The first giant slalom of the season, scheduled as usual on the
Rettenbach glacier in Sölden, Austria in October, was won by 2024 discipline runner-up (and 2020 discipline champion) Federica Brignone, who rallied from third place after the opening run with the seventh-fastest time in the second run to overtake both of the racers ahead of her. With the victory, Brignone, who is 34, became the oldest woman ever to win a World Cup race, surpassing Elizabeth Görgl of Austria, who won her last race on the World Cup circuit in December 2014 at 33, two months before turning 34. Immediately thereafter, in the second giant slalom of the year at
Mikaela Shiffrin's "home" course in Killington, Vermont, United States, Shiffrin was trying for her 100th World Cup victory, having won number 99 in her last race. As in Sölden, she held the lead going into the second run. However, while still in the lead shortly after the midpoint of the course, she suffered a hard crash into the fencing, which resulted in her being stretchered off the course; the crash handed the win to
Sara Hector of Sweden, who thus took over the overall lead in the discipline for the season. After the cancellations (which still had not been rescheduled as of the end of December), the next giant slalom, held after Christmas in Semmering (Austria), came down to a second-run battle between Brignone and Gut-Behrami, which was decided when Gut-Behrami hooked a gate with her arm, causing her to drop all the way to ninth and handing the victory to Brignone, who edged ahead of Hector by 4 points in the season standings. The first giant slalom of 2025 took place in Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, just after New Years Day, and Hector was able to win again and reclaim the season lead after Brignone fell during her first run, with New Zealand's
Alice Robinson moving into a tie with Brignone for second. During the next week, one of the giant slaloms cancelled at Tremblant in December 2024 was awarded to Sestriere on 21 February, the day prior to the giant slalom already scheduled there. And still in Italy,
Alice Robinson of New Zealand won the giant slalom held at
Kronplatz, in a race where Hector, Brignone and Goggia all failed to finish, and she edged out Hector by four points for the season lead in the discipline. At the world championships, Shiffrin (the winningest skier in women's World Cup history in the giant slalom, with 22 victories) decided that she still had not recovered mentally from the crash in Killington and chose not to defend her 2023 world championship in the discipline. In her absence, Brignone and Robinson dominated the race, with Brignone posting the fastest and Robinson (the first Alpine skiing world medalist from New Zealand) the second-fastest time in each heat,. The next day, Brignone dominated again, winning her fourth GS of the season to move into second, just 40 points behind Robinson with only two races remaining, while a still-recovering Shiffrin missed qualifying for the second run for the first time in 12 years (since October 2012 at Sölden). Next, in Åre, Sweden, the giant slalom was once again won by Brignone for her third straight win in the discipline (fourth straight, counting worlds), with Robinson once again second, decreasing Robinson's lead to just 20 points (520 to 500) with only the finals remaining. ==Finals==