Freeriding (winter sport)

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Freeriding is a style of skiing or snowboarding performed on natural, un-groomed terrain, without a set course, goals or rules. It evolved throughout the sport's formative years as a contrary response to the highly regimented style of ski competition prevalent at the time. Snowboarders primarily refer to freeriding as backcountry, sidecountry, or off-piste snowboarding, and sometimes big mountain or extreme riding.

Freeriding incorporates various aspects of riding into a style that adapts to the variations and challenges of natural, off-piste terrain, and eschews man-made features such as jumps, rails, half-pipes, or groomed snow. Freeriding incorporates aspects of other snowsport disciplines such as freestyle and alpine. This provides the necessary flexibility for varied natural terrain. Whereas freestyle snowboarding relies on the use of man-made terrain such as jumps, rails and half-pipes, and alpine snowboarding is done on groomed snow, freeriding utilizes the random flow of natural terrain to perform similar tricks.

Due to their use of backcountry routes, freeriders are (proportionally) much more likely to become a victim of avalanches. One estimate posits that about 80% of all avalanche deaths in the Alps occur among freeride/backcountry riders.^[1]

While the term “freeriding” originated in snowboarding, some skiers have adopted it in recent years. For many years, the skiing equivalent of freeriding was known as freeskiing and referred specifically to off-piste skiing. However over the years, especially since the arrival of snowboarding, the term "freeskiing" has come to refer to freestyle skiing. This has left traditional “freeskiers” without a name for their style of skiing, and so some now use the snowboarding term instead. This became somewhat official in 2013, when the “Freeride World Tour” absorbed the “Freeskiing World Tour” into its schedule of competitive events.