Vreni Schneider
Kjetil Andre Aamodt
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Kjetil Andre Aamodt leads 3 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Vreni Schneider at #10 and Kjetil Andre Aamodt at #11.
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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.
The case for Kjetil Andre Aamodt
The most decorated Olympian alpine skiing has produced, with eight medals across five Games from Albertville in 1992 to Turin in 2006 — a spread of championship longevity nobody else on this list approaches. Four of them were gold, level with Janica Kostelic at the top of the sport's all-time count, and three came in the same event: he won Olympic super-G in 1992, 2002 and 2006, at 20 and again at 34. He added combined gold at Salt Lake City and five world championship titles. His World Cup record is comparatively modest at 21 wins and a single overall Crystal Globe in 1994, and that gap is the case against him — but it also reflects a racer who contested all five disciplines seriously in an era of increasing specialisation, and who peaked, deliberately and repeatedly, in the weeks that mattered most.