The POWDER Staff Reacts To Freeride's Olympic Inclusion

Did you hear the news? The Olympic’s newest sports are freeride skiing and snowboarding.

POWDER has been tracking the potential for freeride’s inclusion at the 2030 French Alps Games for multiple years, but the announcement was officially made yesterday, July 7, 2026.

It’s way too early to know how this decision will influence the Freeride World Tour, junior circuits, and other freeride-focused events, but the POWDER staff needed to get some thoughts off their chests.

So, without further ado, here are our immediate reactions to yesterday’s news. Vote in the poll at the bottom of the article to chime in on the debate.

Matt Lorelli, Senior Editor

I watch the Winter Olympics religiously every four years, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve felt jaded recently due to the IOC’s blatant corruption and its innate ability to overlook human rights atrocities and vicious dictators in the name of profit.

That’s why I can’t wrap my head around why I’m so excited that freeride will be included at the French Alps 2030 games. I should be apathetic, disillusioned, and perhaps even angry that the IOC is getting its filthy hands on freeride, the one discipline of skiing I hold sacred.

It could just be the international spotlight of it all, but then again, I fear that an Olympic pathway for freeride athletes could further exacerbate the problems that Britta Winans wrote about for POWDER a couple of months ago. The desire to chase points, spin-to-win, and disdain for the free-spirited, creative nature that freeride was built on could derail the sport at its very core.

On the other hand, will the 2030 Olympics be the global reckoning that freeride skiing is one of the most entertaining spectator sports ever? Maybe, and that could lead to financial windfalls for some of my favorite athletes, but at what cost? Will their bibs be emblazoned with logos from oil and AI sponsors in the future? Will the sports betting sickos try to ruin it by creating unnecessary betting lines and stories? I have no idea.

In reality, it’s July, and freeride won’t debut at the Olympics for another three and a half years. Worrying about these hypothetical, unknown circumstances is something I’m doing to pass the time while it’s 100 degrees outside. And still, an optimistic outlook is breaking through my cynical consciousness for, again, a reason I can’t quite place my finger on.

So, for now, I’ll remain optimistic and hope that the IOC and FIS don’t fumble the bag on freeride’s debut on the world stage. If they do mess this whole thing up, however, don’t be surprised. 

Greed is the name of the game when it comes to the Olympics, and that’s inherently antithetical to freeride. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how this all plays out.

Max Ritter, Gear/Print Editor

I’m a bit hesitant to get excited about this development, particularly in light of what’s been going on with perhaps the most similar organization to the IOC—FIFA—and the behavior of its higher-ups, as well as the handling of situations during the current World Cup.

It’s become pretty clear that to preserve the spirit of sports like skiing, we don’t need more organization. It’s abundantly obvious that these money-driven marketing mega organizations don’t bring much more than “mo money mo problems” to the sport.

It takes away from what brought us into the sport in the first place: freedom, rebellion, doing things your own way, but maybe this is a good catalyst to return to the roots.

I agree with what some of the most knowledgeable and successful folks in the sport, like Markus, Sammy, Ben Richards, and Mike Douglas, are saying.

In short, freeride skiing is facing a legitimacy problem. Comp skiing isn’t bad per se. There’s nothing wrong with a little healthy competition and progression, but please, let’s keep the corrupt old white men out of it.

Ian Greenwood, Staff Writer

In this moment, I find it useful to wind the clock back to 2014. That year, slopestyle made its Olympic debut, and we were having very similar conversations. Was the culture finished? Would freestyle or freeskiing become robotic, uninspired, and entirely points-oriented? Had armageddon arrived?

The answer to those questions ended up being no—not only is ski video media in a good place, but some of the best of it is being made by people who compete in the Olympics. Meanwhile, grassroots events like Jib League and SLVSH harken back to the good old days. Freestyle’s more kaleidoscopic than ever.

