Canadian ex-Olympic snowboarder pleads not guilty to US drug charges

SANTA ANA, Calif., Jan 26 (Reuters) – Ryan Wedding, a Canadian former Olympic snowboarder, pleaded not guilty to charges of becoming a cocaine smuggling kingpin responsible for multiple drug-related murders in a U.S. federal court in Santa Ana, California, on Monday.

Wedding was flown to California after being arrested in Mexico City on Thursday.

Wedding, 44, is accused of leading a transnational drug trafficking network and working with Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel to transport hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from Colombia through Mexico to the U.S. and Canada. He was on the FBI’s “Top 10 Most Wanted” list and the U.S. government had offered a $15 million reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction.

Wedding, who competed for Canada at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, faces charges including conspiracy to distribute cocaine, conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to tamper with a witness. Prosecutors accused him of ordering several drug-related murders, including that of a U.S. federal witness in Colombia in January 2025 before he could testify against him, the department said.

Prosecutors also accuse him of directing the murders of two people and the attempted murder of a third in Ontario, Canada, in November 2023 over a stolen drug shipment, and of ordering the killing of another person in Canada in May 2024 over a drug debt.

If convicted of the most serious charges, he could face a sentence of life in prison.

(Reporting by Sarah Mills and Arafat Barbakh in Santa Ana, California, and Ryan Patrick Jones in Toronto; editing by Scott Malone and Rosalba O’Brien)