Speed riding is essentially skiing but with wings. You clip into your skis, strap on a small glider, and take off. The glider or ‘wing,’ as it is referred, lifts, the skis carve, and gravity does the rest. It’s fast. It’s light. And when done right, it looks like flight sculpted in real time; the ability to glide only inches or also hundreds of feet above snow, cutting tight turns, touching down and lifting again—all at breakneck speed.
Born in France in the early 2000s, speed riding stemmed from speed flying, which exploded as a fringe experiment, turning into one of the most exhilarating mountain sports on the planet. The main difference? Speed riding is on snow with skis while speed flying is only flying. Both demand precision, speed, and a lot of nerve. They both took root deeply in the Chamonix valley—where the terrain is some of the most serious the world has to offer. The line between life and death runs thin here, and those who call these mountains their home constantly dance along that line.
Yet beneath the sport’s rugged image lies a quieter legacy—one carved by the women who’ve been flying these peaks for decades.
Cyrilde Pic is a Chamonix local and a speed riding guide. She’s been flying since before social media existed, before most people knew what speed riding even was. “There was a lot of speed riding with women here before the social media,” she says with a French accent. “It’s just an old story—older than Instagram.”
Pic grew up between Chamonix and Brittany, skiing and sailing. Her introduction to wind sports like speed flying actually started first with windsurfing. Later, a paragliding tandem flight for her 20th birthday changed everything. She dropped out of university to become a paragliding instructor. “When speed riding showed up in the mid-2000s…I was a skier and a sailor and a paraglider. It was love at first sight. For me, it was windsurfing on snow.”
She started teaching speed riding in 2009, and by 2010, she won the French championship at 40 years old. “It’s not the Olympics,” she says. “We were 12 girls. But for me, it was an achievement. I couldn’t make what I wanted to do in my windsurfing career because of the money. So I was really happy to win this title.”
From the start, women weren’t just on the sidelines in Chamonix—they were actively shaping the speed riding scene. Pic, one of the sport’s early figures, remembers it clearly. “It’s always been a girl story, riding in the valley,” she says. Some of her friends moved on over the years, but Pic stayed with it—teaching, riding, competing—driven purely by love for the sport. Women weren’t just participating; they were building the foundation.
Pic’s journey hasn’t been smooth. In 2012, an avalanche near the Monte Bianco Skyway in Italy nearly ended her career. She was out in the mountains shooting photos of skiing and speed riding with a friend when she got caught. “By chance, I didn’t take the canopy out yet,” she says. “I tumbled for 400 meters and broke all my right side. It’s been a long way back.” But the injury gave her perspective. “It’s probably one of the most interesting journeys in my life. You discover that you can do it. I find joy now in simpler things.”
Today, she still rides—guiding clients, exploring lines, and sharing knowledge with younger pilots. “I’ve been teaching speed riding for a long time and paragliding more than 30 years. If I can share that with other women and the kids who need a bit of experience, I’m super happy.”
One of those younger pilots is Ioana Hanganu, a Romanian rider who moved to Chamonix in December 2020 and became actively involved in the speed riding community. She flies constantly; before work, after work, or pretty much whenever the weather allows. She flies with other women. With men. Or with whoever shares the same obsession for speed, flow, and freedom. For Hanganu, it’s not just about logging flights—it’s about building a community in the sky. One where skill matters more than ego, and where every shared lap becomes part of something bigger.
“There are people that are super good at flying but not very good on skis,” she says. “You need both. It’s not like you can do this once every two weeks. You have to keep up. It’s a year-round thing. You need hours.”
Hanganu started with paragliding, logging in hours of flight time before progressing to speed flying and then ultimately speed riding. But that all came to a halt when, on a paragliding trip in India with some friends in 2024, she crashed and broke her spine trying to top-land at the end of a long day of flying. Hanganu couldn’t land where she initially planned and made an error on the descent, crashing and suffering a compression fracture in her L2 vertebrae and spinal chord compression, which left her needing an intense rescue that took hours, followed by spinal surgery and months of rehabilitation just to return to her normal physical ability.
She learned a lot from the accident, she says. Now, she increases the amount of studying she does for landings and better listens to her body when she’s tired, often backing off from flights when she’s not feeling great about them.”I’m more careful now with being mental there, taking less risk, and trusting myself more than listening to other people—and just feeling it 100% when I go for it,” Hanganu says.
Another friend of Pic and Hanganu is Johanna Stalnacke, a Chamonix mountain guide whose first solo flight paragliding ended in a crash. “There was a bit of a side wind,” she says. “I made a mistake, raised the wrong brake in the stress, and I did a 180 right back into the landing field. But the only thing I could think about was getting back up. Otherwise, I’d be scared.”
It was Pic who helped Stalnacke get her confidence back. “She told me, I’ll guide you on the radio. We’ll do it gradually, and it’ll be a good experience again,” Stalnacke said. “That was the reason I started [paragliding] again.”
