Ex-Olympic Snowboarder Turned Drug Lord Hunted in $15m FBI Manhunt

The US State Department has raised its bounty on Ryan Wedding, a former Olympic snowboarder turned alleged cocaine kingpin, to $15 million, as authorities in Canada arrested seven of his associates in a sweeping cross-border sting.

FBI Director Kash Patel described Wedding as a “modern-day iteration of Pablo Escobar,” saying he leads one of the most violent drug trafficking operations in North America.

Wedding, 44, once represented Canada at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, finishing 24th in the parallel giant slalom. Now, he’s accused of engineering a billion-dollar cocaine empire that floods the US with up to 60 metric tonnes of drugs each year.

“[Wedding] is responsible for engineering a narco-trafficking and narco-terrorism programme that we have not seen in a long time,” Patel told reporters in Washington on Wednesday. He said the fugitive, who sits on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list, is believed to be hiding in Mexico and “extremely dangerous.”

FBI agent Akil Davis added that Wedding is “extremely violent” and “extremely wealthy,” while US Attorney General Pam Bondi called him “Canada’s largest cocaine distributor.”

Bondi said the operation is run in close coordination with Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel.

“It’s killing our kids. It’s killing our friends. It’s killing our relatives. And this guy is responsible for a tremendous amount of that horror,” she said.

The crackdown, dubbed Operation Giant Slalom, led to the arrest of seven suspects in Canada, including Wedding’s lawyer, Deepak Paradkar. Assistant US Attorney Bill Essayli said Paradkar told Wedding that if a key witness in his criminal case were murdered, “the case would be dismissed.”

That witness was later shot five times in the head at a restaurant in Medellin, Colombia, in January 2025.

“Wedding placed a bounty on the victim’s head in the erroneous belief that the victim’s death would result in the dismissal of criminal charges… He was wrong,” Essayli said.

A second suspect, Gursewak Singh Bal, was identified as the founder of a fake news website called The Dirty News. Prosecutors say he was paid to post photos of the witness and his wife online to help locate them before the murder.

The US is seeking extradition of all seven Canadians arrested, while three others have already been detained in the US.

Canadian RCMP Commissioner Michael Duheme called Wedding “one of the top threats to Canadian public safety.”