Defining Moments of the 2025/26 Alpine Skiing Season

Every year, the Audi FIS World Cup tour seems to break new ground and reach new heights as the world's best skiers continue to raise the bar.

That trend continued in 2025/26, and with the additional spectacle of a tremendous Olympic Winter Games at beautiful venues in Cortina d'Ampezzo and Bormio, there was no shortage of iconic moments to define the season.

Comeback Queens

The feel-good Alpine skiing comeback story of the Olympic Winter Games was not the one many people anticipated, but its unexpectedness made it all the more captivating.

After a sensational 2024/25 season that yielded 10 World Cup wins, a world championships gold and three Crystal Globes, Federica Brignone's (ITA/Rossignol) Olympic hopes came crashing down — or so it seemed — after a devastating injury at the Italian championships in April 2025.

After suffering multiple tibia fractures and a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), Brignone couldn't walk for three months after the accident and was racing the clock just to be in the starting gate for her home Olympic Games 10 months later.

She only managed two World Cup races before the Games in late January, an encouraging sixth place in Giant Slalom in Kronplatz and 18th in Super G in Crans Montana.

At that stage, as a 35-year-old coming off a serious leg injury with almost no race preparation, Olympic medals seemed an unlikely dream.

Yet at Cortina d'Ampezzo, where she had famously struggled throughout her career before getting the monkey off her back the previous season, Brignone was simply brilliant.

She claimed the Super G gold medal by nearly half a second and backed it up three days later with a Giant Slalom victory by more than half a second, turning tragedy into triumph in a matter of months.

While Brignone's Olympic comeback ended in a fairytale, Lindsey Vonn's (USA/Head) did not.

Vonn, who returned to the World Cup circuit at age 40 in December 2024, had established herself as the in-form speed skier of the 2025/26 season, winning twice in Downhill and setting the record as the oldest World Cup winner.

Her victory at St. Moritz in December in the first Downhill of the season was her first World Cup win in nearly eight years, and she made the podium in seven of her eight speed races through mid-January.

Then, a week before the Milano Cortina 2026 opening ceremony, Vonn tore her ACL but, feeling no pain, chose to compete at the Games without it.

Thirteen seconds into her Downhill run, however, Vonn clipped a gate at high speed in the air and crashed, fracturing her left tibia and breaking her right ankle.

While Vonn may not ski on the World Cup tour again, the same hopefully won't be true for 2022 Olympic Slalom champion Petra Vlhova (SVK/Rossignol), who finally returned from a long lay off at the Games.

Vlhova, who hasn't competed on the World Cup tour since January 2024 after tearing her ACL and MCL and subsequently suffering further setbacks, made it to the start gate at Milano Cortina 2026 and finished 20th in Slalom.

It wasn't quite the comeback that Brignone enjoyed, but in a process-based sport, it was an important step on a journey that could see her return to her best one day.

First Time's a Charm

Prior to the 2025/26 season, Julia Scheib (AUT/Rossignol) and Laura Pirovano (ITA/Head) had zero World Cup wins and only one individual podium between them in over 150 starts.

As they both entered the campaign last October at 27 years of age, they must have been wondering if glory would ever find them.

Did it ever.

Scheib and Pirovano were the breakout winners of the women's tour, picking up eight victories between them and a Crystal Globe each - Scheib in Giant Slalom, Pirovano in Downhill.

Starting with the Austrian, she won the season-opener on home snow in Sölden for an emotional victory, then reeled off four more GS wins over the course of the season to clinch the globe before the finals.

Two DNFs were the only blemish on her World Cup season; she otherwise finished on the podium in all eight of her GS races, having done so only once in her entire career prior to this season.

Pirovano, meanwhile, was becoming known as the queen of just missing the podium; through early March, she had finished fourth or fifth 11 times in World Cup races dating back to January 2021 without ever cracking the top three.

Then, all of a sudden, the Italian went from knocking on the door to tearing it down, dominating the back end of the Downhill season by winning the last three races to claim the season title at the World Cup finals in Kvitfjell.

While Pirovano and Scheib were the most prominent first-time winners, given how long they had been chasing the top step of the podium, they weren't the only ones.

Swiss young gun Malorie Blanc (SUI/Atomic) was marked for greatness when she won the Super G title at the junior world championships in 2024 and then came second in her first World Cup downhill race the following year.

The 22-year-old backed up that promise with her first World Cup victory in on home snow on an emotional weekend in Crans-Montana in late January, less than a month after the devastating New Year's Eve bar fire in the Swiss resort.

Although she's only two years older than Blanc, it seems as though Alice Robinson (NZL/Salomon) has been around forever.

The Sydney-born New Zealander started the season on fire, winning two early Giant Slalom races and then a Super G contest in St. Moritz to become the first skier from Oceania to win a World Cup speed race.

