The inaugural World Cup race was held on 5 January 1967 in Berchtesgaden, West Germany, a slalom won by Heinrich Messner of Austria.

The racer with the most points at the end of the season in mid-March wins the cup, represented by a 9 kilogram crystal globe.

For super-g races in the three seasons previous, points were added and calculated in the giant slalom ranking.

The World Cup is held annually, and is considered the premier competition for alpine ski racing after the quadrennial Winter Olympics.

World Cup competitions have been hosted in 25 countries around the world: Andorra, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States.

Only four men's racers have ever managed to win small crystal globe in four or more different alpine skiing disciplines during their career, as listed in the table below.

A common measurement of how good individual skiers are is the total number of World Cup races won during their skiing career.

Only a few racers have ever managed to win races in all five classic World Cup alpine skiing disciplines during their career, as listed in the table below.

Marc Girardelli (1988–89), Petra Kronberger (1990–91), Janica Kostelić (2005–06) and Tina Maze (2012–13) are the only skiers to have won all five events in a single season.

Introduced by the International Ski Federation to the World Cup as a spectator-friendly event in late 2015, the parallel giant slalom competition, or shortened parallel-G, joining the parallel slalom, is intended to lure more speed specialists into the faster of the two technical disciplines, along with attracting their fans to watch the races at the venue, on-line, and on television.

[7] Few venues offer the slope and conditions required to host an extremely short Giant slalom course that can be readily viewed in its entirety by a compact gallery of fans.

Modified or not, the Federation has not suggested that they will push the format to lower-level tours like the NorAm and Europa Cup.

The Chief Race Director of the inaugural event at Alta Badia, Markus Waldner, on 20 December 2015 stated that "great performances" and "head-to-head fights" between the best giant slalom racers is the goal of the competition.

Points were awarded and accumulated according to current standards for the race season in all relevant categories: the GS discipline, Overall and Nations Cup.

The best combined times moved the fastest racer to the second round through bracket preference protocols.

The World Cup scoring system is based on awarding a number of points for each place in a race, but the procedure for doing so and the often-arcane method used to calculate the annual champions has varied greatly over the years.

Until 1970, the results of Winter Olympic Games races and Alpine World Ski Championship races were also included in the World Cup points valuation (i.e., Grenoble 1968 and Val Gardena 1970); this was abandoned after 1970, mainly due to the limited number of racers per nation who are permitted to take part in these events.

This perennial tweaking of the scoring formula was a source of ongoing uncertainty to the World Cup racers and to fans.

The need for a complete overhaul of the scoring system had grown increasingly urgent with each successive year, especially once the FIS and the International Olympic Committee accepted after 1984 that the skiers were fully professional and not amateurs, so they no longer needed an artificial limitation on their number of events.

The fewest points for an overall champion under the current system thus far have been 1009 for men by Aksel Lund Svindal in 2008–09 and 1248 for women by Vreni Schneider in 1994–95.

The tables below contain a brief statistical analysis of the overall World Cup standings during the 21 seasons since the Top 30 scoring system was implemented in 1991–92.

Since 1993 the International Ski Federation (FIS) has hosted a World Cup Final at the end of each season in March.

Marc Girardelli accounted for all of Luxembourg's 46 wins, while Janica Kostelić has 30 of Croatia's 56 and her brother Ivica has the rest.

Some nations specialize in either speed (downhill and Super G) or technical (slalom and GS) disciplines, while others are strong across the board.

Some nations have strong teams in only one gender, as 92% of Norway's wins have come from their men and 83% of Germany's from their women, while the Swiss, French and Canadian totals are split almost equally.