Mikaela Shiffrin
Vreni Schneider
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 Vreni Schneider at #10.
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 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.