Manon Loschi

La Clusaz, France | Active: 2022-present elite freeride | Discipline: Freeride, Backcountry Freestyle and Creative Skiing | Known for: FWT podiums, Natural Selection Ski, Double Trouble, Abstrus

Alaska When The Course Changed Overnight

The Alaskan face was not the one the riders had studied all week. Wind and weather had forced Natural Selection Ski away from the planned Spine Cell zone, leaving Manon Loschi with a new canvas, fresh speed checks, and no space for hesitation. She dropped into the 2026 final with a line built on flow rather than panic, set the tone with a double backflip, then linked features until the run felt less like survival and more like drawing. One year after becoming the first women’s ski champion at the event, she had defended the title.

From Thônes Mornings To La Clusaz Days

Loschi’s story is tied tightly to the Aravis. She has described herself as from Thônes, the town near Annecy where she sleeps and studies, while La Clusaz is where the skiing happens. That split says a lot about her rhythm: valley life below, freeride culture above, and a home resort where Candide Thovex’s influence is part of the local weather. She was born on February 23, 2002, and her FIS freeride profile now lists her with Club des Sports La Clusaz.

La Clusaz gave her more than terrain. It gave her a club, a scene, and a language for mixing tricks with mountain lines. Freeride World Tour describes her path through La Clusaz’s Freeride Club, then juniors, then qualifiers, before she earned a place for FWT23. An early-season injury kept that debut from happening. The absence mattered because it delayed her first full top-level season, but it did not change the direction.

Seb Michaud And The First Contest Spark

Before the Natural Selection titles and the film projects, Loschi’s competition path started almost accidentally. In a 2022 interview, she explained that she was skiing freeride for fun in her local club when a coach convinced her to enter a junior freeride event at La Clusaz. She finished fourth, liked the feeling, then joined the competition section coached by Seb Michaud. Her second competition became a win.

That detail matters because her skiing still carries that first motivation. She did not sound like a rider built only for ranking tables. She came from a freeride club where friends, hiking, powder and Balme laps were part of the same day. In the same interview, she mentioned riding often with Lalo Rambaud and friends from the club, a group she called “les Gaziers.” That crew setting explains the looseness in her skiing better than a results sheet can.

Verbier Rookie Pressure On Petit Bec

The FWT24 start at Verbier turned a delayed debut into a statement. The event took place on Petit Bec, with the Freeride World Tour noting a consistent snowpack from top to bottom and a fresh overnight layer that softened the landings. Loschi finished second in the ski women’s field with 94.00 points, behind Zuzanna Witych and ahead of Molly Armanino.

That was not a quiet rookie result. Verbier has enough history to make every first appearance feel heavy, even when the venue is Petit Bec rather than the Bec des Rosses. Loschi’s run used speed, air choice and control rather than a cautious survival line. She was 21 at the time, coming back from the injury that had erased her FWT23 start, and she immediately placed herself among the central riders of the ski women’s field.

Kicking Horse In Cold Powder And A Backflip

The second FWT24 event at Kicking Horse Golden BC Pro confirmed that Verbier was not a one-day spike. The competition went down on T1 South in Golden, British Columbia, with reports describing a firm base, a fresh layer of powder and temperatures pushing toward minus 20 degrees Celsius. Loschi finished second again, less than three points behind Astrid Cheylus.

The line included a backflip and a 360, both important in the way they framed her freeride identity. She was not simply skiing big cliffs as straight airs. She was placing freestyle into exposed terrain without making the line feel like a park run dropped onto a mountain. Astrid Cheylus, Hedvig Wessel and Zuzanna Witych were all part of that same ski women’s conversation, giving Loschi an immediate peer group at the front of the tour.

Fieberbrunn And The Fourth-Place Season

Fieberbrunn added the third podium of her rookie FWT season. Loschi finished third in Austria, behind Astrid Cheylus and Hedvig Wessel, and that result helped put her fourth overall in the 2024 Freeride World Tour ski women’s ranking. Downdays later summarized the season clearly: second at Verbier Pro, second at Kicking Horse Golden BC Pro, third at Fieberbrunn Pro, fourth in the final ranking.

The overall position is useful because it prevents the season from being reduced to one clip. Loschi handled Switzerland, Canada and Austria, three different faces, three different snow textures, and three different pressure settings. She did not win the world title, but she arrived as a rookie who could threaten podiums immediately. For a skier coming off a missed year, that result density was enough to change her public status.

Double Trouble In The Aravis

Double Trouble gave Loschi another kind of profile. Built with Alex Remonnay, the project was rooted in the Aravis and framed around friendship, freeride and a deliberately strange visual identity. The film mixed ski imagery with everyday scenes shot in a 16 mm spirit, leaning into character and texture instead of presenting a standard athlete edit.

The film matters because it shows how Loschi thinks about skiing away from bib numbers. It is not only a rider part. It is a self-authored piece with mood, friendship and local terrain at the center. The Aravis setting keeps the work close to her roots, while the tone separates her from freeriders who only appear in event replays. Double Trouble made her look like a skier with her own visual world, not just a rookie waiting for a final score.

