Manon Loschi

Profile and significance

Manon Loschi is a French freeride skier from the Aravis, raised between Thônes and the lifts of La Clusaz. Born in 2002 and shaped by a club culture that prizes mileage in real terrain, she erupted onto the top tier in 2024 with multiple podiums on the Freeride World Tour and became the inaugural women’s winner of the 2025 YETI Natural Selection Ski in Alaska. Her skiing is a clear example of modern freeride: calm, platform-first approaches into big airs, flips and 360s placed where the mountain invites them, and landings driven back to the fall line so the line keeps flowing. She also pushed progression with a headline-making attempt at a double backflip in big-mountain competition, signaling how women’s freeride is expanding its trick vocabulary at speed. Between broadcast runs and film parts, Loschi has become a reference for how to combine consequence with clarity.

Competitive arc and key venues

After winning the 2022 Qualifier overall, Loschi’s first full elite season arrived in 2024. She started with a statement at the Tour opener in Verbier, taking second on the Petit Bec above Verbier with a 94.00—built on fast, powerful turns and deep, decisive airs. Weeks later she repeated the result at Canada’s Kicking Horse Mountain Resort, a venue known for chalky panels and exposure that reward clean edge sets and exact line choice. She then added a third place at Fieberbrunn in Austria to finish fourth overall for the season. In 2025, she stepped into a different proving ground and won the first-ever YETI Natural Selection Ski—an Alaska face-format contest designed to merge freeride and freestyle—confirming that the same habits that score on Tour also stand up under a head-to-head bracket. The throughline is a record that travels across very different canvases: the ribbed, chalky steeps at Golden, the expansive freeride face in the Kitzbühel Alps, and the iconic Swiss finale at Verbier.

How they ski: what to watch for

Loschi skis with an “approach quiet, exit decisive” philosophy. Watch how flat her skis stay in the run-in—light ankle work, no chatter—until she builds a firm platform and pops cleanly. The air time is axis-honest: controlled backflips, tidy 360s in both directions, and grabs that stabilize rotation rather than decorate it. Landings are driven to the fall line with an immediate re-center, preserving speed into the next feature. On spines and convex roll-overs she manages moving snow proactively, making brief cross-fall-line cuts to shed sluff before re-committing. When the terrain offers the perfect lip and a generous landing, she is willing to escalate—her widely discussed attempt at a double backflip was notable precisely because it arose from a read that the feature could support it. The overall impression is of tricks used as punctuation in a sentence the mountain has already written.

Resilience, filming, and influence

The resilience thread in Loschi’s story is easy to miss because she looks so composed in competition. She qualified for the Tour a year earlier but lost that season to injury, then returned in 2024 and podiumed immediately—a psychological turnaround as striking as the results themselves. Off the bib, she has leaned into storytelling. She featured in Matchstick Productions’ 2024 film “Calm Beneath Castles” alongside an A-list cast, and she released a short project, “Abstrus,” filmed in spring conditions in northern Sweden. Those appearances show the same habits viewers recognize from contests: deliberate speed, precise reads of wind features, and tricks placed where the terrain naturally sets the line. The combination of podiums, a major film presence, and a win at the first Natural Selection Ski event has made her a touchstone for younger riders looking for a path that balances ambition with process.

Geography that built the toolkit

Place explains a lot of Loschi’s composure. The lift network and mixed aspects of La Clusaz deliver frequent laps in variable snow—early-season hardpack, storm slabs, and spring corn—so platform management and speed control become second nature. On the world stage, each stop sharpened a different tool. At Kicking Horse, chalk and exposure demand early, confident edge sets. At Fieberbrunn, the face rewards linking ribs and gullies into a coherent story. At Verbier, consequential entrances and unforgiving runouts test calm execution under pressure. For filming and late-season projects, Scandinavia’s long-light venues such as Riksgränsen add firm-snow takeoffs and wide runouts that suit clean rotations. The result is a toolkit that travels: set a speed floor, manage the surface in front of you, and let terrain choose the moment for expression.

Equipment and partners: practical takeaways

Loschi’s partners reflect reliability over novelty. With Red Bull behind her travel and performance projects, she skis freeride shapes from K2 Skis that offer stable platforms and forgiving rocker for deep landings, and outerwear from Mountain Hardwear built for storm days and long approaches, often featuring GORE-TEX membranes. Vision and protection show up via Anon Optics, while binding choices from Marker underscore the need for retention and elasticity when impacts come fast. For skiers translating that into their own setups, the useful lessons are simple: pick a freeride ski you can center confidently; keep edges honest underfoot for chalk but smooth at contact points for three-dimensional snow; and pair boots and bindings that won’t fold when you land deep. In any backcountry context, beacon, shovel and probe are non-negotiable, and clear communication with partners adds more safety than any single gear upgrade.

Why fans and progressing skiers care

Fans gravitate to Loschi because her lines make sense at full speed. She doesn’t chase tricks for their own sake; she organizes a face into a beginning, a middle and an end, and uses a flip or a three to emphasize the terrain, not to distract from it. That’s why her runs replay so well and why judges reward them. For progressing skiers, the takeaways are concrete: build a quiet approach, pop from a clean platform, land to the fall line and manage moving snow early. Her 2024 Tour podiums at Verbier, Kicking Horse and Fieberbrunn proved the formula under pressure; the 2025 win at Natural Selection showed it scales to different formats and even bigger canvases. Grounded in the daily reality of La Clusaz and sharpened on the sport’s heaviest venues, Manon Loschi stands as one of the clearest examples of contemporary women’s freeride—credible to judges, inspiring to audiences, and practical for anyone trying to turn highlight-reel moments into repeatable habits.