant slalom double at Schladming in 1982. His style was the argument for economy: minimal upper-body movement, no visible effort, a line so precise that his runs look slow on film until the split times appear. He was also the last great champion of the straight ski, retiring in 1989 four years before the shaped ski arrived.