Billy Major: Leading British Slalom Racer Post-Ryding
Billy Major: World Cup points including at Schladming, fifteenth at the 2025 Worlds, and one of the leading British slalom racers of the next generation.
Billy Major is one of the leading British slalom racers of the next generation. Born 21 November 1996, Major has emerged as the leading British male slalom racer of the post-Ryding era, with World Cup results that suggest the progression is ongoing rather than settled.
The World Cup Breakthrough
He has scored World Cup points, including at the Schladming night slalom, the Planai in Austria, one of the most demanding slalom venues on the circuit, a night race run under floodlights with 40,000 spectators creating an atmosphere that has ended the seasons of technically superior racers who could not hold it together under those conditions. Points at Schladming are not scrappy points on a peripheral circuit. They mean the racer held two clean runs on one of the hardest slaloms of the year.
He has since developed his World Cup programme, working across the slalom circuit while maintaining his Europa Cup ranking for depth of results across the season.
The 2025 World Championships
At the 2025 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships in Saalbach, Austria, Major recorded fifteenth place in the men’s slalom. He was twenty-eight years old, at or approaching the age when slalom racers tend to reach their consistent competitive peak. A fifteenth at a World Championship, against a full international field, is the kind of result that gets a British racer noticed.
Earlier in the season he had recorded World Cup points finishes, including on courses that punish any racer who does not commit fully to the gate in the upper section.
Milan-Cortina 2026
He competed at the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. A documentary produced by Warner Bros Discovery followed the British World Cup slalom team through the build-up to those Games, with Major as a central figure, a level of coverage that British alpine ski racing has rarely received.
Whether Major can close the gap to the top twenty consistently, and whether he can build the podium results that Ryding eventually achieved, will define the next phase of British slalom racing. The foundations are in place: World Cup points, a fifteenth at the Worlds, and an Olympic debut at Milan-Cortina.