Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Blister Podcast on the Blister Podcast Network.

I'm Jonathan Ellsworth, and you can check out everything we're doing and reviewing over at

blisterreview.com and on our YouTube channels, Blister Review and Blister Studios.

Today, our guest is the 2026 Free Ride World Tour men ski champion and the very first FIS world champion, Ben Richards.

Ben just wrapped up one of the most impressive seasons in FWT history, and if you somehow

haven't yet watched all of his comp runs, you definitely should.

In our conversation here today, Ben and I will go through each of his runs on the tour this

year, but you're also going to hear more about his background, how his approach to

comp skiing has evolved over the years, and at the end of our conversation, there's a bit

of gear talk, and you are going to get to hear a really cool, kind of wild story about the

ski Ben used to blow all of our minds, become the first

FIS world champion, and win the FWT.

And if you would like to get on and check out that ski for yourself, the Armada Antimatter

114, well, you will have that opportunity to do so at

our Blister Summit, which kicks off tonight at Snowbird in Utah. We've got our welcome sessions

this evening, then two of our panel sessions, and then we are going to be on snow testing skis and snowboards

and a bunch of other gear this Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday at the Bird.

So we will leave a link to the Blister Summit in the show notes, and I look forward to seeing a whole bunch of you tonight.

Now, finally, I want to give a shout out to a few of our newest Blister Plus members,

and that includes Fred in Truckee, California, Chris in Ridgeway, Colorado.

This next one is real timely.

We've got Armada athlete Olivia Aslin in Canada, just became a

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