The Top 14 of 2014 – The Ski Racing staff counts down the stories that counted this year

14. Hansdotter finally gets a win

On Feb. 2, under difficult conditions in Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, Frida Hansdotter finally captured that elusive World Cup victory. The Swede had previously finished runner-up in eight World Cup slalom races, several of which saw her just behind Mikaela Shiffrin. The youngster held the lead after the first run, but made a critical mistake in the second to open the door for Hansdotter.

13. Mancuso captures bronze in Olympic combined

On Feb. 10, Julia Mancuso added a super combined bronze medal to her collection, which also includes two silvers and one gold. Coming into the Games in Sochi, the 29-year-old had already won more Olympic alpine medals than any other American woman. Helped by the fastest downhill run in the combined, she was able to harness the Olympic magic once again.

12. Aspen awarded 2017 World Cup Finals

On June 6, after protracted discussions in meetings and hallways, FIS Council Member Bill Marolt was successful in securing the 2017 World Cup Finals for Aspen, Colo. The event is expected to be the first alpine finale staged by the resort and the first held in the U.S. since Vail last hosted in 1997. But the FIS also sent a letter to the Aspen organizing committee with a list of needed improvements. These included reworking the finish arena and replacing the old 1A lift, while stating the event needed vastly more energy and support from the local community. We’ll see what happens in 2015.

11. Norway’s big recovery

On Oct. 19, days before the World Cup opener in Soelden, Aksel Lund Svindal tore his Achilles tendon, and it seemed he would likely be out for the entire 2014-15 race season. But a new Viking hero quickly filled the void as Kjetil Jansrud opened the season with an amazing run of podiums — six, to be exact, including four wins.

10. Oslo drops Olympic bid

On Oct. 2, Norwegian voters sent a message to the IOC when the nation elected to pull the plug on Oslo’s bid for the 2022 Olympic Winter Games. Oslo was the fourth city and first final candidate to withdraw from the bidding process for 2022, leaving only Almaty, Kazakhstan; and Beijing, China; remaining in the process. Opposition to the bid was largely because of the cost of arranging the Games and the so-called “strange” requirements by the IOC. Oslo had received endorsement from FIS president Gian-Franco Kasper and many others in the global ski racing community.

9. Nyman’s early season roll

On Dec. 19, after fighting back from an Achilles tear of his own, Steven Nyman showed the Saslong in Val Gardena who’s boss. Nyman skied a beautiful run on a course with minimal coverage to claim his third career victory at the venue. The win came on the heels of a podium performance for Nyman at his home race of Beaver Creek, which could spell even greater things for the American in 2015.

8. Travis Ganong captures career-first win

On Dec. 28, Travis Ganong closed out 2014 in style. The 26-year-old American, who many had suspected was on the verge of this moment for some time, solidified his first career win on the unfamiliar Santa Caterina slope. Ganong had picked up his career-first podium in Norway last spring and snagged a top-five result in Beaver Creek earlier in the month.

7. Schild retires as winningest female slalom skier in the history

On Sept. 2, after weeks of speculation about Marlies Schild’s future in ski racing, the 33-year-old slalom specialist officially announced her retirement at a scheduled press conference in the Vienna. The various reasons for her decision to hang up her skis included the desire to raise a family and a series of injuries that had prevented her from racing in top form during recent seasons. Still, she claimed the silver medal in slalom at the 2014 Olympic Winter Games, won two races during the season and stood on the podium seven times out of 11 total races. With 35 slalom wins, matching Alberto Tomba for second all-time, both genders, Schild retired as the winningest female slalom skier in the history.

6. Weibrecht, Miller take silver, bronze in Olympic SG

On Feb. 16, Andrew Weibrecht came from the 29th start in in the Olympic super G to earn a silver medal, just 0.30 seconds behind gold medalist Kjetil Jansrud of Norway. The bronze medals — yes, multiple bronze medals — went to Bode Miller of the U.S. and Jan Hudec of Canada, who were both 0.53 seconds out. Weibrecht, 28, had barely been heard from on the international stage since he captured a bronze medal in the same event at the Vancouver Olympics four years earlier.

5. Maria Hoefl-Riesch retires with downhill title

On March 12, Maria Hoefl-Riesch’s career came to a dramatic and bittersweet end. During the downhill at the World Cup Final in Lenzerheide, the German legend crashed hard into the nets after starting 23rd of 23, while fighting illness and fatigue. With Anna Fenninger down in fifth place, the downhill title was already locked up when Hoefl-Riesch kicked out of the start with an 80-point cushion in the discipline. But perhaps more significantly on the mind of the nearly season-long frontrunner was the overall title race, in which she held just a 29-point advantage over Fenninger coming into the day. Fenninger ultimately captured the overall, and Hoefl-Riesch announced days later she would call it a career.

4. Tiger Shaw assumes leadership of USSA

On March 3, Tiger Shaw officially took over the reigns of USSA as President and CEO, following in the footsteps of the retiring Bill Marolt, who had been at the helm since 1996 and led the organization to its greatest athletic success in history. Yet Shaw arrived with promise of shaking things up. At the Eastern Alpine Competition Committee spring meeting on April 27, Shaw kicked off his address with a bold plan to broaden the spectrum of the organization’s “Best in the World” vision to also include the sub-elite track.

3. Ligety’s GS accomplishments

In 2014, Mr. GS continued to live up to his nickname. With five victories, including an Olympic gold medal, no other competitor — not even Marcel Hirscher — comes close to that tally during the calendar year. On March 15, Ligety picked up his fifth-career giant slalom title by the closest of margins — literally. In the season’s final race, Alexis Pinturault and Felix Neureuther squeezed between Ligety and Hirscher, pushing the Austrian down to fourth place by a mere hundredth of a second. That created a tie atop the GS standings, 560 points each. The tiebreaking mechanism, wins over the season, went to Ligety (four to two).

2. Everything Mikaela Shiffrin has done

On Feb. 21, with a half-second lead after the first run, Mikaela Shiffrin spiced things up in the second leg of the Olympic women’s slalom by nearly getting bucked out of the course and making an amazing recovery to claim the gold medal. In doing so, the then-18-year-old became the youngest-ever Olympic gold medalist in women’s slalom history. But Shiffrin wasn’t done there — she carried that confidence into the remainder of the season, locking up a second straight World Cup slalom title a week early in Are, Sweden. If that wasn’t enough, Shiffrin wowed fans with a career-first giant slalom win at the World Cup opener in Soelden this past October and then followed it up with a victory in Kuehtai at the end of December to officially become the winningest slalom skier in U.S. history.

1. Vonn wins second race, joins Mancuso, Cook for US podium sweep

Dec. 6 marked the the most spectacular story of 2014 as Lindsey Vonn, who had spent the better part of two years battling injury, came back — in a big way. In just her second World Cup start since deciding to sit out the Olympics in Sochi, Vonn skied to victory in Lake Louise as she has so many other times: 15, to be exact. Making the story all the more remarkable was the simultaneous, first-of-its-kind American sweep of a World Cup podium. Vonn led fellow ‘84s Stacey Cook, second, and Julia Mancuso, third, who came up through the system together. With her 60th win — and 61st coming shortly after in Val d’Isere — the stage is set for Vonn to make a run at the all-time women’s World Cup win record in 2015. She needs one to tie and two to surpass Austrian legend Annemarie Moser-Proell.