Ryan Wedding, once a rising star in snowboarding, is now on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List. He came from a well-off family of ski racers.
Wedding started his career at the age of 12 and won a bronze medal in the Parallel Giant Slalom at the 1999 Junior World Championship and a silver medal in the 2001 Junior World Championships. He became the Canadian national champion in the Giant Slalom in 2001 before representing Canada at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. That wasn’t all that bad a career trajectory.
And then it all went haywire.
Shortly after the 2002 Olympics, Wedding enrolled at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and started working as a bouncer. He eventually got involved with the city’s pot dealers.
Wedding later dropped out of school and allegedly turned into a big marijuana dealer before linking up with some Iranian and Russian cocaine smugglers, making the end of his snowboarding career.
He was first arrested in 2008 in California and found guilty of conspiring to smuggle cocaine.
In 2009, Bobby Allison, a former national champion ski racer, said Wedding was fearless. He said when many young athletes claim they want to go fast, they often hold back due to a fear of falling. But Wedding had no such fear and pushed himself without hesitation.
Wedding was sentenced to four years in jail in May 2010 after being found guilty of attempting to buy cocaine from a government official in 2008.
According to prosecutors, he was involved in at least three killings and ran a billion-dollar criminal operation between 2011 and 2024 that transported cocaine between Colombia, Mexico, the US, and Canada. The alleged drug kingpin has been linked to the dangerous and powerful Sinaloa cartel.
The cartel allegedly helped Wedding and his ally Andrew Clark, who was arrested in October 2024, run their operation out of Mexico. They are charged with trafficking 54 tons of Colombian cocaine to Los Angeles stash homes and then across the US and Canada.
Martin Estrada, the US Attorney for the Central District of California, said, “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.”
Wedding married a British Columbian businesswoman of Iranian descent while being behind bars in 2011, as per CBC. The woman, whose identity has not been revealed, said Wedding told her he was convicted unfairly, claiming he was just “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
She later distanced herself from him, saying, “I don’t want to be associated with these people.”
Her name has reportedly since been connected to kidnapping and money laundering cases, some of which are related to Mexican drug cartels, according to CBC.
Twelve gang members have been captured as a result of the FBI’s collaborative effort with other law enforcement agencies to target the cocaine gang, but Wedding has so far escaped arrest.
The FBI also said that Wedding might be under the protection of the Sinaloa cartel. The US State Department has offered a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to his arrest or conviction.
The FBI is now providing an extra $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the suspected drug kingpin.