3.2.1. Dropping. Who's Ready For The Freeride Winter Olympics 2030?

Freeriding is now an Olympic sport, an official skiing and snowboarding discipline for the 2030 Winter Olympics, taking place in the French Alps.

The announcement at the beginning of July, 2026 has kicked started a flurry of excitement on - and off - the mountains. Who will quality? Who will win? Freeriding's Olympics will debut with 22 men and 22 women selected for the starting gates to compete in the four skiing and snowboarding events. Soon top online sportsbooks will begin listing odds for the events, in the form of futures, so keep an eye on the Freeride World Tour over the next three winters with the events' rankings creating the tracks to qualification.

It's a pretty safe bet that freeriders who have already proved themselves in competition via the Freeride World Tour, like Marcus Goguen (main image) who stomped his first victory as Champion in the Men's Ski section in 2025, will be scoring an Olympic medal or two, but with just over three years to go who knows what young rookie may be out there ready to drop a gold medal winning backflip off a cliff?

But freeriding is not what you would call a mainstream event. And some would even question its definition as a discipline. To freeride is to ignore discipline and go where no man - or woman - has laid tracks before, riding where the powder takes you, rather than where competition officials dictate.

So how do you judge these mavericks of the mountains who don't follow laid out courses and structured boundaries?

The US Ski & Snowboard national governing body has an answer. Sort of:

'Freeride is a discipline in which skiers and snowboarders descend natural, ungroomed terrain rather than a set course, choosing their own line through features like cliffs, chutes and powder fields. Athletes are judged on a combination of line choice, control, fluidity, technique and style, rather than on time.'

But Ross Tester, an American skier on the Freeride World Tour (FWT) shoots from the hip with his response for The Athletic:

'There's a part of the mountain where there's a bunch of rocks and cliffs and chutes  We go and look at the mountain and decide how we want to ski down it, and we get judged on how we ski it.'

And it's a hard competition to predict because on the day of judgement in the Olympics it comes down to individual freeriders' skill, speed, conditions and the opinions of the judges. As in surfing, it's not the first to cross the line but the best at creating a line down steep and deep mountain terrain.

So how do the judges pick a winner? Having successfully harnessed the wild spirit of freeriding evolving from Xtreme Verbier, which gained iconic status in the world of freeride skiing and snowboarding in 1996 as a competitive event, the Freeride World Tour organisers have honed the judging process:

'The goal of our judging system is to ensure that any style of riding has the potential to win on any given day. Whether a rider excels in steep terrain, big airs, technical tricks, or speed, each style should have a chance to win based on the most impressive run that showcases the rider's strengths.

Riders should not have to conform to a system; rather, the system should adapt to freeriding.

With the high risks that come with riding down untracked mountain terrain including avalanche potential and extreme cliff drops, it's a certainty that freeriding will score high as one of the most dangerous Winter Olympic sports, ranking with Big Air, Aerial and Slopestyle, if not above them all for potential injury.

So strap in and get ready for the most action packed competition in the history of Winter Olympics.