Kai Jones Joins 65 Skiers for the First-Ever FIS Freeride World Championships

by admin in RSS Social News. Posted October 17, 2025

Kai Jones, alongside 65 other athletes, will appear in Andorra Ordino Arcalís this coming winter for the first-ever FIS Freeride World Championships between February 1 and February 6, 2026.

Jones, a Teton Gravity Research star and big mountain wunderkind, has plenty of movie credits but hasn’t appeared on the Freeride World Tour. For the upcoming Championships, he was awarded a wildcard. An array of other qualification channels filled out the rest of the roster. Included are top-ranked skiers from the FWT.

The other wildcard skier, Manon Loschi, had a standout rookie season on the 2024 FWT but didn’t compete on the circuit in 2025. She did, however, appear in the inaugural Natural Selection Tour ski event in Alaska this year and, like Jones, absolutely rips.

Of note, the FIS Freeride World Championships aren’t technically a stop of the FWT. It’s a separate event that’ll occur alongside the six-stop, previously announced FWT calendar.

The launch of the new freeride competition comes after the discipline was granted official status by the FIS in 2024—a signal but not confirmation that freeride was on its way to becoming an Olympic sport.

The Freeride World Championships, as the FIS noted in a previous press release, situate freeride in the governing body’s framework and pave the way “for a structured and unified approach to competitions and athlete development.” The FIS announced that it had bought the FWT in 2022. Other Olympic freeskiing disciplines, like halfpipe and slopestyle, already have FIS World Championships every other year.

Keep reading for the complete FIS Freeride World Championships ski roster.

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