Former Canadian Olympic snowboarder makes FBI’s Top Ten list

A Canadian snowboarder slid his way into the FBI’s “top ten” list on Thursday afternoon.

Source: FBI.gov

A Canadian snowboarder slid his way into the FBI’s “top ten” list on Thursday afternoon.

The American agency’s latest “Top Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” list names Ryan Wedding of Thunder Bay, Ont., making him the second Canadian in history to have earned the distinction.

Wedding, 43-year-old, represented Canada in slalom snowboarding at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics but is now on a different kind of run, accused by U.S. authorities of operating his own murderous Mexican drug-smuggling ring with ties to the Sinaloa cartel.

The accusations from U.S. authorities were made public in a longer statement by the Department of Justice, also published on Thursday.

“Wedding is wanted for allegedly running a transnational drug trafficking network and for orchestrating multiple murders and an attempted murder in furtherance of these drug crimes,” the statement read.

“Wedding went from shredding powder on the slopes at the Olympics to distributing powder cocaine on the streets of U.S. cities and in his native Canada,” said Akil Davis, assistant director of the FBI’s LA Field Office.

The RCMP said in its own statement that it and the FBI ran a joint operation going back “over a year” targeting “a Mexican Cartel-linked criminal network.”

The RCMP accused the criminal network of moving large amounts of methamphetamine and cocaine to Canada and “commissioning murders across North America.”

Wedding and others are accused of orchestrating at least four “execution style” killings in Ontario alone, including the apparent mistaken-identity shooting of an elderly Indian couple in  Nov. 2023.

Wedding’s bumped Alexis Flores off the top ten fugitives list.