In Łódź, a city in central Poland where the horizon is flat and the winters often arrive more as slush than snow, a teenage girl dragged buckets of ice shavings from the local skating rink. She and her friends heaped it into mounds beside the railway embankment, shaping small jumps and rails from scraps of metal. It was the closest thing they had to a ski hill.
Zuzanna Witych—who’s more commonly known as “Zuza”—remembers those early days less as deprivation than as improvisation. “That was our training,” she told me earlier this summer from her apartment in Bielsko-Biała, a small city in the forested mountains of Southern Poland where she lives and trains during the offseason. “We didn’t have real slopes, so we built them. It was fun—we were happy.”
From those makeshift beginnings, Witych has risen to become one of the world’s top freeride skiers and the only Polish person ever to compete on the Freeride World Tour, the sport’s premier stage. In 2024, she won at Verbier, the most storied stop on the circuit and arguably the most intense, with a near-perfect run and a score of 97.67 after stomping a massive cliff that even she admits looked far smaller from above than it did in the air. “Only in the air did I think, ‘Oh, it’s a bit bigger,’” she laughed.
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Her path has been anything but typical. Unlike many of her rivals who were raised in Alpine valleys, born into ski clubs, or trained from childhood, Witych skied once a year as a girl, on family holidays to the Alps. It wasn’t until her late teens, when she started hanging out with freestyle skiers from Polish ski towns Zakopane and Bielsko, that she began to take the sport seriously. She joined Poland’s modest freestyle national team, studied abroad in Grenoble in southeastern France, and later moved to Switzerland, where the allure of big mountains, powder snow, and the creative freedom to draw her own lines on the mountain pulled her in like gravity. She had effectively fell from the park and landed in the backcountry. Her life would never be the same again.
Witych began freeriding at 23, far later than most of her peers, and within two seasons reached the Freeride World Tour. “Everything is possible,” she said. “You know, I started super late. I didn’t really have proper coaches and preparation. I was learning everything at the moment. And, yeah, because of a huge passion for the sport, I got to compete with the best in the world.”
Her rise was meteoric. In 2019, she entered her first Freeride World Qualifier event in Verbier, a modest one-star competition, and won. The FWQ circuit is structured by “star” rankings, ranging from entry-level one-star events with shorter venues and simpler lines to the prestigious four-star events held on big mountain faces with steep, complex terrain. Riders can enter as many comps as they want, but only their top three results count toward their regional ranking, with far more points awarded at higher star levels—a four-star win can net 2,500 points compared to just 320 at a one-star. Within two seasons, Zuza had climbed rapidly through that system, progressing from one-star to four-star victories, earning the European overall title, and claiming a spot on the Freeride World Tour. Her debut in Andorra was unforgettable: she drew bib number one in a random selection and dropped first, opening the entire competition. “It was a lot of stress and pressure,” she said. “But amazing.”
On the Tour, Witych quickly stood out—not only for her technical strength and style, but for the fact that she was alone. While France and Switzerland field multiple riders, Poland has only her. “If it doesn’t go well for a French rider, there’s another French [rider],” she said. “For me, I’m the only one. People in Poland started watching freeride because of me. That’s a big pressure—but also a big honor.”
In March 2025, that pressure snapped in an instant. At Fieberbrunn, Austria, Witych went for a large double-drop but on the landing of the second cliff, she caught her tails in some old, sugary snow, crashed, and blew out her right knee. An ACL, MCL, and meniscus tear ended her season. Surgery followed and she was on crutches for the next six weeks. Her recovery process has been grueling but positive. “I’m very serious with exercises, diet, supplements. No partying,” she told me. “I’m doing everything I can to be 100% next season.”
That next season looms large. The Freeride World Tour will expand into new territory, including Alaska, freeriding’s holy grail. And for the first time, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation will host a Freeride World Championships in Andorra. Witych has already qualified. “It’ll be a busy season,” she said. “But I’m super excited.”
Witych’s story travels far beyond podiums. In Poland, she has become a visionary, showing young skiers a path they had scarcely imagined. With two friends, she launched the Freeride World Tour Academy Poland, running camps in Austria and coaching both kids and adults. Eleven of her students competed for the first time last season. “It’s my mission to promote this sport in Poland,” she said. “To show that it’s a normal, trainable discipline. I wanted to help the new generations and the young—you know, young riders to make it to the sport more professionally.”
When I asked if she feels she represents Poland every time she drops in, she didn’t hesitate. “Of course,” she said. “We have five million skiers, but almost nobody knows it. Some people don’t even know we have mountains. I want to show that even if you’re not born in the Alps, even if you don’t have a coach, you can get here. If you work hard and love the sport, everything is possible.”
That notion of what is possible has carried her from the flatlands of Łódź, hauling ice shavings in buckets, to the high faces of Verbier’s legendary Bec de Rosses and Austria’s Fieberbrunn. A lofty teenage dream joked about with friends in baggy park apparel on the sidelines of urban rail features in dimly lit alleyways has carried her to the highest heights of success as well as the lonesome lows of injury, and will—she believes—carry her back to the top. “Sometimes I find myself in situations I never thought I could manage,” she said. “And I do. That gives me confidence—not just in skiing, but in life.”
In freeride, a sport that doubles as an art form, where a single turn can separate triumph from massacre, Witych has learned that confidence must coexist alongside humility. Although now one of the best skiers on the planet, she remains, at heart, the girl hauling ice shavings from a local skating rink to build a jump where no slope existed, trying to prove—to herself, to her country, to the world—that Poland belongs in the high mountains.
