The men's slalom in the 2026 FIS Alpine Skiing World Cup is scheduled to consist of eleven events, including the discipline final. For the second straight year, the season is scheduled to open in Levi, Finland (16 November), and the entire season will be held in Europe, according to the initial schedule released on 12 June 2025.[1]
The season will be interrupted for the quadrennial 2026 Winter Olympics in three regions in Italy–Milan, the Stelvio Pass, and Cortina d'Ampezzo–during 6–22 February 2026.[2] All of the Alpine skiing events for men are scheduled to take place on the classic Stelvio course at Bormio.[3] The championship in men's slalom, the last men's event in Alpine skiing, is scheduled to be held on Monday, 16 February.
Season summary
In the opening slalom of the season in Levi, 2023 discipline champion Lucas Pinheiro Braathen, who then skied for his native Norway before transferring to his mother's homeland of Brazil in 2025 after a one-year retirement, recorded the first World Cup victory ever for his new country and its one-man team.[4] At the same time, six-time discipline champion Marcel Hirscher, who won all of those championships while skiing for Austria before transferring to the Netherlands after a six-year retirement, announced that his return to the World Cup circuit from his season-ending injury in December 2024 would not take place until January 2026.[4] A week later, the second slalom, in Gurgl, Austria, produced a huge upset as France's Paco Rassat, who had finished a career-best sixth the week before, came from 14th place on his second run to earn his first World Cup victory in his first World Cup podium finish, which gave him the lead in both the discipline and the overall World Cup standings.[5] After a break while the World Cup series moved to North America, slalom resumed at Val d'Isère, France, where Norway's Timon Haugan, who had failed to podium the day before in giant slalom after being in third following the first run, held off Loïc Meillard of Switzerland, the previous day's winner, to become the third different winner in the discipline this season and take over the discipline lead.[6] Finally, in the last World Cup race before Christmas, the aptly-named Clément Noël of France held the slalom lead after the first run, but Norway's Atle Lie McGrath passed him on the second run for the victory, thus denying Noël a holiday-themed win, with McGrath's Norwegian teammate Haugan (fourth) retaining the discipline lead.[7]
Returning from the New Year's break, the men began a series of five slaloms in five weeks with a night slalom in Madonna di Campiglio, Italy, which this time was won by Noël, who came from behind to edge Finland's Eduard Hallberg and thus trail Haugen by only three points for the discipline lead.[8] A week later in Adelboden, Switzerland, France's Rassat claimed his second victory of the season in the slalom, edging out two Norwegians (McGrath and Henrik Kristoffersen) for the win and claiming the lead in the discipline himself by 26 points over Noël, as Haugen failed to finish the first run.[9] In the third race, at Wengen, Switzerland, McGrath repeated his victory there from 2025, beating his good friend (with birthdays only two days apart) and former Norwegian teammate Braathen by almost half a second, which propelled him into a narrow discipline lead, now followed by Braathen, Noël, Rassat, and Haugan, with only 42 points separating the five of them.[10] But the next week, in the slalom at Kitzbühel, Austria, the home country's Manuel Feller came from fourth after the first run to overtake leader Loïc Meillard and save Austrian honor for the weekend; meanwhile, when McGrath failed to finish his first run, Braathen, who finished fourth, took over the discipline lead.[11] Three days later, about a week before the start of the Olympics, a night slalom under the lights at Schlamding turned into an all-Norwegian battle between McGrath and Kristoffersen, with last year's discipline champion Kristoffersen coming from behind on the second run to claim his first victory of the season, while McGrath grabbed a one-point lead over Braathen in the discipline race.[12]
The first run at the Winter Olympics started in a light snowfall, which quickly turned into a blizzard with low visibility, allowing McGrath, the first skier, to build a lead of 0.59 over Meillard, the second skier, who built another 0.35 over the next-best skier, Fabio Gstrein of Austria, with only seven skiers within two seconds of McGrath's lead and 11 of the top 30 and 49 out of 96 total failing to finish the run; however, McGrath straddled a gate and skied out early in the (clear) second run, allowing Meillard to complete his set of Olympic medals at these games with a gold medal (to join his silver from the team combined and his bronze from the giant slalom). Gstrein, who matched Meillard for the best second-run time, won the silver for the first medal for the Austrian men's Alpine skiing team first individual medal of the games, and Kristoffersen, who posted the third-best second-run time, took the bronze for his second career Olympic medal.[13]
Finals
The World Cup finals in the discipline are scheduled to take place on Wednesday, 25 March 2026 on the Olympialøypa course at Hafjell, near Lillehammer, Norway.[14] Only the top 25 skiers in the World Cup downhill discipline and the winner of the 2026 FIS Junior World Championships in the discipline, plus any skiers who have scored at least 500 points in the World Cup overall classification for the season, will be eligible to compete in the final, and only the top 15 will earn World Cup points.
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