Beijing 2022 - Alpine Skiing
It wouldn’t be the Olympic Winter Games without ski racers flying down terrifyingly steep hills at ridiculously fast speeds. Alpine skiers must navigate a course defined by gates in a quest to get to the finish line in the fastest time. There are four individual events that fall across a spectrum that runs from technical to speed. Slalom is the most technical, followed by giant slalom. The gates spread out farther for the super giant slalom (better known as super-G) before skiers really let loose on the downhill, a breakneck race in which the top skiers can reach nearly 100 mph.
Although alpine skiing wasn’t included in the inaugural Winter Games in 1924, it has the distinction of having included matching women’s and men’s events from the start. Both women and men competed in the alpine combined (slalom plus downhill) at the 1936 Winter Games in Germany. The Olympic program eventually grew into five individual events that have been contested since the 1988 Winter Games — slalom, giant slalom, super-G, downhill and alpine combined.
The one notable change in recent years was the addition of a mixed team event in 2018. This is a parallel slalom competition in which the best 16 teams go head-to-head in a single-elimination bracket, with two men and two women racing for each country. Whichever team wins more races (or in the case of a 2-2 tie, has a better aggregate time) advances.
Austria (121) and Switzerland (66) are the all-time medal leaders in alpine skiing, with France (48) and Team USA (47) leading the second tier. Austria, Switzerland and Norway each won seven medals in 2018. The U.S. won three medals, with two of them courtesy of Mikaela Shiffrin and one from Lindsey Vonn.
Vonn, the most successful women’s racer of all time, has since retired. Shiffrin, 26, remains in peak form and is on pace to surpass Vonn as the winningest woman on the world cup circuit. No other Americans have been consistent podium threats in the world cup in recent years, although a handful of skiers have the potential to reach the top three at any given time. In December, Bryce Bennett became the first American man to win a downhill race in nearly five years. Breezy Johnson, meanwhile, posted three consecutive second-place finishes in downhill races in December.
The Olympic alpine skiing events will be held at the National Alpine Ski Centre in the Yanqing zone approximately 50 miles northwest of Beijing.
Updated on January 28, 2022. For more information, contact the sport press officer here.