A former Olympic snowboarder has been arrested on suspicion of running a major international drug trafficking operation—but FBI Director Kash Patel struggled to get word out about the “modern-day El Chapo.”
The embattled Patel, 45, held a news conference Friday on a tarmac at California’s Ontario International Airport, forcing him to yell in order for microphones to pick up his detailing the arrest of the Canadian Ryan Wedding.
“Just to tell you how bad of a guy Ryan Wedding is, he went from an Olympic snowboarder to the largest narco trafficker in modern times,” Patel yelled over the buzz of jet engines. “He is a modern-day El Chapo. He is a modern-day Pablo Escobar.”
Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, 68, is still alive and is considered a modern-day drug trafficker, despite Patel’s suggestion that he is a historical figure. After two escapes in Mexico, he has been in U.S. custody since 2016.
Wedding, 44, has been charged with overseeing the operations of a criminal enterprise and enriching himself with its laundered drug proceeds.
Patel, as he often does, was quick to spin Wedding’s arrest into a political win for the Trump administration. He opened his news conference with a brag.
“Today, we are announcing the capture of another FBI Most Wanted top 10 fugitive, Ryan Wedding,” he began. “That makes six top 10 FBI captures in one year alone. To put that in perspective, that’s two more than the entirety of the prior administration.”
Officials have previously accused Wedding—who competed in the giant slalom snowboarding event at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah—of smuggling approximately 60 metric tons of cocaine per year between Mexico and Los Angeles via semitrucks. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Wedding’s cocaine operation generated more than $1 billion a year in illegal drug proceeds.
Wedding, whose aliases include “El Jefe,” “Giant,” and “Public Enemy,” was placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives list in March 2025, and the agency eventually offered a $15 million reward for information leading to his capture.
The FBI has previously accused Wedding of smuggling hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from Colombia through Mexico and Southern California to Canada and the United States.
“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,” Akil Davis, the assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said at a press conference last March.
Wedding is further alleged to have orchestrated “multiple murders” and an attempted murder as part of his drug empire.
According to authorities, a witness who was due to testify against Wedding was shot and killed at a restaurant after Wedding allegedly placed a “bounty” on the individual’s head.
Even Wedding’s official Olympic biography notes how the snowboarder’s life spiraled out of control after he finished 24th in the giant slalom in 2002.
In 2006, he was accused of growing “large quantities of marijuana” at a property in British Columbia, though he was never charged. In May 2010, Wedding was convicted of attempting to buy cocaine from a U.S. government agent in 2008 and was sentenced to four years in prison.
Wedding was later charged in a September 2024 superseding indictment with attempted murder and other counts related to the alleged drug enterprise.
