Freeride World Tour Will Return To U.S. In 2026 With Alaska Stop

Forbes

14-04-2025

The FIS Freeride World Tour will return to Alaska in 2026 with the YETI Haines Alaska Pro in March, ... More the first FWT event in Alaska since 2017
Nine years after the last U.S. Freeride World Tour stop, the iconic freeride competition will return to Alaska in March 2026 for the YETI Haines Alaska Pro.
Alaska hosted Freeride World Tour (FWT) events for three consecutive years between 2015 and 2017 at the iconic Haines venue, revered in the freeride community (and nicknamed 'the Dream Stop') for its technical spines and abundant powder thanks to its proximity to the Pacific Ocean.
Before Alaska, U.S. FWT stops included Kirkwood, California, in 2011, 2013 and 2014; Palisades Tahoe, California, in 2009 and 2010; Crested Butte, Colorado, in 2009; Snowbird, Utah, in 2009; and Mammoth, California, in 2008.
The last time FWT held a competition in the U.S. (2017), Americans swept the men's snowboard category and took first in women's snowboard.
'Haines offers some of the most iconic big-mountain lines on the planet, and we can't wait to see the world's top athletes push their limits right here in our backyard,' said Haines Alaska tourism director Rebecca Hylton.
The Freeride World Tour competition in Haines, Alaska, in 2016
'Bringing the Tour back to Alaska has been a dream in the making for years,' said Freeride World Tour CEO and founder Nicolas Hale-Woods. 'Haines offers some of the most dramatic and respected terrain in the world—it's the ultimate freeride venue.'
Hale-Woods founded FWT in 1996 as the Verbier Extreme, and it ran as a snowboard-only contest until 2004. Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, the Xtreme Verbier on the Bec des Rosses in Switzerland serves as the FWT Finals.
It's not that the event has run for 30 years that gives Hale-Woods the greatest satisfaction. It's that he knows it will run for another 30.
Hale-Woods and the FWT more broadly have played a monumental role in the sport's growth. Much like surfing and the WSL, freeriding is supported by a pyramid of development programs overseen by FWT, from the FWT Pro circuit to the FWT Challenger, FWT Qualifier and FWT Junior levels. The FWT also collaborates with ski schools to offer freeride programs to riders of all ages at its FWT Academies.
But a return to the U.S. isn't the only big news in store for freeride. The sport hopes to make its Olympic debut at the 2030 Winter Games in the French Alps and expand to the 2034 Winter Olympics in Park City, Utah.
The inaugural Freeride World Championships in February 2026 are a crucial step in freeride's journey to becoming an Olympic sport, with the events held between May 1, 2024–April 30, 2025 serving as world championships qualifiers.
To join the Olympic program, a sport must demonstrate that it has strong participation around the globe. Any new Olympic sport must have gender parity in its athlete quotas.
There's no question freeride is on the rise in the U.S., especially among women. There are more than 100 events across the U.S. within the FWT pyramid. Since 2022, women's participation across all FWT divisions has increased by a whopping 93.6 percent.
The U.S. is freeride's biggest market in terms of number of participants, partners and resorts organizing events, says Hale-Woods. What's more, it's becoming clear that in ski clubs across the U.S., the freeride division, not alpine, is the largest.
Between 2021 and 2024, the overall growth of licensed freeride athletes across the globe increased by 116.35 percent. That makes Hale-Woods optimistic about the sport's continued growth overall but especially in the U.S., as well as the chance for the contiguous U.S. to host a freeride world cup event or world championships ahead of the 2034 Olympics.
Hale-Woods and his co-founder, Philippe Buttet, launched the first Verbier Extreme in the winter of 1996—sponsored by a then-expanding brand out of Switzerland by the name of Red Bull, which still lacked wide distribution and therefore provided half its sponsorship fee of $90,000 in cash and half in pallets of the energy drink.
Back then, Hale-Woods never imagined freeride could one day be in the Olympics.
Then, the Swiss-Brit entrepreneur was just hoping to stage a successful snowboarding event. The Bec des Rosses is a rock-studded and steep venue in the best of conditions, with a vertical of 600m and a 45° to 55° incline, and that first year, snow conditions were terrible.
But by a stroke of luck or favor from Mother Nature, a foot of snow blanketed the venue two days before the event, and 30 years later, the rest is history.
Today, FWT Management SA serves as a centralized system for freeride, a sport that now has more than 10,000 licensed riders in the world and 250-plus events annually, so that the organization acts more like a sport federation than a private company—including defining rules, organizing an events calendar and generating world rankings.
This was attractive to the International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS) when FWT was looking for strategic partners, and FWT is now officially part of FIS but still largely autonomous.
An Olympic freeride event will inherently face some of the same challenges as Olympic surfing events, namely that organizers and NBC can't commit to the event being held on one specific day due to numerous factors like weather, safety and, in the case of freeriding, snowfall. Freeride competitions are typically planned to happen within a weeklong weather window to allow for a successful and safe event.
But Hale-Woods has been impressed, in his conversations with the committees for French Alps 2030 and Salt Lake City 2034, by how much Olympic organizers are willing to be creative and flexible in their approach to the sport.
'You don't need a lot of infrastructure and resources to organize a freeride competition,' Hale-Woods said. 'If you have snow and a mountain, even without lifts or groomers or artificial snow, you can hold a freeride comp. You need three judges that can see the venue, you need a starting point and a finish point and you have your stadium basically. This means competitions can take place in Turkey, in Lebanon, in Argentina, in China, everywhere.'
'There is a global freeride community that is excited about the sport's future,' he added.
That community eagerly awaits a decision on the sport's potential Olympic designation this summer.