Alberto Tomba: Racing Gates and Racing Hearts

Arguably the most electric personality who ever stood in a starting gate, Alberto Tomba won 50 World Cup slalom and GS races and 13 World Championship and Olympic medals in a span of a dozen winters (1986 to 1998). Powerfully built, with curly black hair and more than his share of Italian charisma, Tomba had a childhood that didn’t much match the typical Euro racer’s rise from a poor family farmstead.

Sylvain Saudan: The Father of Extreme Skiing

With its ever-mounting degrees of difficulty and its hip athletes endorsing products and starring in films, extreme skiing has become the face of American skiing. The sport did not begin in the U.S., but in the jagged Alps above Chamonix, France, in 1967, when a fearless local by the name of Sylvain Saudan—declaring himself to be le skieur de l’impossible—linked more than 200 turns down the frighteningly steep Couloir Spencer on the Aiguille de Blatiere. No one had previously skied such a slope. It was also the first time that the press had covered such an event.

Suzy Chaffee: Queen of the 1970s Ski Ballet

Retirement from racing proved to be the beginning of a sequin-spangled career for Suzy Chaffee. Underappreciated today for her racing skills, Chaffee nearly won a World Championship downhill medal in Portillo, Chile, in 1966. Two years later in the Grenoble Winter Olympics, competing in a skintight silver suit, she became the fashion gold medalist of the Games.

Jean-Claude Killy: The Best of the Best

Among alpine skiing’s champions who’ve raced in the past 40 years, neither iron man Hermann Maier nor perfectionist Ingemar Stenmark nor prodigy Bode Miller has come close to matching Jean-Claude Killy. The Frenchman famously won all three alpine gold medals (slalom, giant slalom, downhill) at the 1968 Olympics. He was arguably even better in the inaugural World Cup season in 1967, when he won more than 70 percent of all races held—a record that may never fall.

Jean-Claude Killy

Shannon Tweed

Shannon Tweed: Hot Tub Star, Actress

Back in the early 1980s, if you walked into a movie theater to see Hot Dog…The Movie, you walked out a skier. Especially if you were a teenage guy. A goofy comedy that transported the beach party genre to the mountains, Hot Dog featured radical—for its time—ski stunts, potty humor and the first screen appearance of a young Canadian-born Playboy model named Shannon Tweed. Hot-tubbing—and spring-break ski vacations—would never be the same.

Andrea Mead Lawrence: Unequaled At Any Age

Today, when the average age of a top female World Cup ski racer is 28, it’s astonishing to recall how young champions once were. Not one has ever been as precocious as America’s Andrea Mead. The pig-tailed, fiercely competitive Vermont youngster made the U.S. Olympic team at 14, prompting her parents to ask older team members to chaperone her when she competed in the 1948 Games.