Thomas Sykora comes from a sporty family. His father Ernst Sykora was the head of the Hochkar school ski home. His aunts Liese Prokop and Maria Sykora were successful athletes.
Sykora won the Slalom World Cup in 1996/97 and 1997/98. Previously, he was already in the lead in the slalom in Lech in 1994 after the first round, but in the end he had to admit defeat to Alberto Tomba by 2 hundredths of a second after the second round . He won a total of nine world cup races. At the 1998 Olympic Games in Nagano , he won the bronze medal in slalom. In 1996 and 1999 he was also Austrian slalom champion.
After being forced to retire from his career due to numerous knee injuries, Thomas Sykora became an ORF co-commentator. He began to comment on women's races in 2000 and was later used in important men's slaloms (Kitzbühel, Schladming). In most of the races he comments on, he drives with the helmet camera in order to give the spectators a better understanding of the different routes and their difficulties.
After the end of his active career as an athlete, he decided to study and trained as an academic mental coach in Bregenz ; he then completed his studies with an MBA.
Until November 2009 Sykora was president of FC Waidhofen / Ybbs , whose first team was represented in the third-class Austrian Regionalliga Ost . After buying into his favorite restaurant chain my Indigo in the late autumn of 2016 and from that time on running a restaurant in PlusCity in Pasching as a franchisee , in July 2017 he opened another branch in the Donau Zentrum in the federal capital Vienna .