Olympic snowboarder arrested on murder charge after going on the...

Ryan James Wedding, a former Olympic snowboarder, has been arrested by the FBI. The athlete, who competed in snowboarding men's parallel giant slalom for Team Canada at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, was apprehended in Mexico on Thursday night, FBI Director Kash Patel announced on social media. He noted that Wedding is being transported from Mexico to the United States. Patel said that Wedding was "believed to have been hiding in Mexico for over a decade," and claimed that as a member of the Sinaloa cartel, "he was allegedly running and participating in a transnational drug trafficking operation that routinely shipped hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from Colombia, through Mexico and Southern California to the United States and Canada." At a press conference at the Ontario International Airport outside of Los Angeles on Friday morning, Patel discussed Wedding's alleged criminal enterprise. "Just to tell you how bad of a guy Ryan Wedding is: he went from an Olympic snowboarder to the largest narco trafficker in modern times," he said. "He is the modern-day El Chapo, he is the modern-day Pablo Escobar." Akil Davis, the assistant director of the FBI's Los Angeles field office, announced that the FBI had arrested 36 people associated with Wedding's organization. He said that Wedding will be held in custody over the weekend and is expected to make his first court appearance on Monday morning. The FBI placed Wedding on its 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list in March 2025, and in November, an unsealed grand jury indictment revealed that the former snowboarder was "charged with overseeing the operations of a criminal enterprise — including by engaging in witness intimidation tactics such as murder — and enriching himself with the enterprise’s laundered drug proceeds," the Justice Department said at the time. Wedding was also accused of ordering the murder of a witness in a separate federal narcotics case. The Justice Department said that the athlete "placed a bounty on the victim and enlisted the services of others to locate and kill the victim, who was shot to death in a restaurant in Medellín, Colombia, in January 2025." Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter. In a previous indictment in 2024, Wedding was charged with "running a continuing criminal enterprise, assorted drug trafficking charges, and directing the Nov. 20, 2023, murders of two members of a family in Caledon, Ontario, Canada." The Justice Department said that the murders were ordered "in retaliation for a stolen drug shipment that passed through Southern California," and that "another member of that family survived the shooting but was left with serious physical injuries."