While Robinson's form dropped off as the season progressed, at age 24 she is already the most successful World Cup Alpine ski racer from outside Europe or North America with seven wins, a number that will surely continue to rise.

The Golden GOAT

Mikaela Shiffrin (USA/Atomic) reigned supreme on Slalom skis this season, winning nine out of 10 World Cup races while narrowly coming second in the other one.

She wrapped up the Slalom Crystal Globe all the way back in January, but had to wait until the final day of the season to secure her record-equalling sixth Overall title ahead of Emma Aicher (GER/Head).

For all her dominance on the World Cup circuit, however, it was the Olympic Slalom race that was always going to define Shiffrin's season in the eyes of the public, four years after her difficult and medal-less Beijing 2022 experience.

In February, Shiffrin returned to Olympic snow and struggled in the Slalom leg of the Team Combined, dropping from first to fourth to again miss out on a medal.

But in the Slalom proper eight days later, the American star was superb, crushing the field by 1.5 seconds to leave no doubt that she is, still, the best Slalom skier we've ever seen.

Switzerland's Golden Boy

Entering Milano Cortina 2026, Alpine skiing pundits knew that a Swiss man could claim three victories. That prediction turned out to be accurate — except the man biting into all that gold was not the one everyone thought it would be.

Franjo von Allmen (SUI/Head) lit up Bormio in February, winning the Downhill, Super G and Team Combined titles at his first Olympic Games to upstage more fancied teammate Marco Odermatt (SUI/Stöckli).

In doing so, 24-year-old von Allmen became only the third man to win three Alpine skiing golds at one Olympic Games. The other two — Toni Sailer (AUT, 1956) and Jean-Claude Killy (FRA, 1968) — are quasi-mythical legends of the sport.

Von Allmen has not yet reached that status, but the fearless youngster has shown himself to be a big-game performer, with five Olympic and world championships gold medals already to match his tally of five World Cup wins.

The story of Von Allmen's entire career is yet to be written, but no matter how it unfolds, those five magical days in February 2026 will forever define it.

Veterans Reach a Century of Podiums

While Odermatt's Olympic Games did not quite go to script, he still walked away with three medals and enjoyed another dominant World Cup season.

Winning the Overall World Cup title for the fifth consecutive year, as well as claiming his fourth straight Super G globe and third straight Downhill title, the 28-year-old continued his climb into the record books.

Now with 54 World Cup wins, Odermatt has tied Austrian legend Hermann Maier (AUT) for equal third on the men's all-time list, and sits one victory behind Vreni Schneider (SUI, 55) for the all-time record by a Swiss man or woman.

Coincidentally, Odermatt's 102 career World Cup podiums by season's end drew him level with a man he has long sparred with on the Giant Slalom slopes, Henrik Kristoffersen (NOR/Van Deer).

The feisty Norwegian added seven podiums to his tally this season, and also claimed his 34th World Cup win by triumphing in the famous night Slalom in Schladming.

The pair are equal third on the all-time men's World Cup podium list, with only the legendary Ingemar Stenmark (SWE, 155) and Marcel Hirscher (NED/Van Deer, 138) ahead of them.

When next season begins on the Rettenbach glacier in Sölden, they will resume their assault on the sport's history.

New Countries, New Stars

While traditional Alpine skiing powers continue to win the lion's share of the prizes, new countries are emerging more than ever to challenge the old order.

Skiers from unheralded places created some of the greatest moments of the 2025/26 season, including:

• Jan Zabystran (CZE/Kaestle) winning the Val Gardena Super G in December, the first World Cup win by a male skier from Czechia or the former Czechoslovakia.

• Eduard Hallberg (FIN/Fischer) making Finland's first World Cup podium on home snow in the Levi Slalom, then adding two more as the season progressed.

• Armand Marchant (BEL/Head) coming second in the Gurgl Slalom to record Belgium's first ever World Cup podium.

Beyond these historic performances, the man doing the most to take Alpine skiing to new frontiers is Lucas Pinheiro Braathen (BRA/Atomic), whose spectacular season gave Brazil its first World Cup win, its first Winter Olympic gold medal and its first Crystal Globe.

The former Norwegian racer danced his way to that groundbreaking World Cup win in the Levi Slalom in November a year after switching his allegiance to Brazil, but his greatest moments were still to come.

In February, Pinheiro Braathen won the first Winter Olympic medal of any colour for any South American nation by dominating the Giant Slalom, pushing defending champion Odermatt into silver by over half a second.

Back on the World Cup Giant Slalom circuit, the Brazilian won in Kranjska Gora in March and again at the World Cup Finals in Hafjell to end Odermatt's four-year stranglehold on the Giant Slalom Crystal Globe.

After his incredible Olympic triumph, Pinheiro Braathen reflected on what it means to ski for Brazil.

"I hope I can inspire some kids out there that, despite what they wear, despite how they look, despite where they come from, they can follow their own dreams and be who they really are," he said.

"Because that is the real source of happiness in life."