At the same time, yes, the FIS freeski circuits that eventually feed into the Olympics often aren’t raw, artistic expressions of skiing. By necessity, they are places where precision matters far more than creativity.

I’m worried, but not terribly so, about the same happening to freeride. The Freeride World Tour has long been the biggest show in freeride. It’s been owned by FIS since 2022. The first FIS Freeride World Championships event went down this past winter. Through all that, competitive freeride has remained a wild ride and my favorite event to watch—hats off to every hardworking skier and organizer who makes that happen.

Maybe I’m naive, but I think competitions held in ever-changing, unmanicured mountains are resistant to rigidity. You can’t control the weather or the snow. Luck will always play a role. Sometimes, when the snow’s unstable, you can’t compete at all. Freeride requires an ability to go with the flow that other disciplines don’t. I could see a points-focused jock getting involved in freeride with Olympic dreams, only to quit after realizing that, no matter what they do, the mountain—not the other competitors—can beat them.

The only thing that really scares me, then, is if Olympic organizers try to iron these kinks out and create a perfectly level playing field. My nightmare—but entirely unlikely—scenario is a constructed, artificial mountain sitting in a giant warehouse that’s used for the Olympics every four years. It would be best to avoid that.

Izzy Lidsky, Staff Writer & Photo Editor

Call this a cop-out, but honestly, I feel pretty conflicted about the inclusion of freeride as an Olympic sport.

Countless Olympians have ridden on their successes at the Games. Just look at folks like Michael Phelps, Simone Biles, Shaun White, and more recently, Alysia Liu, Ilona Maher, Ilia Malinin, Anna Gibson, and Cam Smith. They have become household names for folks who had never watched a swim meet, gymnastics event, halfpipe competition, figure skating program, or even heard of SkiMo.

The very same thing could happen in freeride, and while skiing’s core may scoff at it, Ben Richard’s face on a cereal box after the 2030 Olympics would mean skiers in more disciplines are getting paid, and more people are engaging in the sport, which skiing needs to survive.

The folks pushing the limits of skiing, documenting the sport, creating the best gear, and so on, have been scrounging for the outdoor industry’s measly dollars forever, but what if skiers got paid like football players? The Olympics could do that (well, maybe not quite that) for freeride.

On the other hand, I hear the folks who are worried that pushing freeride into a more highly regulated competitive category takes away from the true ethos of the sport. Freeride is all about expression and creativity, finding one’s own pathway down the mountain and injecting as much personality and style into it as possible. Even in its current form, I’ve never totally understood how scoring works when one person’s run can be so different from another’s. Sure, one skier might have thrown a bigger backflip, but a super steezy shifty off a line no one else thought to ski has just as much merit when it comes to true freeriding.

I worry that the competitive angle of freeride will have a similar effect to what it did on big air events with the ‘spin to win’ phenomenon. A couple of winters ago, I found myself in the middle of a conversation between a group of professional freeriders that included a former FWT champion and a current (at the time) FWT competitor. They remarked that it felt like no one on the FWT could make a turn anymore, and that skiers were just traversing between the biggest features on the face to do tricks.

They worried that competitive freeride had lost the technical skiing edge that makes a really good line so fluid in favor of who was going the biggest. This conversation has come to mind while watching FWT events and the Freeride World Championships ever since.

It’s already so hard to quantify freeride, given the variability in snow conditions, venues, line choices, and so on. It’s not a level playing field, the way slopestyle or halfpipe is. In the same way that some felt Ski Mountaineering had been diluted to fit an Olympic venue and format at the 2026 Olympics, I could see freeride getting a bit diluted by an even more structured competition format than already exists.

But if that’s what gets eyes on the sport and allows athletes to go off and freeride in film projects, then it can’t be all bad, right? So, there you have my cop-out, my non-answer, and, like everyone else, I’ll just have to wait and see.

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Related: Can Freeride Stay Wild? An Argument Against Chasing Points