The Mexican authorities recently announced the seizure of dozens of high-end motorcycles, drugs and Olympic medals on Wednesday after raids that appear linked to ex-Canadian Olympian-turned alleged drug kingpin Ryan Wedding, according to National Post.
Multiple agencies raided and searched four homes in Mexico City and the State of Mexico, which are related to Wedding, who is also one of the 10 most wanted fugitives by American authorities.
What do we know about Ryan Wedding?
Born in 1981, Wedding is a former Olympic snowboarder. He competed for Canada in the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in snowboarding.
After his athletic career, Wedding allegedly got involved in large-scale international drug trafficking and related violent crimes. He was added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in March 2025. He reportely built a sprawling narcotics network accused of trafficking large quantities of cocaine from Colombia through Mexico and into the US and Canada, according to the National Post.
Wedding had studied business for two years at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, New York Times reported.
Authorities allege Wedding has strong ties to the Sinaloa Cartel and used cryptocurrency to launder illicit proceeds.
He was earlier imprisoned in the US
After Wedding was convicted of conspiring to traffic cocaine, he was transferred to a federal prison in Texas. He served a total of about three-and-a-half years and as soon as he gained his freedom in late 2011, he established his trafficking organisation,
according to a 2025 grand jury indictment, New York Times reported.
Why did Mexican authorities perform raids now?
The raids followed an escalation by Canadian, US and Mexican authorities in a decade-long manhunt for Wedding, which began in 2015 after Canadian police charged him with importing cocaine while he was living in Montreal, before he fled ahead of his arrest.
“Despite the fact that they didn’t capture Ryan Wedding in these raids, this is a significant step in that it shows that Mexican authorities are taking this seriously now and that they are making efforts to locate Ryan Wedding and attack his organisation,” former FBI agent and senior lecturer at the University of New Haven, Ken Gray, said according to CTV News.