Lara Gut-Behrami and Marco Odermatt are both currently having the best season of their lives. But how good are they compared to the outstanding figures in ski history?
Ski racing is a lonely battle against the slopes and the clock; no race is comparable to the other. Nevertheless, comparisons across space and time appeal to us. Who is the best in the history of skiing? How good are Lara Gut-Behrami and Marco Odermatt compared to previous heroines and heroes? Who has the longest winning streak? A look at the ski statistics handbook.
Lara Gut-Behrami, the eldest
She was already a star as a teenager: Lara Gut in 2008 – with Silvan Zurbriggen at the Swiss Ski press day in Saas-Fee.
Olivier Maire / Keystone
The Ticino woman will be almost 33 years old when she receives the big crystal ball for her triumph in the overall World Cup at the end of March. She breaks the age record for women, but also represents an exceptionally long career. Gut-Behrami was on the podium for the first time in the World Cup more than 16 years ago; she celebrated her first victory in 2008. Not a single one of the athletes who competed with her back then is still active today.
The Austrian Petra Kronberger had an extremely short career. In December 1989 she won for the first time as a 19-year-old, and at the end of that winter she won the overall World Cup. The following winter she became the first athlete to triumph in all five disciplines. In three seasons she won the overall World Cup three times, became Olympic champion and world champion. In December 1992, in the middle of winter, she said she lacked motivation. She was only 23 years old at the time – and resigned.
Ingemar Stenmark, Series champion
Nobody dominated the technical disciplines as much as him: Ingemar Stenmark in Stockholm in 1975.
Olle Seijbold / Imago
The Swede won so often in the 1970s and 1980s that it was thought his records would last forever. But then other prodigies came along. Marco Odermatt is currently in the process of attacking Ingemar Stenmark’s record: 14 consecutive victories in the giant slalom. Odermatt currently stands at 12, and because the Kranjska Gora race was canceled, he will not be able to equal the record until next winter.
Stenmark was purely a technician, his 86 victories all coming from giant slaloms (46) and slaloms (40). The fact that he only won the overall World Cup three times is due to the fact that at his time only the best three results in each discipline counted for the overall ranking. In 1978/79, for example, he won 13 races, but was only able to earn 150 points and ended the winter in 5th place.
Marco Odermatt, Dominator
There is champagne almost every weekend: Marco Odermatt after winning the 2024 giant slalom in Palisades Tahoe.
Penny Collins / Imago
In one respect, Odermatt has already caught up with Stenmark: He also managed 13 wins in the 2022/23 season, has now reached this mark again and can increase his total to 16 by the end of the season. At 26 years old, the man from Nidwalden is already one of the outstanding figures in alpine ski racing. With 2042 points he holds the men’s record, which he can improve to 2302 points by the end of winter.
This is mainly due to Odermatt’s almost unbelievable consistency at the highest level. So far this winter he has started 23 races and finished 20 of them with a podium finish. This corresponds to a success rate of 87 percent. He won 57 percent of the races (13). He is currently number 1 in the world in all three disciplines in which he competes.
Tina Maze, The Perpetual Mobile
At times she seemed like a counted-out boxer – but Tina Maze always got back up and won.
Kevin Frayer / AP / Keystone
The absolute record as a points collector is held by Tina Maze, who achieved a total of 2,414 points in 2012/13. The Slovenian competed in all disciplines and a total of 35 races that season. She achieved 11 wins and a total of 24 podium places.
As the season progressed, Maze looked like a stricken boxer, sitting pale in the snow after her runs and barely able to raise her hand in a gesture of triumph. But then she got up again and got ready for the next top result. In between, she quickly became world champion in Super-G. She recently said in an interview with the NZZ that more was needed at the time, after all, some races were canceled.
Maze doesn’t think her record will last forever. One who could surpass him is Mikaela Shiffrin. The American is already at the top of some statistics. So far she has achieved 95 victories in the World Cup and has thus outclassed the supposedly untouchable Stenmark. In the winter of 2018/19 she achieved 17 wins. At that time she drove in 26 races and finished 21 of them on the podium.
Johan Clarey, Races
If he had been driving, he would have had to hand over his driver’s license. On January 19, 2013, the Frenchman was clocked at 161.9 kilometers per hour in Wengen. This is the highest speed ever recorded in the Ski World Cup. The Hanegg shot on the Lauberhorn has now been modified and added a jump, so that Clarey’s record is unlikely ever to be broken.
The Austrian Armin Assinger achieved the highest average speed in 1993 in Sierra Nevada with 112.37 kilometers per hour. The route was essentially a highway, with the athletes crouching from top to bottom. Today, the technical requirements in downhill runs are significantly higher and the average speeds are lower.
The athletes in speed skiing prove that it can be done much faster without any curves. The world record is held by Frenchman Simon Billy at 255,500 kilometers per hour. The fastest woman in the world is an Italian, Valentina Greggio, at 247.083 kilometers per hour.
Franz Klemm, high-flyer
King of the downhill skiers: Franz Bracket celebrates his third win of the season in 1976.
Walter L. Keller / Ullstein-Image / Getty
The Austrian is the best downhill skier in the history of the World Cup. He won a total of 25 races in his specialist discipline and remained undefeated in the winter of 1974/75. His superiority is also reflected in the lead he achieved on the Lauberhorn in 1975: 3.54 seconds. This is the largest margin ever measured.
Bracket is also the only athlete to date to win the downhill discipline ranking five times. Two Swiss came closest to him: Didier Cuche and Beat Feuz, each with four small balls in the supreme discipline. As a consolation, Cuche took away the record for most downhill victories in the Austrian ski mecca of Kitzbühel in 2012 with his fifth triumph on the Streif.
Austria, number 1
Crushing superiority: The Austrians finished 1st to 9th in the 1998 Super-G in Innsbruck.
Screengrab / ORF
The duel between neighboring countries Switzerland and Austria has been enlivening the ski circuit for decades, with the Austrians being ahead in most statistics. They won the overall World Cup most often among women and men, 17 times each. And they won significantly more races: 860:566.
The superiority at the turn of the millennium was overwhelming, when a red-white-red avalanche flattened everything. The men’s Super-G on December 21, 1998 in Innsbruck is emblematic of this. It was held at Patscherkofel, in a ski resort owned by Peter Schröcksnadel, the all-powerful president of the Austrian federation. The Austrians took places 1 to 9. A good week later they dominated the downhill in Bormio with places 1 to 6.
The winner of both races was the figurehead of that great Austrian generation: Hermann Maier. The Swiss speed riders were just extras at the time and a little later brought in veteran star Pirmin Zurbriggen as a mentor for the World Ski Championships in Vail. He couldn’t do anything.
Didier Cuche, Methusalem
Didier Cuche celebrated Olympic silver in the Super-G in 1998 – but he only became really good in the second half of his career.
Rudi Blaha / AP / Keystone
The man from Neuchâtel was part of the disgraced speed team in 1999; a year earlier he had won silver at the Olympic Games in Nagano. Back then, Cuche was a hope for the future with some great successes, but he only really became outstanding in the second half of his career.
At the age of 32, he won a crystal ball for the first time in 2007, in the premier discipline of downhill. By the end of his career in 2012, he had been presented with a total of six such trophies, four in downhill, one each in super-G and giant slalom. To this day, Cuche is the oldest athlete to ever win the World Cup, in 2012 at 37 years and 192 days. He raised the record several times; his name appears 12 times in the top 20 oldest winners. The oldest person to ever stand on the podium in the World Cup was Johan Clarey at 42 years and 13 days old. In Kitzbühel, of all places, on the most brutal downhill slope in the world.
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