In 2004, Finland staged its first World Cup race, and a Finn won it. Two decades on, Levi has become the ritual opener of the slalom season, the kingdom of Mikaela Shiffrin and her reindeer. One thing was missing: a Finnish man at the sharp end.
28 February 2004, the founding act
On Saturday 28 February 2004, the World Cup came to Finland for the first time. The project had been born eight years earlier, during an inspection of the slope. No mountains, said the sceptics. No Alpine tradition either.
Tanja PoutiainenFIN was 23. She came from Rovaniemi, less than two hundred kilometres away. Of her first Games, in Nagano in 1998, she would later say: “I was like Alice in Wonderland.” In 2004, Alice was at home. She won the slalom in front of her own crowd. The next day she finished sixth in the second slalom, won by Maria RieschGER.
What followed confirmed her talent: giant slalom silver at the Turin Games and three discipline globes. At Levi she returned to the podium three times, the last in 2012.
Kalle Palander, the pioneer
© Alpine Racing Press
Before her, there had been Kalle PalanderFIN. Born in Tornio, at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia, he became slalom world champion at Vail in 1999. He took the discipline’s globe in 2003. He was the first Finn to truly count on the circuit.
Levi did not become a fixture straight away. The resort hosted two women’s slaloms in March 2006. That November it opened the 2007 season, and the men raced there for the first time. Palander finished eleventh. It would remain his best result at Levi.
Marcus SandellFIN then took up the torch, mainly in giant slalom. He raced on the World Cup until 2017 and placed fourth at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 2013. Eduard Hallberg made his debut in December 2023, at Val d’Isère.
Mikaela Shiffrin’s reindeer
In 2013, Levi invented a prize skiing had never seen: a reindeer for the winner. The animal stays in Lapland, and its sponsor chooses its name. That year Mikaela ShiffrinUSA was 18. She won, named her reindeer Rudolph, and kept coming back.
In 2019, her fourth win at Levi took her past the 40 slalom victories of Ingemar StenmarkSWE. The reindeer would be called Ingemar. In 2022, Levi staged two slaloms and Shiffrin won both: Sunny, then Lorax. On 12 November 2023, Petra Vlhová led after the first run, then went out in the second. Shiffrin seized the opening, and Grogu joined the herd.
The name is chosen after the race, never before. “It’s not good karma for me to think about the name before the race,” she explained in 2024. It would be Rori, for aurora borealis. In 2025 she won for a ninth time. She now has as many reindeer as Santa Claus.
Only one rival has stood up to her: Petra VlhováSVK, a six-time winner at Levi, in 2017, twice in 2020, twice in 2021 and in 2023. In 2021, both podiums were identical: Vlhová, Shiffrin, Lena DürrGER. Since 2016, no other woman has won at Levi. The tally stands at nine to six.
Behind them come two regulars. Lena Dürr took five podiums at Levi between 2021 and 2024, without ever winning. Katharina LiensbergerAUT, the 2021 slalom world champion, has four: two third places in 2020, a third in 2023 and a second in 2024.
The men, a patchy history
The men have never enjoyed the women’s regularity at Levi. Their races were cancelled in 2007, 2011, 2015 and 2020. They were not on the programme from 2021 to 2023.
The last slalom before that long pause, on 24 November 2019, went to Henrik Kristoffersen, ahead of Clément Noël and Daniel YuleSUI. The men returned on 17 November 2024. Noël won, ahead of Kristoffersen and Loïc MeillardSUI. Marcel Hirscher, a three-time winner here, was in the start gate, now racing for the Netherlands.
The “Fearless Finns”
© @WorldCupLevi Elias Koli
In 2025, two Finns approached Levi with real ambitions: Eduard HallbergFIN and Jesper PohjolainenFIN. Their team calls itself the “Fearless Finns”. Hallberg had already scored his first points here, finishing twenty-fourth in 2024. The Austrian Mario Rafetzeder coaches them.
In August 2025, Pohjolainen and his teammates went in search of winter in Ushuaia, Argentina. From 67° north to 55° south. “We had three weeks of real winter conditions, icy slopes at first, then spring conditions,” he says. His goal for Levi is clear: “Make the second run, and then gain a few more places.”
Among the women, Rosa PohjolainenFIN embodies the next generation. The theme of the 2025 edition, “Chasing Dreams”, suits them well. Five hundred volunteers keep the race running, and Santa Claus, Lapland’s official resident, drops by to greet the podium finishers.
Epilogue: Levi kept its word
On 15 November 2025, Rosa Pohjolainen qualified for the second run wearing bib 65. The next day, Eduard Hallberg took third place, behind Lucas Pinheiro Braathen and Clément Noël. It was the first podium for a Finnish man at Levi. Finland had celebrated nothing like it there since Tanja Poutiainen’s second place in 2012.
Eduard Hallberg, Ski25’s favourite. Read the profile
Part three: the 2025 favourites, and what happened. Read on
Article published on 7 November 2025, revised on 6 October 2026: factual errors corrected (Tanja Poutiainen, Levi’s calendar and roll of honour, Finland’s presence on the World Cup), weather forecasts removed, epilogue on the 2025 races added.