Fill is an all-round skier. In the
2007 season, Fill was among the overall leaders for the overall World Cup title, the first Italian since
Alberto Tomba to rank in the overall top ten. Fill learned to ski at the age of 3 with the help of his first teacher Frieda Senoner. He achieved his first successes during his middle-school years, while he was coached by Peter Thomaseth. In 1997/98 he joined the
Seiser Alm training center, where he was coached by his uncle Arnold. In the same year he joined the B-Pool of the Bolzano-Bozen ski team (coached by Sepp Steinwandter). One year later he advanced to the A-Pool under Stephan Feichter. In 1999, he won every discipline at the National Junior Championships and returned home with four gold medals; he was called "the phenomenon" by the Italian press. In 2000, Fill joined the national team for the first time. His coach was Ernst Pfeifhofer, who continued as his coach for the following year in the Italian B-Team. At the same time he became a member of the
Carabinieri sportsgroup. As a junior in 2001, he achieved his first important success on an international level, a bronze medal in the super-G at the
Junior World Championships. In 2002/03 he was part of the A-Team of Flavio Roda for the first time. In February 2002, Fill won the World Juniors and, as a result, took part in his first
super-G race of
World Cup on 7 March 2002 at Altenmarkt in Austria, where he placed 12th outpacing the Norwegian
Lasse Kjus by one hundredth of a second. While Fill's strengths are the downhill and
super-G, he is also competitive in the technical disciplines. On 13 January 2006 he stood 3rd on the Ski World Cup podium of the super combined race in Wengen (Switzerland). During the 2006 and 2007 World Cup seasons, Fill had seven podiums: four in downhill, two in super-G, and a combined, but no wins. On March 21, 2007, he became Italian Champion in multiple disciplines (twice in super-G and once in giant slalom), bringing his career total of national championships to 3. During the 2008 season, he was unable to reach the podium but managed to place in the top ten 10 on six occasions. On 29 November 2008 in
Lake Louise (Canada) he won his first World Cup competition, beating Swiss
Carlo Janka and Swede Hans Olsson, becoming the seventh Italian in World Cup history to win a downhill competition. On 4 February 2009, he won the silver medal in
super-G during the World Championships in
Val-d'Isère (France) on the icy and steep slope
Face del Bellevarde. He managed to place himself before the three-time World Champion
Aksel Lund Svindal, but was not fast enough to beat the Swiss
Didier Cuche. His medal was the only one won by the
Azzurri in the men's competitions. Fill won his second World Cup race in
2016, the downhill at
Kitzbühel, on a difficult dark and windy day on the
Streif that ended the season of overall leader
Aksel Lund Svindal. Fill went on to become the first Italian to win the World Cup downhill title, finishing 10th at the last downhill of the season in
St. Moritz in March 2016 to finish 26 points ahead of Svindal. ==Personal ==