The 2030 Winter Olympics in the French Alps will include the debut of freeride skiing and snowboarding, a wildly popular 30-year-old discipline that features athletes shredding steep and consequential slopes.
“This is such a good thing for so many up-and-coming athletes who want to make a career in freeride skiing,” said Glenwood Springs’ Kelly Hilleke, who debuted on the Freeride World Tour last year and works as a freeride coach at the Aspen Ski and Snowboard Club. “This will allow a lot more people to dedicate themselves to the sport and really push the sport to new levels.”
The International Olympic Committee this week voted in Switzerland to include freeride in the Alpes 2030 Olympic Winter Games. If the debut goes well, the sport will be part of the 2034 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
The Freeride World Tour has shaped big-mountain skiing and snowboarding competitions for 30 years. Born from the momentum of the first-ever U.S. Extreme Skiing Championships in Crested Butte in the 1990s, the Switzerland-based Freeride World Tour has launched the careers of the world’s top big-mountain skiers and snowboarders.
The big-mountain style of skiing — ripping down treacherous couloirs and cliff faces — was born in the Alps in the 1960s as skiers pushed into terrain long considered impossible.
Today, more than 50 of the world’s top male and female skiers and snowboarders travel to six contest locations across the globe to race down daunting terrain. They are scored based on the lines they choose, their control, fluidity, technique and style, which includes lofty flips and spins in technical terrain. The tour includes more than 300 competitions across four continents to help push young skiers and snowboarders into those elite-level competitions.
The International Federation of Skiing, or FIS, acquired the Freeride World Tour in 2022 and recognized freeride as an official discipline in 2024 with the FIS president saying “it is only natural for us to fully embrace the excitement of a rising discipline like freeride.”
In February the Freeride World Tour hosted the first-ever FIS Freeride World Championships in the Pyrenees of Andorra, with the U.S. taking home the most medals, including gold for snowboarder Mia Jones of Truckee, California, and bronze for her skiing cousin Kai Jones, from Victor, Idaho. (Mia is the daughter of big-mountain snowboarding legend Jeremy Jones, and Kai is the son of Teton Gravity Research co-founder and big-mountain skiing moviemaker Todd Jones.)
So it has taken only two years for freeride to move from official recognition to inclusion in the Olympics, a speedy track that reflects the International Olympic Committee’s work to embrace youthful sports like skateboarding, BMX, climbing and surfing.
But that embrace of the new comes at a cost, as the committee compares the popularity of newcomers with sports that are fading. The decisions coming out of the committee this week, for example, included the removal of the 102-year-old Nordic combined (ski jumping and cross-country skiing) discipline. The termination of Olympic Nordic combined stirred anger in the small but passionate sport of high-flying, endurance-oriented skiers who were hoping the committee would vote this week to include women in the Olympic contests after three world championships since 2021.
“Raw excitement on stunning natural terrain”
The format for the Olympic freeride contests has not been set and venues have not been selected.
Freeride’s two decades of structured pathways for young athletes to climb from junior to elite ranks, “is a success story on the development level,” FIS president Alexander Osphelt said in a statement.
“It is clear why freeride’s combination of raw excitement on stunning natural terrain is an appealing addition to the Games,” Osphelt said.
Western Colorado University in Gunnison has been investing in its mountain sports program — including freeride skiing and snowboarding — for several years, with several alumni landing on the Freeride World Tour with skills honed on the steeps of nearby Crested Butte Mountain Resort. Western alum Cam Smith credits his time with the school’s mountain sports program to winning a hard-earned spot in the Olympic debut of ski mountaineering in February.
“It’s not just about the Olympics either,” said Andrew Kunze, the freeride coach at Western Colorado University’s Mountain Sports program. “Freeride and backcountry have become one of the fastest-growing segments of the ski industry lately, so this news opens up opportunities well beyond the Games as more people continue to get exposed to the sport and the industry keeps growing.”
When the Olympics added slopestyle freeskiing in the 2014 Winter Games in Russia, some athletes worried that the free-spirited soul of creative skiing could be jeopardized as technical spinning eclipsed simpler style, which is harder to judge or even define.
Hilleke isn’t so concerned about the Olympics pushing freeride contests into overly technical, spin-to-win competitions.
“Unlike other skiing events in the Olympics, freeride is on totally natural terrain and every face is different and as an athlete you have to balance your own strengths and weaknesses in highly consequential terrain,” the 20-year-old said. “I don’t think the Olympics will change what makes freeride special. It will just give more people a chance to discover why we fall in love with this sport in the first place.”