Industry News
The 23/24 FIS Alpine World Cup season has wrapped up and it’s time to pour over the statistics. The International Ski and Snowboard Federation (‘FIS’) gathers data on the brands used by the international skiing elite as well as other data. FIS adds all the points accumulated by athletes sponsored by individual ski brands and publishes a ranking each year. Here are the findings for the 23/24 season:
- The best ski brand for Alpine across all disciplines was Head, with 7,760 FIS points.
Overall World Cup Season winner Lara Gut-Behrami skis on Head skis. Other famous brand ambassadors are Cornelia Hütter, Ragnhild Mowinckel, Lena Dürr, Wendy Holdener, Sara Hector, and James Crawford. - The best ski brand for Downhill was Head with 1,865 FIS points.
2021 Downhill World Champion Vincent Kriechmayr from Austria is a Head athlete. - The best ski brand for Super-G was Head with 2,560 FIS points.
2022 Olympic Silver medallist Ryan Cochran-Siegle is a Head athlete. - The best ski brand for Giant Slalom was Rossignol with 2,570 FIS points.
Rossignol counts famous athletes like Federica Brignone, Petra Vlhova, Clement Noël, and Katharina Liensberger as brand ambassadors. Rossignol also supplies many Freestyle and Cross-Country skiers with skis. - The best ski brand for Slalom was Atomic with 2,020 FIS points.
Atomic has been a long-time sponsor of such Alpine athletes as Mikaela Shiffrin, Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, Sofia Goggia, Lucas Braathen, Manuel Feller. Many of these athletes had injuries this year which impacted the brand’s performance in speed disciplines like Super-G and Downhill. It is also very active in Freestyle and Cross-Country which has not been taken into account for this analysis.
Of course, the bigger the brand, the more money it can pour into providing athletes with equipment at which stage it becomes a numbers game. So don’t dismiss the smaller brands like Van Deer Racing or Stöckli, who only supply a limited number of athletes with free skis.
How big a role does material play for ski racers? Naturally, ski racers need the best of the best to perform at this level, however, the difference between the individual brands does not come down to quality but rather individual preference. Athletes spend many months testing skis and finding the right pair for them. Sometimes switching brands can help athletes as the material simply does not match their individual skiing style or preference. Ultimately, all these brands are the top Alpine ski brands that have spent decades perfecting race skis and tailoring them to skiers’s requirements. The skis used by professional athletes are typically not suitable for recreational skiers, as their specs are meant for ski racing and not recreational skiing. If you have the opportunity to demo various skis, I would definitely recommend demoing a pair of race skis to get a feel for the handling of these highly engineered and diligently crafted racing tools.
