Gina Hathorn: Britain's First World Cup Winner
Gina Hathorn won a World Cup race in the inaugural 1967 season, the first British alpine skier ever to do so, and finished 4th at the 1968 Olympics.
Gina Hathorn won a World Cup race in the early years of the World Cup. The FIS Alpine Ski World Cup had only just been created, its first season ran in 1967, and Hathorn, a slalom specialist from Britain, was already standing on the top step of the podium. She is the first British alpine skier, male or female, ever to win a World Cup event.
Born 6 July 1946, Hathorn was one of the British alpine racing generation who came of age at a time when Britain still produced serious competitive skiers, particularly in the technical disciplines. Slalom rewarded technique and intelligence over the pure athletic development of downhill, and Hathorn had both.
Three Winter Olympics
She competed at three consecutive Winter Olympic Games: Innsbruck 1964, Grenoble 1968, and Sapporo 1972. It was at Grenoble in February 1968 that she produced what remains one of the finest results in British Olympic alpine skiing history: fourth place in the women’s slalom. Fourth is the cruelest result in sport, and in a race where the difference between third and fourth can be a tenth of a second, Hathorn was closer to a medal than the final standings suggest.
The context matters too. The 1968 Winter Olympics were held at altitude in France, and the slalom field that year included some of the finest technical skiers in the world. A fourth place for a British woman, in 1968, in a slalom at the Games. It should be a better-known result than it is.
Her World Cup win in 1967 came at a time when the circuit was young and the scoring system was still taking shape, but a win is a win regardless of the era. She competed through the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, accumulating results that have largely faded from public memory in a country that pays little sustained attention to alpine ski racing between Olympic cycles.
Underrecognised
Hathorn’s place in British skiing history is considerable and underacknowledged. She predates Bartelski’s 1981 podium, Baxter’s 2002 Bronze, and Ryding’s 2022 win by a full decade in each case. The 1967 World Cup win has been largely lost from mainstream British sporting consciousness, partly because the World Cup was new and received little coverage in Britain at the time, and partly because British skiing has always struggled to maintain its own institutional memory.
That memory exists here: Gina Hathorn won a World Cup race. She is the first Briton who can say so.