Christl Cranz

German alpine skier who dominated the 1930s, winning a record 12 World Championship gold medals and becoming alpine skiing's first female Olympic champion in 1936.

Christl Franziska Antonia Cranz was born on 1 July 1914 in Brussels; her family fled to Germany during the First World War, settling near Reutlingen, where she learned to ski, before later moving to Grindelwald and Freiburg. She rose quickly through the ranks of the sport's earliest international competitions, making her World Championship debut in 1934 in St. Moritz, where she won gold in slalom and combined. Cranz went on to utterly dominate women's alpine skiing for the rest of the decade, winning every available title at both the 1937 World Championships in Chamonix and the 1939 Championships in Zakopane. At the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, held in her home country, she won the newly introduced alpine combined event after a dramatic comeback, having crashed in the downhill and trailed by 19 seconds before two outstanding slalom runs carried her to gold - making her the first female Olympic champion in alpine skiing history. She competed in unofficial 1941 World Championships during wartime before retiring, finishing with a career total of 12 gold and 3 silver World Championship medals, a haul that remains unmatched to this day, with Mikaela Shiffrin the closest challenger decades later. Cranz's athletic dominance made her a prominent figure in Nazi-era Germany, where she served as a poster figure for state sports organizations during her competitive years - a well-documented part of her historical record. After the war she became Germany's first officially certified female ski instructor, founded her own ski school in Oberstdorf, and later served as head coach of the West German women's alpine team at the 1956 and 1960 Winter Olympics. She died on 28 September 2004 at the age of 90.

Complete all-round racer, unbeaten in combined events throughout her competitive career, equally strong in downhill and slalom

Remembered as the most successful competitor in Alpine World Ski Championships history, a record that stood unmatched for over eight decades, though her career remains historically inseparable from her prominence within Nazi-era German sports propaganda

• 1936 Olympic Gold Medalist, Combined (alpine skiing's first female Olympic champion)
• 12x World Championship Gold Medalist (1934-1939)
• Record 15 total World Championship medals, unmatched for over 80 years
• Swept all titles at both the 1937 and 1939 World Championships