Virgile Didier taps his poles together, shuffles his skis and then points them straight down the mountain, quickly gathering speed. It’s a bright, sunny day in the French resort of Val Thorens, and 40cm of fresh snow has fallen overnight — perfect conditions for freeride skiing.
Didier puts in a single turn above a rocky cliff, then hits it head on, launching into an enormous backflip that carries him at least 15 metres down the slope. He lands in an explosion of powdery snow, disappearing momentarily. When he emerges, he’s greeted by a huge roar from the hill opposite, where more than a thousand people have gathered to watch.
Freeriding, by definition, takes place off the beaten pistes. Normally, professionals would spend most of their time miles out in the back country, accompanied only by the photographers and cameramen who document their exploits. But here in Val Thorens, spectators can stand on the edge of an easy blue run and watch 53 of the world’s best going “full send”.
Didier, the last of the male skiers to drop, is a local hero, and a clear crowd favourite. Several people have printed giant cutouts of his face. Others wave banners; one fan swings a chainsaw around his head, revving it to create extra ruckus, while another sets off a shipping flare, sending a plume of red magnesium smoke up into the bright blue sky.
This is competitive freeriding — an attempt to bottle the lightning of back-country skiing and present it in a quantifiable, easy-to-follow format. There’s no course as such, just an open mountain face. Skiers and snowboarders must drop in from a start gate and ride through a gate at the finish, but in between they can take any line they like. Because practice runs would mess up the snow, they have to ride their lines “on sight” — they can inspect the face with binoculars, study photos and drone footage, but they only get one make-or-break run each.
A panel of three judges awards points for line difficulty, technique, control and speed or “fluidity” over the terrain, as well as for dropping off cliffs, rocks and any other natural obstacles the freeriders choose to hit. Tricks such as Didier’s massive backflip earn extra.
Competitive freeriding is not new. Its top-level contest circuit, the Freeride World Tour (FWT), grew out of a one-off, snowboard-only event called the Xtreme Verbier, which first took place in 1996. Skiers were invited to join in 2004 and the tour was launched in 2008; it has expanded steadily since. The 2025 season has included stops in Spain, France, Canada, Georgia and Austria en route to the final, which will take place in Verbier, Switzerland, this week.
Now, though, the once-renegade sport is becoming part of the establishment. In December 2022, the tour was sold to the Fédération Internationale de Ski (FIS), the global governing body for mainstream events such as downhill, slalom and ski jumping. In June 2024, at their annual congress in Reykjavik, delegates voted to approve freeride skiing and snowboarding as official FIS events.
If, as expected, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) gives the final seal of approval at a meeting scheduled for September, this least disciplined of skiing disciplines will be confirmed as an Olympic event. (It can’t hurt that Johan Eliasch, president of the FIS, is a member of the IOC and one of the seven contenders for its presidency at this week’s election.)
Nicolas Hale-Woods, the FWT’s long-standing chief executive, who co-founded the Xtreme Verbier and has led the organisation since, is confident of Olympic accession: “Right now, all the lights are green.”
January’s Val Thorens Pro event, which kicked off with an opening ceremony featuring 1,300 fans, a DJ and a fireworks display, was planned almost as a trial run for the Olympics, according to Vincent Lalanne, director of the resort’s tourist office. Freeriding is expected to make its debut not at the Milano Cortina games next year, but at the French Alps 2030 Olympics.
There will be a bidding process in which other French resorts — probably La Rosière, possibly Chamonix — are expected to throw their hats in the ring, but Lalanne believes Val Thorens is in pole position. Along with his colleagues at Val Thorens’ mairie (town hall), the Club des Sports and ski-lift operator Setam, he has signed a deal to host the tour for the next four years, at a cost of around €600,000 each time (a figure that includes the staging of the event, as well as a contribution to the FWT’s operating costs).
“We also have a strong chance because of the choice of faces we have where we can hold the competition,” Lalanne says. Each FWT event has a week-long weather window, with snow and safety conditions dictating the final choice of day and slope — sometimes as late as 48 hours before the first rider drops. The blizzard leading up to the week’s clearest day ruled out Val Thorens’ preferred venue, beneath the Cime Caron lift.
But the same heavy snowfall means that conditions on the Lac Noir face — which is mellower, but with more cliff drops — are perfect. Watching Didier and the others tear down it, it’s easy to see why the resort was keen to host, and why the IOC might be eager to add this spectacle to the Olympics.
As a judged discipline, freeriding is “by definition” more difficult for casual viewers to follow than, say, ski racing, Hale-Woods concedes. “They have the advantage of having a timer, which is super easy to understand.”
But in a world where audiences are increasingly ditching linear television for social media, the FWT’s potential to create viral moments is appealing to its sponsors, the FIS and the IOC. It has escaped no one’s notice that the enduring image of the Paris Olympics last summer was not Noah Lyles winning the 100m sprint, but surfer Gabriel Medina jumping off his board with his finger raised in the air.
