US offers $17m reward for Canadian Olympic snowboarder-turned-drug lord

Ryan Wedding of Canada competes in the qualifying round of the men's parallel giant slalom snowboarding event during the Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games. Photo / Getty Images

The United States offered a US$10 million ($17.44m) reward on Thursday for information leading to the arrest of a Canadian former Olympic snowboarder wanted on drug and murder charges.

Ryan Wedding, 43, who is believed to be in Mexico or another Latin American country, was also placed on the FBI’s list of the “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.”

“Wedding went from shredding powder on the slopes at the Olympics to distributing powder cocaine on the streets of US cities and in his native Canada,” said Akil Davis, assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office.

“The alleged murders of his competitors make Wedding a very dangerous man.”

Wedding, whose aliases include “El Jefe”, “Giant” and “Public Enemy”, may possibly be living under the protection of the Sinaloa drug cartel, Davis said at a press conference.

Acting US Attorney Joseph McNally said Wedding had allegedly shipped hundreds of millions of dollars of cocaine from Colombia through Mexico to the United States and Canada.

Alan Hamilton, chief of detectives for the Los Angeles Police Department, said Wedding used the southern California city as the hub for the drug smuggling operation.

“An estimated 60 metric tons of cocaine per year and five metric tons of fentanyl per month moved through Los Angeles on its way to US and Canadian cities,” Hamilton said.

Wedding, who competed for Canada in snowboarding at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, finishing 24th in the parallel giant slalom, is one of 16 defendants facing US charges for their roles in the drug operation.

“The organisation is violent, responsible for deaths as part of its criminal operations,” McNally said.

These include the November 2023 murders of two members of a family in Ontario, Canada, in retaliation for a stolen drug shipment and a May 2024 murder in Niagara Falls, Ontario, over a drug debt.

The State Department is offering a US$10m reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Wedding.

Wedding’s second-in-command, fellow Canadian Andrew Clark, 34, known as “El Dictador”, was among 29 alleged or convicted narcotics traffickers extradited to the United States from Mexico last week.