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Maxime Chabloz
MGG is proud to be the official apparel sponsor to Maxime Chabloz (Instagram: @maxime_chabloz).
Maxime’s achievements at such a young age (he’s still only 21) are nothing short of remarkable, and we leapt at the chance to partner with a Swiss multi-sport phenom who not only possesses seemingly limitless talent, but who also shares the same values as us. What makes him particularly unusual, however, is that Maxime is possibly the only athlete on the planet right now to compete at world class level across multiple disciplines, both in winter and summer sports. This extraordinary feat has led to comparisons with a young Shaun White, who competed at both winter and summer X Games back in the day, and more recently with fellow Red Bull athlete and multi-sport waterman Kai Lenny (although even he has never competed in any winter sport disciplines).
Young Beginnings
Maxime discovered kiting at the age of seven, and straight away fell in love with what in those days was still something of a nascent sport. It was around this time that he began to dream about becoming the best kiteboarder in the world. By the age of 14 in 2015, he won his first Kiteboarding Freestyle Junior World Champion title. It was on.
Not content with kiteboarding at the highest level, from the ages of 13 to 15, Maxime also attended a specialist sports school for alpine ski racing and, until the age of 15, he was committed to a full time career in the same. Notably, his brother Yannick competed in the Olympic Downhill and Alpine Combined at Beijing 2022, so there’s a chance that had he continued down this route, the two brothers might have competed alongside one another.
Image © Maxime Chabloz
Push & Pull
By 2017, Maxime had quit ski racing entirely to focus 100% on kiteboarding and pursuing his dream of becoming world champion. Further Kiteboarding Freestyle Junior World Champion titles followed in 2017 and 2019. However, this sudden shift away from winter sports weighed heavily on his mind, and he began to feel that something was missing. During the winter he found that he preferred to stay in Europe and ski, rather than travelling to the southern hemisphere to carry on kiting. He also struggled to feel sufficiently motivated at the end of the kiting season.
It was around this time that Maxime discovered competitive freeride skiing. With the acrobatic skills and prowess that he’d already honed kiting, he decided to start competing at the junior freeride level.
Image © FWT
Competing Interests
In his first year on the Freeride Junior World Tour, Maxime won the 2019 Freeride Junior World Championship Kappl. Somehow he’d managed to translate many of the aerial skills that he’d learnt on water, to snow, in almost no time at all, which nobody had ever done before.
Following his initial success, it took Maxime just two seasons of Freeride World Qualifier competitions (he was ranked No.1 in 2021) to qualify for the Freeride World Tour.
In the meantime, he was now competing simultaneously in multiple disciplines on the GKA Kite World Tour during the summer months and, in 2020, he won every competition organised by the GKA (the Distance Battle and SuperKite) in Brazil.
Image © Qatar Airways / GKA Kite World Tour
Winner Takes All
Maxime tells us that he was nervous when he started competing on the Freeride World Tour 2022 for the first time, alongside seasoned legends such as Reine Barkered, Kristofer Turdell, and Aymar Navarro. Despite this, you’d never have known it. He explains that he started out with a “learning mindset” and intended to simply gain “as much experience as possible, with the goal of winning the Tour within maybe the next three to five years.”
But then suddenly, things started to go very differently. After his first win at Ordoni-Arcalís in Andorra on only the second stop of the Tour, he realised that not only could he compete at the highest level of freeriding ..he could beat them all, too. A second win followed at Kicking Horse in Canada on the next stop, and by now he was simply operating on a different plane to everyone else. In between these two Tour wins, he even had time to come and compete in the Backcountry Invitational at Nendaz in Switzerland hosted by MGG and our very own Tanner Hall (in collaboration with Nendaz Freeride), where he put on an incredible display - you can watch full highlights of this epic event, HERE.
Suffice to say that what followed is already the stuff of legend.
At this point Maxime had achieved qualification for the following season (which is all he’d set out do in the first place, anyway). Therefore all that remained was to throw caution to the wind and show the rest of the field just how good he was. This culminated in him winning yet another stop on the Tour, a startling third of the 2022 season, the mythical Xtreme Verbier in Switzerland, and on his home turf too, the sweetest victory of them all.
And with that, Maxime was crowned world champion, winner of the Freeride World Tour 2022 in only his rookie year. It was an unprecedented achievement in such a short space of time which rocked the world of competitive freeriding, and one that he says still gives him goosebumps every time he thinks about it.
Image © FWT
Future Prospects
Maxime sought to defend his world championship title in the Freeride World Tour 2023. In a season where stops were heavily affected by warm and dry conditions, he found himself in second place on points coming into the final event, the YETI Xtreme Verbier. Frustratingly, for only the second time in Tour history, the event was cancelled, after an avalanche was triggered by patrollers on the main competition face during testing. Maxime therefore finished the season in second place by default, and wasn’t able to defend his world championship title. Nevertheless, to have achieved first and second place in back-to-back seasons is still a momentous achievement!
Looking forward, Maxime will compete on the Freeride World Tour 2024. He will also continue to compete on the GKA Kite World Tour in a variety of disciplines (Freestyle & Big Air Hydrofoil - as of 2022, Maxime is one of the best freestyle kiteboarders in the world), and also on the GWA Wingfoil World Tour (Surf-Freestyle & Surf-Slalom) - if kiting alone wasn’t already enough!
He’s also recently been enjoying filming video episodes of his own series - MaxWorld - and wants to continue to show more behind the scenes footage of his training and the many different disciplines in which he competes. He’s skillfully assisted in filming and producing these episodes by his girlfriend Nina Font, who also competes on the GKA Kite World Tour alongside him.
Image © Fabian Gattlen
The copyright of all images on this page belong to their respective owners, and all images are used only for educational purposes under the ‘fair use’ doctrine.
Maxime wears:
Denali Insulated Pro Jacket 3.0
High performance insulated ski jacket
Cotton Classic Hoodie
Premium cotton MGG logo hoodie
Merino Wool Beanie
Classic Merino Wool fisherman beanie
