Ryan Wedding was arrested in Mexico last night
The former Olympic snowboarder turned alleged drug lord had been hiding from police for over a decade
Ryan Wedding, the former Canadian Olympic snowboarder who is alleged to have run a transnational drug trafficking operation, has been arrested after hiding from law enforcement for over a decade.
Related: The story of Ryan Wedding, Canada’s Olympic snowboarder turned drug lord
Wedding, who is on the FBI’s list of ten most wanted fugitives, was discovered and taken into custody last night in Mexico, according to a statement posted to X by FBI director Kash Patel.
Wedding “routinely shipped hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from Colombia, through Mexico and Southern California to the United States and Canada, as a member of the Sinaloa Cartel,” Patel said.
Some of Wedding’s possessions had been located and seized in recent months, but his whereabouts had long been unknown.
Court documents reviewed by NBC News show that Wedding’s criminal activity began in 2008, six years after he competed in the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. In addition to drug trafficking allegations, he is accused of orchestrating the murder of a key witness.
Related: That flexing Ryan Wedding Instagram account appears to be AI
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
