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Old Men Yelling at Clouds? The Olympic Fight for the Soul of Freeride Skiing

Henry
6 hours ago
5 min read

The recent announcement of freeride entering the Olympics has sparked celebrations ... but not everyone is happy ...

Freeride is officially in the Winter Olympics, starting in Alpes 2030 hosted at venues across the French Alps.

It follows SkiMo and break dancing as the latest in a slightly contrived list of sports to be given the Olympic treatment. As a result, not everyone is happy, and they have good reason not to be.

So what is all the fuss about? Are there any good reasons for Freeride to be in the Olympics, and what does this mean for one of the last bastions of the "soul" of snowsports?

What is Freeride?

Oh yeah, let's start there.

Freeride, at its simplest, is another way of saying off-piste skiing - skiing in unprepared terrain away from marked trails. It is, for many of us, one of our favourite forms of skiing, not just the challenge of this unprepared terrain but the possibility of going where no-one else has gone, of stepping away from civilisation, and the ultimate thrill of you versus the mountain.

Competitive freeride takes it up a notch. Four classes of athletes - men and women, skiers and snowboarders - compete over the same mountain face, failed if they wipe out but scoring big points for dropping cliffs and sending flips.

Bringing that all together, and that idea of escapism is key. Freeride is about, well, being free. Free to ski how you want, where you want.

Competitive freeride burst onto the scene in the late 1990s with the Verbier Pro snowboard event. That has grown and grown, eventually turning into the Freeride World Tour, including skiing, stop offs in incredible mountain ranges across the world, and the creation of hundreds of feeder events growing skiers and riders until they can make the leap into the main event.

Surely it's a good thing freeride is in the Olympics?

In many ways, yes.

Quite simply, more skiing events at the Olympics is not less, so for ski fanatics like me (and hopefully you) there is more chance to tune in to skiing on a global stage every four years.

Building on this, freeride can often appear far more accessible to many of us than racing or freestyle - in contrast to the skin-tight cat suits and endless threat of being smashed in the face with slalom poles, or the sheer lunacy that comes with all forms of freestyle, skiing off-piste is something we all do on our holidays even if only for a little bit.

Even more so, freeride as an official Olympic sport continues to provide a platform for young skiers and riders to build a career and a name for themselves, something that just wasn't there 20 years ago and has been kindled by the Freeride World Tour (FWT).

And, as with freestyle, the almost equal opportunities for female representation are a huge factor. All of Britain's best hopes on snow at the 2026 Olympics, and who are forecast to be on the scene in 2030, are freestyle Queens including Zoe Atkins (ski halfpipe), Charlotte Bankes (snowboard cross), Kirsty Muir (ski big air), and Mia Brookes (snowboard slopestyle and big air) - all of whom have won X Games, World Cup, World Championship and now Olympic golds in the past 18 months.

As with many new sports or sports entering a new environment, they are growing up with a gender parity that is often difficult to encounter in more traditional sports, something the FWT has long engendered and its inclusion at the Olympics will undoubtedly send to the moon.

What's the issue then?

This announcement has been met with almost instant pushback from some big names within and without the industry.

Nikolai Schirmer, one of the biggest names in freeride thanks to his YouTube exploits ripping some of the most ridiculous lines and couloirs in Northern Norway, hopped straight on Instagram to hope that freeride wouldn't, in effect, lose its soul.

Freeride is better without coaches and rules beyond just the community that was building it, he writes, something that the institutionalisation of counter culture sports via the Olympics has sapped from them over the years.

And plenty have taken aim at the Olympics and the organising body, the International Olympic Committee, for their perceived corruption over the years, something that in their eyes immediately delegitimises any sport it touches.

But there's something else, for me, that's the issue here, something far far simpler than a fight for the 'soul' of a sport.

I love freeride skiing. I'm not half bad at it either, mind, although you won't find me anywhere near the FWT. I love watching videos of me freeride skiing - which are not half bad, either, go check some of them out on my Instagram.

But for me, competitive freeride ... simply ... doesn't make a good competition.

I love freeride skiing because the thrill of flying through powder is one of the best feelings alive.

Freeride as a competition puts the emphasis not on skiing an amazing line or even the freedom of free skiing, but the backflips you can pull along the way and the cliffs you can drop. Actually skiing well - or skiing free - between these moments becomes almost meaningless, so the real freedom of freeride is lost amidst long traverses over poor snow conditions with commentators scrabbling for something meaningful to say to fill the time

And if I wanted backies off a big jump? Then I'd watch Big Air, which I adored at Milano Cortina 2026 and almost cried when Kirsty Muir missed out on a medal.

On a more macro level, the FWT is faced with a curse of conditions - a third of all events were cancelled last winter, including the farce of cancelling and "relocating" one event halfway across Europe only to cancel the rescheduled event, too.

With changing climatic conditions and the growing unpredictability of the snowpack, competitive freeride becomes more precipitous and more about the backies than skiing amazing lines in brilliant snow - losing a helluva lot of its relatability along the way, that one thing that makes all of us go "yeah, I can do that!" and could make it captivating to watch.

I don't agree with the "old men yelling at clouds" who say the Olympics will be the death of freeride - the sour grapes of having not had this opportunity when trying to break out themselves rings loud and clear in every Instagram post that's popped up in my feed criticising the move.

I think there's plenty of room for Freeride to have both its soul and its Olympic moment, and elevate the next generation of athlete male and female.

But like SkiMo - Ski Mountaineering, which entered the witner Olympics for the first time since 1924 in 2026 - it risks becoming something else. It risks becoming a parody of itself, if it hasn't already, something engineered for a TV audience; real SkiMo competitions are equivalent to ultra-marathons across the high Swiss Alps, like the (in)famous and historic Patroille de Glacier. Its modern competitive equivalent is atheltes running around an obstacle course trying far too hard to simulate running up a mountain.

By contrast, slalom has remained unchanged since it was codified in the late 1920s, TV and the competitive environment adapting to the unique challenge of the event.

SkiMo was bastardised from something truly free, and on a competitive level it is derided by the very athletes who compete in it. Freeride doesn't have the rich competitive pedigree that Slalom has, and as a result risks going the same way as SkiMo, losing not its soul but the very thing that makes it relatable and a dream for so many.

Final Thoughts

Will I still tune in to Freeride at Alpes 2030? Almost undoubtedly. Skiing is after all skiing and when this great big party of winter comes round it's hard to decline the invitation and get stuck in - just ask how many naysayers have bought in and enjoyed this last FIFA Football World Cup once a ball was kicked.

But I know that something will have been lost along the way. Just maybe don't ask me what ...