How snowboarder Ryan Wedding went from Olympian to alleged drug kingpin and murderer on FBI Most Wanted list

Two decades after his career as an Olympic snowboarder, Ryan Wedding is on a different type of downhill — skidding straight onto the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list.

Wedding, a 43-year-old Canadian who competed in the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, has since gone off-piste and into a different type of powder — allegedly becoming a cold-blooded transnational drug kingpin with ties to the vicious Sinaloa cartel.

Prosecutors allege he operated a billion-dollar criminal enterprise moving cocaine between Colombia, Mexico, the US and Canada between 2011 and 2024 and is responsible for at least three murders.

His alleged number two, Andrew Clark, 34 — also a Canadian citizen — was arrested in October 2024 in Mexico and has been extradited to the US to face charges.

Wedding’s nicknames include “El Jefe,” (The Boss) and “Public Enemy” and the State Department is offering a $10 million reward for information leading to his capture.

Prosecutors believe he’s somewhere being protected by the cartel even though at 6’3″ with piercing blue eyes and reddish hair, he is not inconspicuous.

Wedding and Clark allegedly ran their operation out of Mexico using used the encrypted messaging app Threema, according to the feds.

With the help of the cartel, they are accused of moving 54 tons of Colombian cocaine up to stash houses in Los Angeles then transporting across the US and Canada.

“He chose to become a major drug trafficker and a killer,” Martin Estrada, the US Attorney for the Central District of California, said last fall when Wedding was indicted on charges of conspiracy to export cocaine, running a continuing criminal enterprise and three murders in connection with the operation, as well as an attempted murder.

“An Olympic athlete-turned-druglord is now charged with leading a transnational organized crime group that engaged in cocaine trafficking and murder, including of innocent civilians,” Estrada said.

Tony Wayne, a former ambassador to Mexico who teaches at American University School of International Service in Washington DC and is an expert in the trafficking of drugs between Mexico and the US, told The Post it’s not unusual for non-Mexicans to be liaisons or point people within a larger Mexican-run cartel — but it’s rare one is in charge of such a huge enterprise themselves.

“I haven’t heard of many white men from Canada involved on this level, that’s for sure,” Wayne said.

Not only is Wedding a white man, he came from a well-off family of ski racers in Thunder Bay, Ontario who apparently doted on him and supported his snowboarding career, which he began at age 12.

Wedding did well as a snowboarder in part because of his innate genetic talent but he possessed another trait that served him well in the sport — and probably later in his alleged narco-trafficking empire.

“He had no fear,” Bobby Allison, a former national champion ski racer, told Rolling Stone in 2009. “A lot of kids, they say they want to go fast, but they don’t really want to go fast. They hold something back, because there’s a little bit of fear there of falling. Ryan had none of that.”

However, Wedding, who finished 24th in his category at the Olympics was not a big enough star in snowboarding for some of the sport’s veteran insiders to even remember.

Jeff Galbraith, publisher of The Snowboarders Journal, said he had never heard of Wedding — and was shocked to hear he was once one of them.

“He sure is an outlier,” Galbraith told The Post. “Most snowboarders past or present don’t wind up on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.”

Wedding appeared to start breaking bad not long after the 2002 Olympics when he enrolled in Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, went to work as a bouncer and fell in with the city’s pot dealers. He eventually dropped out of school and allegedly became a major marijuana dealer before hooking up with some Iranian and Russian cocaine traffickers, Los Angeles magazine reported in January.

He was arrested for the first time in California in 2008 and found guilty of conspiring to traffic cocaine. He did time in some tough US prisons filled with convicted drug traffickers which could have served as a kind of graduate school for him when it came to solidifying his network.

His family stood by him — at least in the early years.

“You can have every opportunity and still take the wrong path,” his mother told a Rolling Stone reporter in 2009. “But it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.”

That was then. A recent review of court records indicates the one-time snowboarder has allegedly been “connected to some of the most dangerous criminals in the world: dirty ex-Russian KGB agents, Iranian encryption experts, Hezbollah-connected narco-terrorists, and the infamously violent Sinaloa Cartel,” according to Los Angeles magazine.

Canadian investigators have been tracking Wedding since 2015 but after he fled the country, the US Department of Justice joined the effort to find him, calling the case “Operation Giant Slalom” — after the race Wedding competed in at the Salt Lake City Olympics.

So far, the feds have arrested 12 men associated with Wedding’s cocaine empire, including Clark, whose nickname is “The Dictator.” Only three, including Wedding, remain at large.

Late last month, an Ontario court learned a key witness who was supposed to testify against Wedding at trial will no longer do so, CBC reported. That twist came amid reports US prosecutors are concerned for witnesses’ safety in the case.

Wedding, they believe, still has the ability to call on a network of contract killers he’s allegedly used to murder rivals who got in the way of his business.

Wedding and Clark’s drug operation has also been linked to the mistaken-identity shootings in southern Ontario, Canada, which left four members of one family dead, according to Ontario police.

“This is a complex case involving a sophisticated drug-trafficking organization, whose leaders have shown a callous disregard for human life, including … deploying hitmen to execute perceived rivals or enemies,” Los Angeles-based assistant US attorney Maria Jhai wrote.

“Wedding is at large, presumably with the same access to encrypted means of communication and network of hitmen that enabled the charged murders,” Jhai added. 

Little is known about Wedding’s personal life although some media reports from the time of his first arrest indicate he had “girlfriends coming and going.”

In 2011, a year into his four-year prison sentence, Wedding got married behind bars to an Iranian-born businesswoman from British Columbia, CBC reported.

The still-unidentified woman said Wedding told her he was convicted because he was “at the wrong place at the wrong time,” according to CBC.  

“I don’t want to be associated with these people,” she said.

In the interim, however, her name has allegedly come up in money laundering and kidnapping cases, some also tied to Mexican drug cartels, per CBC.

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Stephen Collopy

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