Maggie Voisin Announces Retirement from Freestyle Skiing

For more than a decade, Whitefish-born skier Maggie Voisin has been a fixture of the U.S. Freestyle Ski Team, wracking up three Winter Olympic appearances and seven X Games medals. But after a slew of injuries along and the loss of her brother shifted her perspective on her career, Voisin announced a hiatus from the competitive world, taking the 2024 season off to pour her energy into the backcountry.

On Thursday, those plans became more firm as Voisin announced in a joint Instagram post with the U.S. Ski Team that after 10 years she is officially taking a step back from the world of freeskiing.

“Saying goodbye to the bib, not to the sport,” the post reads. “We will miss watching her compete but are stoked to continue following her journey in the backcountry (and in the booth?)”

Voisin grew up skiing on Big Mountain as a toddler and joined Whitefish Mountain Resort’s freestyle team at age 9. By the time she was 12, she was dominating her peers at national competitions and was invited to Park City, Utah, to train — a move that became permenant a few years later.

In 2013, Voisin was named the ESPN Rookie of the Year after winning the Association of Freeskiing Professionals’ world championship in Whistler, B.C., and was the only woman competitor to successfully execute a switch 900. She followed that up the next season by becoming the youngest skier, a record since broken, to medal at the X Games; and she became the youngest American in four decades to make an Olympic team when she headed to Sochi, Russia.

Unfortunately, a crash during a practice run a few days before the Olympics took Voisin off the competitor’s list. Injuries plagued a few of her competitive seasons after that, but four years later she was back on the world’s biggest stage as a member of Team U.S.A. 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 was sitting in third place through much of the competition until the final competitor bumped her off the podium into fourth.

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

In 2023, Voisin planned just three competitions, but wound up skipping them to recover from a minor knee injury. She instead 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 that trajectory last winter, filming with TGR alongside her childhood friend Parkin Costain.

“I’m excited to put my attention in that direction and see where I take my skiing,” Voisin told the Flathead Beacon in December. “It’s fun to merge the two worlds – putting park tricks into backcountry skiing lines.”