“Another judged sport, another sport with a weather window,” says Hale-Woods, who as a keen surfer himself, relishes the comparison. “That’s what the IOC needs, right? They need to speak to the next generation, and [for that] they need to have exciting action.”
The flipside of exciting action is that freeriding can be as dangerous as it looks. Ahead of the action in Val Thorens, Cody Bramwell, currently the only British athlete on the FWT, tells me two years ago he “went to jump a cliff, took it a little bit wrong, landed on the next cliff, broke my ankle and then flew over the next cliff,” Incredibly, he says, “I had so much adrenaline, I rode down, I didn’t realise my ankle was broken until later.” But the injury put him out for a whole winter.
In 2016, another British snowboarder, Sascha Hamm, fell 30 metres and landed on his back, leaving him in intensive care for a fortnight with 10 broken ribs, a broken arm, elbow, collar bone and collapsed lung.
Núria Castán Barón, a 27-year-old Spanish rider who finished as runner-up in women’s snowboarding last year, can also list a litany of career injuries. “I broke my ankle once in Canada, I broke my meniscus partially, and I’ve had a few concussions,” she tells me in Val Thorens. But by far the scariest incident she’s ever been involved in was two years ago, making her way to the start gate of the FWT finals in Verbier.
“There was an avalanche. I got caught, went down for about 100m and got buried,” she says. It was only thanks to the swift action of two of her fellow competitors that she survived. Avalanche victims’ chances of survival drop precipitously after 15 minutes. Castán Barón was dug out after 12. “I couldn’t breathe or anything, so I was conscious for two or three minutes and then I thought, yeah . . . ” she trails off. “I thought that was going to be it,” she eventually adds. “I thought I was going to die.”
There have been other avalanche accidents. In 2015, the event at Kappl in Austria was cancelled after a competitor was hit by an avalanche on the course, and in 2018 a mountain guide was killed while performing safety checks on the face before an FWT contest in Andorra.
For Castán Barón, it took “a lot of therapy and a lot of psychology” before she felt comfortable competing again. When she did, she recorded her best ever season of results, but the memory is still “traumatic”, she says, and a constant reminder that competitive freeriding is still freeriding. “No matter if you’re competing, or if there’s an organisation behind it, it’s the mountain that has the last word,” she adds.
If the potential appeal of freeriding to the IOC is obvious, it is not necessarily true that this works both ways. To some devotees, the whole idea of competitive freeriding is oxymoronic, with judges and ranking systems inevitably compromising the freedom that defines the discipline.
“Freeriding right now is very loose, a little bit cowboy,” explains Canadian Erin Sauve, who won the women’s snowboard category last winter, “but everyone loves that about it. Having it be part of FIS, and now moving into the Olympics, is a serious progression, but it comes with some negatives as well as positives.”
Lily Bradley, a non-binary skier from California, agrees. “Originally I was against freeride becoming an Olympic sport because I thought that it would really change the culture,” they say. “Freeride was born out of the counterculture, and the FIS has a lot more rules and is just more regimented.” What’s changed Bradley’s mind, they explain, is the financial opportunities they see opening up for future generations. “I would ideally hope that it would be something you could make a living wage off of because it’s not currently, at least in the US.”
Right now athletes get free half-board accommodation at each event. First place wins $5,000, and the prize structure ensures that every competitor takes home a minimum of $1,000. But sometimes this barely covers travel costs, according to Bradley.
Sauve tells me she currently has to work three jobs over the summer to pay for her winters competing. “I start in the spring — I’m a tree planter — and then once the fire season starts, I’m a firefighter, and then I have another company that I work for doing forestry surveys,” she says.
As well as increasing the sport’s appeal to mainstream sponsors beyond the winter sports industry, Olympic status would also open up the possibility of government funding. British snowboarder Cody Bramwell, who recently won the Georgia Pro contest, could qualify for an annual grant of up to £28,000 from UK Sport (the Lottery-funded body that supports Team GB) if he continues to “consistently demonstrate podium potential”.
But if Olympic acceptance could mean better funding for the freeride elite, the impact will also trickle down to younger skiers. Among the spectators at the Lac Noir face are several members of the local freeride club, which trains 45 junior athletes not just in skiing, but in back-country safety and avalanche awareness. Similar programmes are being set up everywhere from Scotland to individual US states, and the FWT now sits on top of a well-organised pyramid that includes more than 250 affiliated qualification events in 30 countries, including Kyrgyzstan, Greece and Argentina.
In Val Thorens, there’s a palpable buzz about the sport’s growth — even for riders like Suave, who, at 35, admits she will likely be too old to compete in its Olympic debut. For most of her riding career, “I never really considered myself an athlete.” But for the next generation, she believes things could look very different. “And I’m so excited for that.”
Tristan Kennedy was a guest of Val Thorens (valthorens.com) and the Freeride World Tour (freerideworldtour.com)
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