Dave Ryding: Britain's Greatest Alpine Ski Racer
Dave Ryding: the Kitzbühel win, multiple World Cup podiums, five Winter Olympics, and the career that redefined British alpine skiing.
There is a moment in sport when something that seemed structurally impossible actually happens, and you realise the structure was wrong all along. For British alpine skiing, that moment came on 22 January 2022, at the foot of the Ganslern slope in Kitzbühel. Dave Ryding crossed the finish line in the slalom and won. Not a podium, not a near-miss, not an agonisingly close second. An outright win, the first by any British skier in the fifty-five-year history of the FIS Alpine Ski World Cup.
He was thirty-five years old. He had been on that same circuit for over a decade. He had stood on the podium six times before and not won. And he did it in Kitzbühel, which is not an incidental venue: it is the most prestigious stop on the World Cup calendar, the race every specialist in the world wants on their résumé. If you were designing a moment for it to happen, you would design it like that.
Career Overview
Full name: David Ryding Born: 5 December 1986, Lancashire Discipline: Slalom World Cup podiums: Multiple (1 win, further podium places) Winter Olympics: 2010 Vancouver, 2014 Sochi, 2018 Pyeongchang, 2022 Beijing, 2026 Milan-Cortina World Championships: multiple appearances, best result sixth place in slalom at 2025 Saalbach
Background
Ryding grew up in the Ribble Valley area of Lancashire and learned to ski at the Ski Rossendale dry slope in Rawtenstall, on plastic bristles rather than snow. He did not grow up in the Alps. He did not have the infrastructure that Austrian, Swiss, or French juniors take for granted. He developed his technique in the north of England, and somehow translated that into a career at the top of the most technically demanding discipline in alpine skiing.
He came through the British junior programme and made his World Cup debut in December 2009. For the first several years on circuit his results were what you would expect from a British slalom racer: World Cup points occasionally, but nothing that suggested what was coming. The breakthrough came incrementally. A first podium at Kitzbühel in January 2017, finishing second. Then a sequence of results in the late 2010s and early 2020s, two more podiums in 2020 and another in 2021, that made it clear this was not a one-off. He was a genuine World Cup-level slalom racer.
The Kitzbühel Win
The 2022 Kitzbühel slalom, formally the Raiffeisen Slalom on the Ganslernhang, took place on 22 January 2022. Ryding went into it with a strong recent record and skied aggressively in both runs.
He finished with a combined time of 1:41.26. Lucas Braathen of Norway finished second, 0.38 seconds behind. Henrik Kristoffersen, also Norway, was third at 0.65 seconds back.
The win made Ryding the first British skier to win a World Cup race since Gina Hathorn in the inaugural 1967 season. It also made him, at thirty-five, the oldest-ever winner of a World Cup slalom.
The significance of the venue was not lost on anyone who follows the sport. The Hahnenkamm week, the downhill on the Streif and the slalom on the Ganslern, is the event that matters most to the serious skiing world. British skiers have appeared at it across the decades; Martin Bell was the first to crack the top fifteen in the downhill back in 1986. Winning the slalom there, half a century later, was something else entirely.
Five Olympics
Ryding competed at five consecutive Winter Olympics, which is itself a measure of career longevity that few alpine skiers achieve.
2010 Vancouver: his Olympic debut, finishing twenty-seventh in the slalom.
2014 Sochi: seventeenth in the slalom.
2018 Pyeongchang: ninth in the slalom, his best Olympic result. He was thirteenth after the first run and moved through the field on his second run to finish in the top ten, a result that confirmed he was capable of performing at the highest level when it mattered.
2022 Beijing: he was selected as one of two British flag bearers for the opening ceremony alongside curler Eve Muirhead, a recognition of what his Kitzbühel win ten days earlier had meant. His slalom result was thirteenth.
2026 Milan-Cortina: He competed at the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, more than a decade after his World Cup debut in 2009.
World Championships
Ryding competed at numerous World Championships across his career. His best result came at the 2025 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships in Saalbach, Austria, where he recorded sixth place in the men’s slalom, the best result by a British male at a World Championship since 1934. It was a fitting near-finale to a career defined by repeatedly exceeding what the sport had decided was possible for a British racer.
What He Represents
Ryding is British alpine skiing’s single greatest achievement on the competitive circuit. He won a World Cup race. He competed for well over a decade at the highest level in his discipline without the structural advantages that every one of his competitors enjoyed. No one else has done anything comparable.
His career also matters as a proof of concept. Every argument made against British alpine ski racing, no mountains, no infrastructure, no pipeline, applied to him too. He overcame them regardless. That does not make overcoming them easy; it makes it documented that it can be done.
Dave Ryding’s World Cup win at Kitzbühel on 22 January 2022 remains the greatest result in British alpine ski racing history.