Pic’s mentorship role with pupils like Hanganu and Stalnacke is an important ingredient to the sense of community that is shared amongst flyers in Chamonix. That community blossoms with events that promote and create space specifically for women to gather and fly together. “There’s this event, it’s called the Women of Speed Flying,” Hanganu says. “It’s not a competition, more like a meet-up. Girls from all over the world come. It’s way more accessible in Val d’Isère, and you can do a lot of laps.”
The Women of Speed Flying event has become a yearly tradition in nearby Val d’Isere, two and a half hours from Chamonix. Women come to fly and participate in a speed riding-oriented game where entrants stack points by completing a ‘list’ of various tasks and activities. It’s a playful, friendly competition centered around speed riding that gets women from everywhere to meet up, fly, and then après at one of the on-mountain bars with live music afterwards. “It’s really fun,” Hanganu says.
Pic didn’t get to attend this year, but she believes in the mission. “I think it’s a good idea to push and motivate the girls,” she says. “It’s a way to show that we have our place in the community. I personally love mixed events too, but I think this is a great initiative.”
Still, the roots of this story go beyond new gatherings and hashtags. For Pic, supporting women in the sport was never separate from supporting the sport itself. “I tried to push the activity here in Chamonix—not especially with the girls, but with the youngsters, with everybody,” she says. “To give a chance to this activity and make people understand it could be practiced in many ways.”
That philosophy runs through how she teaches. “You have to be a good skier. Absolutely. No discussion,” Pic says. “You have to be able to ski everything you want to speed ride. And you have to accept not to go too fast. A lot of accidents happen because people push too fast into strong places, or downsize their wing too early. Because it looks good on social media.”
She pauses. “Extreme is not the goal. It’s just one of the ways to practice.”
Chamonix is both a home base and a testing ground. The community is tight-knit but diverse, with riders bringing a wide range of styles—from freestyle-heavy lines to high-mountain technical descents. Nor is it just locals; people come from all over the planet, creating a mix of cultures, perspectives, and approaches. That blend is part of what keeps the scene dynamic—and what makes it such a compelling place to ride, according to Pic.
Hanganu agrees—but notes that it’s not always easy to break in. “It’s kind of a clicky community here,” she says. “You have to trust your partners and for them to trust you. But with speed, even if you don’t fly the same line, you’re still in the gondola together. You’re still on the same lap. It creates a big sense of community. It’s why I keep doing this.”
That openness is something Pic has always felt, even as one of the few women instructors. “I’ve never felt anything bad about being a woman in this sport,” she says. “It has always been an advantage. If you take it the right way, men are super nice and ready to help. You just have to behave like a human, not like a woman. There are speed riders—that’s it. Whatever the gender.”
The path to becoming an instructor in France is not easy. You need both your paragliding license and your ski instructor license—both hard to get. That’s part of why so few are qualified. “It’s super hard to get in France,” Hanganu says. “There’s only a few that are doing it professionally, and even fewer women.”
Still, the presence of women in speed riding—both in the air and behind the scenes—has always been strong, at least in Chamonix. “It’s the same with mountain guides,” Pic says. “There are few women guides overall, but most of them are in Chamonix. Maybe it’s the role models. The climbers, the skiers, the people we grew up seeing. It makes you believe you can do it too.”
For both Pic and Hanganu, longevity in the sport comes from knowing your limits and respecting the mountain. “You have to be realistic about your level,” Pic says. “You have to be able to change places often. If you always ride the same spot, you don’t progress. And you can’t go too fast, especially with conditions or wing size. I’ve seen people die because they didn’t have the level. You need to know the air mass, the techniques, have full control.”
Pic remembers the accident in 2012. She remembers tumbling for 400 meters and the time in the hospital—all the surgeries and all the painful time spent convalescing and reflecting on her life. But she doesn’t have any remorse. “I wouldn’t change a single thing,” she says. “I’ve made my life in the air, and I’ll keep doing that. I have absolutely no regrets.”
Speed riding is not a sport for those chasing likes on Instagram, according to Pic. It’s for people who chase feeling. Who are okay with going slow to go far. Who know the mountain and their wing as well as themselves. “I think the most important thing is that pleasure must always be the engine,” Pic says. “You go for the old friend—the joy, the ride, the moment.”
In Chamonix, more and more speed riders are women. They are not waiting to be invited in. Like valkyries, they are flying fast, high, and with grace on a sort of battlefield, except one where everyone is on the same side. All speed riders possess a deep desire to enjoy life to the fullest. This is what brought them to the sky in the first place; not to conquer it but to dance with it.
[An earlier version of this article misstated terminology associated with source Johanna Stalnacke, who is a paraglider and not a speed rider. It was updated at 2:44 a.m. MST on April 29, 2025]