Recipe And The Female Freeski Collective

Before Double Trouble, Loschi appeared in Recipe, the 2022 freeski film by Coline Ballet-Baz. The project gathered a women’s cast across freeride, slopestyle, big air, backcountry and street, with locations ranging from the French Alps to Salt Lake City. The cast connected Loschi with Michelle Parker, Juliette Willmann, Sarah Hoefflin, Margaux Hackett, Jennie-Lee Burmansson, Maggie Voisin and other riders from different sides of the sport.

Recipe gave her a wider context. She was not only the young French freerider from La Clusaz; she was part of a film that treated women’s freeskiing as a shared movement across disciplines. That matters for a skier whose career now mixes competition, backcountry freestyle and creative projects. Loschi’s later route makes more sense when Recipe is placed early in the timeline: she had already been shown inside a collective vision before the FWT spotlight fully arrived.

Abstrus In The North Of Sweden

Abstrus, released in 2024 with filmmaker Felix Raffaelli, pushed the visual side further. The short film was shot in northern Sweden at the end of the season and described as an artistic experiment mixed with skiing. It was less about explaining a contest objective than playing with sound, strange images, snow texture and the idea of something unclear or difficult to understand.

That approach fits Loschi’s skiing because she is not a pure big-mountain traditionalist. Her lines often carry hand drags, 360s, backflips, surfy turns, natural takeoffs and playful body shapes. Northern Sweden gave the project a different light from the Aravis: flatter horizons, late-season snow, and enough visual quiet to make every movement read sharply. Abstrus helped position her as an athlete comfortable in ambiguity, not only impact.

Calm Beneath Castles With Max Palm

Matchstick Productions brought another scale in 2024 with Calm Beneath Castles. The film’s cast included major names across freeride and freestyle, and Loschi appeared in a segment with Swedish skier Max Palm. Downdays described that section as entertaining and pointed specifically to her skiing and sled-wrangling skills, a detail that says plenty about the reality of big ski filming.

MSP projects carry a different weight than a short personal edit. They place a skier inside a long-running ski-film lineage, with helicopters, snowmobiles, remote access, travel logistics and expectations from a global audience. For Loschi, the pairing with Palm made sense. Both skiers blur the line between freeride and trick progression. Both are more interesting when the mountain line becomes playful without losing consequence.

How Loschi Reads A Face

Loschi’s technical identity sits between freeride line selection and freestyle timing. She uses backflips, 360s, double backflips, natural takeoffs, wind lips and fast turns, but the tricks are usually embedded into the line rather than isolated as single hits. That difference matters. In freeride, a trick is judged through the terrain around it: entry speed, exposure, takeoff shape, landing quality and the turns before and after.

Her best runs carry a surf quality. She can drift speed before a feature, release into the air, then return to a fall-line rhythm without making the landing look like a stop sign. The influences she has named also help frame it: Sean Pettit for style, Candide Thovex for the La Clusaz imagination, Arthur Longo for creativity, and Jennie-Lee Burmanson for smoothness. Those names form a technical map, not a simple inspiration list.

Red Bull, K2 And The Creative Support System

Loschi’s public sponsor picture has changed with her rise, so it should be treated carefully. Downdays listed K2, Peak Performance, Anon, BCA, La Clusaz and La Scierie restaurant in 2022, when she was still being introduced as a new K2 Europe rider. More recent public pages connect her strongly with Red Bull, while brand profiles also place her in the Mountain Hardwear and Gore-Tex outdoor ecosystem.

The important point is not a static sponsor list. It is the type of support. Loschi needs partners that can follow both sides of her skiing: event starts at FWT and Natural Selection, then film work in La Clusaz, Sweden, Alaska or remote backcountry zones. Her career is not built around a single annual ranking. It needs travel, weather windows, film crews, safety teams, avalanche gear, apparel that survives long days, and skis that can handle landings outside groomed terrain.

European Skier Of The Year Before The Alaska Double

The 2024 European Skier of the Year vote gave Loschi a cultural marker beyond official results. Downdays reported that more than 80,000 votes were cast across the contest, and Loschi won the women’s side after a year that combined FWT podiums, Matchstick filming, Abstrus and a Core Shots episode in La Clusaz. She beat Flora Tabanelli in the final round.

That result matters because it came from the freeski community, not from a judging panel on a single face. It rewarded a season with multiple forms of visibility: podium runs, movie segments, home-resort storytelling and creative output. By early 2025, Loschi was no longer only the promising FWT rookie. She was one of the skiers people were actively voting for, replaying and discussing.

Natural Selection Reframed The Ceiling

The first Natural Selection Ski title in 2025 changed the top line of Loschi’s résumé. Red Bull’s athlete profile identifies her as the first-ever women’s champion of the inaugural YETI Natural Selection Ski event in Anchorage, Alaska. The format fit her unusually well because it rewarded technical difficulty, line choice, flow and the ability to use natural terrain creatively.

The 2026 repeat made the result harder to treat as a one-off. In the women’s final, Loschi finished ahead of Astrid Cheylus and Elisabeth Gerritzen, keeping the title after a course change and a format that demanded adaptation. The back-to-back wins place her in a different category from a rider with one strong FWT season. Her current benchmark is now Alaska, double backflips in freeride competition, and a hybrid future where style, tricks and mountain judgment carry equal weight.