Freeride Is Going to the Olympics

Some of you saw this coming and have been waiting for the announcement all week. Some of you are reading this and getting a small stab of dread. Both reactions are valid, but here’s why it is probably the best thing to happen to this cinematic sport.

Initially, major judging panels and broadcast windows were never part of it. It grew out of resort backcountry, film segments, and the Freeride World Tour that runs on rider input and terrain that few people touch. This serious glow-up took years of work from the team at the Freeride World Tour building the format, the venues and the credibility that made this sport worth the IOC's attention in the first place.

This past season, us and Phaenom Footwear became official suppliers to the Freeride World Tour. Long before then, we’ve had a prime role supporting their athletes and community before the Olympics came knocking. We know it; part of what’s always made freeride feel so visceral and real was that it felt like no-one outside the sport was paying attention. It’s become our own crazy corner of the extreme sports world, with its own personalities, in-jokes and historic moments. In 2030, everybody will be watching.

For some riders, it’s a legit thing to be uneasy about. Every sport that has gone Olympic before this one has soul-searched around the same question. Does the thing that made it good survive contact with a bigger stage? Skateboarding asked it, and so did Surfing. Snowboarding asked it decades ago and is still arguing about the answer.

What’s important for us is where we land on it. Judging focuses on creativity and skill in an environment that is as equally as deadly as it is spectacular. Riders still win by finding a novel line and doing it well, sometimes simply holding it together by the skin of their teeth. What’s made it so refreshing is that the results have nothing to do with the fastest run one everybody agreed on beforehand. That part of freeride does not change simply because NBC or the BBC picks up the rights; It gets watched by more people.

A kid with no mountains nearby switches on the Olympics and sees someone drop into a couloir for the first time, and decides they want to try skiing in the first place. A parent who thinks skiing means slalom gates sees an athlete choose their own line down an unmarked. That reach was never available through webcasts and film premieres alone, no matter how awesome the films are from the entire community of brands, athletes and mountain film-makers.

More eyes means more kids picking up skis. More kids picking up skis means a bigger, weirder, more talented generation of riders coming up behind the ones we already support. That is the part of this we actually care about; the pipeline this builds, regardless of any medal counts.

Faction has been part of building this sport for twenty years, before anyone was calling it Olympic material, and it's brought us to now as one of the Freeride World Tour's official suppliers. Phaenom is right there with us. Both brands will keep building for the athletes carrying freeride forward, on the Tour and on the road to Alpes 2030. The sport just got a bigger stage, one that would not exist without the years of work FWT has put into getting this sport taken seriously. What happens on it is still up to the riders, and we’ll continue being a dependable toolmaker and support for the crazy ones taking it there.

This is how freeskiing moves.