Vic Wild

Wild won a bronze medal in the parallel giant slalom at the 2013 FIS Snowboarding World Championships and gold medals in the parallel slalom and parallel giant slalom at 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, which made him the first snowboarder ever to win two medals at the same Winter Games.

Instead of ending his career, Wild opted to leave the country; when he married Russian snowboarder Alena Zavarzina in 2011, Wild applied for Russian citizenship.

Wild originally competed for the United States, but after the 2010 Winter Olympics, the United States Ski and Snowboard Association shut down its alpine snowboarding program. According to a 2014 story by Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports, Wild had been viewed by US snowboarding officials "as an enfant terrible, someone who didn't understand alpine's place in the [USA] snowboarding power structure. Halfpipe is king, with slopestyle creeping up in importance, and snowboardcross racing third." One of Wild's former coaches indicated that before its closure, the alpine snowboarding program had a budget of $135,000, a fraction of the funding needed for an internationally competitive team. This is mainly caused by the fact that the United States remains the only country in the world not to fund its Olympic Committee, that is why available funding is limited.

Victor Ivan "Vic" Wild (Russian: Виктор Айван Уайлд ; born August 23, 1986) is an American-born Russian snowboarder.