There will be a total of five men's and women's Alpine skiing events at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics:

• Slalom
• Giant slalom
• Super-G
• Downhill
• Team combined

The downhill event features the fastest speeds and longest course, creating an exciting race from start to finish. Athletes often will reach 80 miles per hour or higher, depending on the steepness of each race course.

Along with downhill, the super-G is one of two "speed" disciplines that make up Alpine skiing events at the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics.

Super-G stands for "super giant slalom," a hybrid event combining elements of the downhill and giant slalom. A super-G is shorter than a downhill, but adds technical elements to the fold by positioning the gates closer together and building in more turns.

The two technical disciplines, giant slalom and slalom, both have sharper turns on shorter courses. They require skiers to be reactive to the quick turns while maintaining a fast pace on the tightest lines through gates to emerge victorious. The slalom is the shortest of the four disciplines with the most compressed turns, while the giant slalom features fewer acute turns and a wider distance between gates.

In the speed disciplines (downhill and super-G), skiers record times based on a single run through the course, with the fastest time determining the winner.

In the technical events (giant slalom and slalom), racers ski the course twice, with the fastest cumulative time determining the victor.

The men's and women's team combined consists of one slalom specialist and one downhill specialist completing one run of their respective discipline. The duo with the fastest cumulative time is the winner.

Alpine skiing at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics will be held at two venues: the Tofane Alpine Skiing Centre and Stelvio Ski Centre.

Tofane Alpine Skiing Centre, host of the women's events, is located in Cortina, a regular stop on the FIS World Cup tour and venue of the 2021 Alpine Ski World Championships. All races occur on the Olympia delle Tofane slope.

The downhill and super-G courses will be the same as those world championship courses, but the giant slalom and slalom courses will feature slight alterations. For example, the giant slalom has a new start on a section called "Labirintini." Although Tofane's slalom course will be updated, it'll contain the slalom section of the Alpine combined event where Mikaela Shiffrin won the world title in 2021.

Bormio, home of the men's Alpine events at the 2026 Winter Games, will feature all races on the Stelvio slope, one of the most challenging mountains in the world for skiers. Some gradients reach 63%, which is twice the steepness of an average run for a recreational skier. The slope is a regular stop for men's speed events on the World Cup tour.

Bormio also hosted the Alpine Ski World Championships in 1985 and 2005, with American Bode Miller winning gold in the downhill and super-G events.

The results of most freestyle skiing disciplines are determined via judged scoring. Slopestyle, moguls, halfpipe and more take form, technicality and creativity into account, with judges awarding points. In Alpine, the goal for racers is to get to the finish line as quickly as possible without missing a gate. Period.

Cross-country skiing and ski cross (a freestyle skiing event) are also timed races, however, Alpine skiers do not compete head-to-head all at once and they move at much faster speeds.

Lindsey Vonn and Mikaela Shiffrin lead a stacked United States team favored to secure multiple medals in Milan Cortina across the five Olympic Alpine ski events.

Vonn came out of retirement in 2024 after a six-year hiatus with the goal of competing in one final Winter Games. She struggled on the World Cup tour — the highest level of year-round Alpine ski competition — last season, but shocked the world in November when she won a Cup event, becoming the oldest athlete in history (41) to accomplish the feat. She’s been on absolute tear since and has emerged as the favorite to win gold in the downhill.

Shiffrin, Vonn’s GOAT-level teammate, holds nearly every major statistical record in the sport, including a whopping 106 World Cup victories (20 more than the next skier on the list). In 2014, Shiffrin became the youngest athlete to win a slalom gold medal at the Sochi Games, but uncharacteristically did not finish (DNF’d) in her two strongest events — slalom and giant slalom — in Beijing. She’ll look to exorcise those 2022 demons in Milan Cortina. 

There’s a solid chance Shiffrin and Vonn join forces for the new team combined event, which pairs a top technical skier (slalom, giant slalom) with a top speed skier (downhill, super-G). The union would be akin to if prime Michael Jordan played on the same basketball team as prime LeBron James.

Defending downhill world champion Breezy Johnson, technical specialist Paula Moltzan, speedster Jacqueline Wiles and more round out a highly capable women’s squad.

By contrast, the American men are longshots to take home hardware. Still, they have Ryan Cochran-Siegle, the only Alpine skier, man or woman, to earn a medal (silver) for the U.S. in Beijing in 2022. He snagged it in the super-G 50 years to the day after his mom, Barbara Cochran, won slalom gold at the 1972 Sapporo Winter Olympics.

Since achieving the accolade, "RCS" has been a consistent top 10, top 15 World Cup speed racer, and earlier this season, threw down an impressive downhill run in Beaver Creek to take home second place. On the whole, podium finishes largely have eluded Cochran-Siegle in the last Olympiad (reaching two in four years), and he won’t be a favorite in Milan Cortina. However, he wasn’t a favorite in Beijing either and he did just fine there.

Unlike his teammate, who left Beijing with hardware, River Radamus experienced heartbreak. He narrowly missed out on a podium in two separate events: the giant slalom and now defunct team parallel. In GS, he came within 27 hundredths of a second from bronze. 

The 27-year-old, who will turn 28 a day before he competes in the giant slalom at the 2026 Milan Cortina Games, is seeking redemption. He’s steadily improved his World Cup performance this season, picking up four top-7 finishes in his last four technical races, and thus, might be peaking at the right time. Outside of GS, he’s also likely to compete in super-G.

*First-time Olympians