close
close

Maggie Voisin announces her retirement from freestyle skiing

Posted on by angelo

For more than a decade, Whitefish-born skier Maggie Voisin has been a member of the U.S. Freestyle Ski Team, earning three Winter Olympic appearances and seven X Games medals. But after a series of injuries and the loss of his brother changed his perspective on his career, Voisin announced a break from the competitive world, taking the 2024 season off to devote his energy to the backcountry.

On Thursday, those plans became more concrete when Voisin announced in a joint Instagram post with the U.S. Ski Team that after 10 years, she was officially stepping back from the world of freeskiing.

“Say goodbye to the bib, not to the sport,” we can read in the message. “We will miss seeing her compete, but we are excited to continue following her journey in the backcountry (and in the pit?)”

Voisin grew up skiing at Big Mountain as a kid and joined the Whitefish Mountain Resort freestyle team when she was 9 years old. By the age of 12, she was dominating her peers in national competitions and was invited to Park City, Utah, to train. this became permanent a few years later.

In 2013, Voisin was named ESPN Rookie of the Year after winning the Association of Freeskiing Professionals World Championship in Whistler, British Columbia, and was the only woman to land a switch 900. She continued built on this momentum the following season by becoming the youngest skier, a record since broken, to win a medal at the X Games; and she became the youngest American in four decades to make an Olympic team when she traveled to Sochi, Russia.

Unfortunately, a fall during training a few days before the Olympics removed Voisin from the competitive list. Injuries affected a few of her competitive seasons afterward, but four years later she was back on the world’s biggest stage as a member of Team USA in Pyeongchang, South Korea. After becoming the first American woman to win the X Games just before the Olympics, Voisin was considered a medal contender and was in third place for much of the competition until the last competitor knocked her out of the podium and finished fourth.

After overcoming further injuries and the death of her brother before the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, Voisin finished fifth in the women’s slopestyle ski competition and 15th in the inaugural big air ski competition.

Maggie Voisin skis the Alaskan backcountry with Teton Gravity Research. Photo by Nic Alegre

In 2023, Voisin had only three competitions scheduled, but ended up skipping them to recover from a minor knee injury. Instead, she spent most of the winter in the backcountry filming with production companies Good Company and Teton Gravity Research (TGR). She also commentated at X Games Aspen. She continued this trajectory last winter, touring with TGR alongside her childhood friend Parkin Costain.

“I’m excited to turn my attention in this direction and see where I take my skiing,” Voisin told the Flathead Beacon in December. “It’s fun to merge the two worlds: integrating park tricks into ski touring lines.