Video games solved motivation decades ago: the ghost — a replay of your best lap driving alongside you. Cycling and running apps borrowed it (Strava’s Live Segments is the famous one). Skiing never really got it, because ski runs don’t have start gates and finish lines.
Except they do: OpenStreetMap maps the world’s pistes by name. If an app can tell which named run you’re descending, every run becomes a segment — and your own history becomes the ghost.
When you ski a named run, Alpy matches your GPS line against the OSM piste network (a majority vote inside a 40 m corridor — off-piste honestly matches nothing). Ski the same run again and the app finds your fastest full previous descent and races you against it:
Two guards keep the racing fair. A partial descent never races a full one — bailing halfway down in half the time isn’t a record, so any attempt under 80% of the segment’s deepest recorded drop is marked partial and excluded. And the gap is computed by vertical progress, not clock time at a position: the question is “when did the ghost reach the depth I’m at now?”, which works even though no two GPS lines down a piste are identical.
There’s no leaderboard against strangers and no server keeping score. It’s you against who you were — which, on the fourth run of the day with your legs going, turns out to be the only race that matters.
Ghost racing is free in Alpy, like everything else. How it compares to other ski apps.