When friends and family members asked Holden Samuels if he was going to be in the Olympics someday, the professional freeride snowboarder would chuckle.

Freeride is perhaps the rawest form of ski and snowboard competition. Its base ingredients are high peaks, steep slopes and deep snow. Rather than pipes and ramps, competitors play off of rock outcroppings and sheer cliffs. Judges determine winners according to chutzpah and style.

“I would always respond, ‘No, I’m never going to be in the Olympics, because freeride can’t be in the Olympics. There’s too many variables,” the 26-year-old from Salt Lake City said. “So it’s kind of crazy, the fact that it might be.”

On Tuesday, the International Olympic Committee is expected to reveal what sports will be included in the 2030 Winter Olympics being held in the French Alps. Any new additions, if deemed successful, could be carried over to Utah’s 2034 Winter Games. And despite Samuels’ incredulity and the sport’s logistical hangups, freeride appears to be a frontrunner.

Other disciplines vying to be part of the 2030 Games include, among others, 3x3 hockey and ice climbing. The IOC announced last week that ski mountaineering, which made its Olympic debut in Italy last winter, would be included in the French Alps program and expanded from two to five events.

A change made last month to the Olympic charter could make it easier for new disciplines like freeride to find footing in future Games. Starting with the 2032 Summer Games in Brisbane, Australia, the IOC will compare the most attractive candidates with the lowest-performing incumbents to determine which merits inclusion.

“If we stick again to our DNA and culture and spirit, there’ll be no problem to be in the Olympic program,” said Nicolas Hale-Woods, the founder and CEO of the Freeride World Tour — the Formula One of freeride.

Hale-Woods said he and representatives from the International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS) made site visits with 2030 Olympic organizers in April, honing in on two potential venues. His group also visited Utah last year to speak to organizers about the possibility of freeride becoming a 2034 Winter Olympic discipline.

“They confirmed they are very interested in putting freeride in the program,” Hale-Woods said of 2034 organizers.

Under the new charter, Olympic organizers are expected to finalize their sports programs within seven years of their Games. For Utah’s Games, that would be next year, though Utah 2034 organizers say they expect to release their program in 2028.

Freeride has a reputation as an anti-establishment form of skiing and snowboarding, similar to skateboarding and surfing. Yet Hale-Woods said joining the Olympics has been part of his vision since creating the Freeride World Tour event in 1996. When surfing was added to the Olympic program in 2016, freeride athletes took note.

Yet it was not until FIS purchased the tour in 2024 that freeride’s inclusion into the Olympics felt like more than a pipe dream.

Ross Tester, a Utah skier who placed third overall on the 2026 Freeride World Tour, said he was taking a break from competing and considering doing something else with his skiing when he first heard freeride might be included in the Winter Games. In an email to The Salt Lake Tribune, he said in high school he’d been voted “Most Likely to be an Olympian.” If the IOC adds freeride to the Olympic program, he might be able to live up to that title.

“Finding out about the possibility,” he said in an email, “reignited my motivation to compete and potentially become an Olympic athlete.”

Plenty of questions will follow freeride into the Winter Games, if it is added. How often will future hosts have the appropriately steep and snowy terrain needed to showcase the discipline? Will being in the Olympics change the sport? And if so, will athletes and fans accept this bridled version?

The answer to most of those questions, Hale-Woods said, can be found by studying surfing’s Olympics success. That sport faced many of the same issues — a reliance on nature, a tendency to go to remote locations, an alternative culture resistant to change — and yet has proven to be a rising star of the Summer Games.

“The Olympic Games has not changed surfing culture,” Hale-Woods said. “It’s a week every four years, and the format is exactly the same [as] for a [Championship Tour] event. So, I only see positives, I don’t see one negative.”

Of all the past Winter Olympics hosts, Hale-Woods said only Pyeongchang, South Korea, lacked terrain suitable for a freeride contest. However, the IOC has recently become more willing to cross national and regional borders when it comes to venues — speedskating for French Alps 2030, for example, will likely be held in the Netherlands.

For 2030, officials have pinpointed the French towns of Montgenèvre and La Grave as potential freeride venues. They are both a roughly four-and-a-half-hour drive from Verbier, Switzerland — the birthplace of the Freeride World Tour. Switzerland is vying to host the 2038 Winter Games, where freeride would also appear to be a natural fit.

Finding a venue in Utah might be more difficult. The most obvious potential mountains are located in the Cottonwood Canyons, but Utah 2034 organizers have promised they would not put events there.

Samuels said that one of his key concerns with bringing freeride into the Olympics is that sacrifices will have to be made.

The Olympics “want to be a good spectator sport,” he said, “and I think that they’re going to have a hard time always trying to find the great venues that are easy for the public to get to. So, they might have to sacrifice for one or the other, whether it’s terrain or crowds.”

Maybe he’s OK with those tradeoffs when it comes to his body — with extreme riding comes extreme falls — but not to his sport.

Update: July 7, 2026, 10 a.m. • Utah 2034 organizers expect to release their Olympic sports program in 2028.