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By MTB Cycling Gear Team

Red Bull Rampage 2026 Ends With No Men's Champion


High winds canceled the Red Bull Rampage 2026 men’s final partway through competition on Saturday, and for the first time in the event’s 25-year history, nobody walked away from Virgin, Utah with a men’s title. Nine riders got down the mountain. Nine didn’t. Under Rampage’s own rules, that’s enough to void the entire result: scores and leaderboard, gone.

We need to say this plainly before going any further: our Saturday post named Hayden Zablotny the back-to-back men’s champion. That didn’t happen. Nine of eighteen riders is as far as the field got before organizers pulled the plug, no score from that half-finished card counts as official, and that earlier report is wrong. The podium we printed is void, full stop. More on the correction below. First, what actually happened.

Quick Take

ResultNo men’s champion: event canceled mid-competition
WhyHigh winds hit after nine of the field’s riders had dropped in
Provisional leaderSzymon Godziek, 90.00, doesn’t count as a win
Provisional 2nd/3rdJaxson Riddle, 85.87 / Kade Edwards, 84.12
The scareCarson Storch crashed hard, airlifted, later cleared and returned to the venue
StatusCanceled outright, not postponed to a makeup date
Best forAnyone who read our earlier Zablotny recap and needs the correction
Skip ifYou’re looking for a trick-by-trick breakdown: nine runs ended early and there’s no full card to break down

Nine Runs, Then the Wind Won

Rampage finals run as a single-day, one-shot format — drop in, land your line or don’t, no re-runs. Saturday’s field was eighteen deep. By the time organizers pulled the plug, only nine had gone. Pinkbike’s results coverage and Singletracks’ report both describe the same sequence: wind that had been a background concern all week picked up mid-card to the point where sending the back half of the field down a line built on exposed sandstone ridgeline stopped being a competition decision and became a safety one.

That’s not a small call to make. Riders spend days digging and walking these lines before they ever drop in once. Half a field doesn’t get that chance Saturday, through no fault of their own riding.

And this isn’t a rain delay. Brujula Bike’s report on the cancellation is clear that this is a full cancellation, not a postponement. There’s no makeup date on the calendar. The 25th-anniversary men’s field doesn’t get a second Saturday. It just doesn’t have a finished event.

Why Didn’t Red Bull Rampage 2026 Crown a Men’s Champion?

Rampage’s judging format has one rule that matters more than any score on the board: every rider in the field has to complete a run before a winner can be named. Here’s why that rule voided Saturday’s entire leaderboard:

  1. Scores only count inside a completed field. A 90.00 posted against nine riders isn’t comparable to a 90.00 posted against eighteen. The field that never dropped might have beaten it, and there’s no way to know.
  2. There’s no partial champion in this format. Rampage doesn’t have a “best score among whoever rode” fallback. Either the full field finishes, or there’s no result.
  3. Weather cancellation isn’t a tiebreaker in the rider’s favor. Godziek’s run doesn’t get promoted to a win just because the wind happened to hit after his turn instead of before it.

That’s the whole mechanism. Nine riders completing a run, out of eighteen entered, left the judges with no legal way to certify anyone — including the rider sitting on top of the board when the wind made the call for them.

The Leaderboard That Doesn’t Count

Szymon Godziek had the highest score standing when organizers stopped the event: a 90.00, ahead of Jaxson Riddle’s 85.87 and Kade Edwards’ 84.12. Worth saying twice, because it’s the number everyone’s going to want to round up to a result: it isn’t one.

There’s an irony underneath Godziek’s run worth sitting with. Saturday’s now-void recap had him down as one of four zero scores on the card — a number that, like everything else in that post, never happened. Pull that error back out and the real sequence looks almost backwards: the rider we’d wrongly written off with nothing was actually sitting on the best number anyone posted all day. None of it is going in the record book as a win, because the rulebook doesn’t have a category for “best run in a canceled event, correcting a wrong zero.”

Riddle and Edwards sit in the same unofficial limbo. St. George News’ coverage of the cancellation notes Riddle, a local rider, still walked away with memories from the week even without a result to show for it. That’s a strange sentence to have to write about a competition this physically demanding to even enter.

Carson Storch’s Crash Was the Scarier Story Mid-Card

Before the wind ended things, Carson Storch went down hard enough during his run to need a helicopter. Pinkbike’s updates from the venue and St. George News’ separate report on the airlift both confirm he was evacuated to a hospital for evaluation. The better news, and it’s genuinely good news given how these crashes usually read: medical staff cleared him, and he returned to the venue the same day.

Crashes at this event aren’t rare. Rampage lines are built to fail if a rider misjudges a gap or a landing by even a little, and the sport’s own history includes the award named for Kelly McGarry specifically because of what this terrain costs riders who get it wrong. Storch getting up and walking back into the venue is the version of this story nobody wants to have to tell, followed immediately by the version everyone’s relieved to actually be telling.

Correcting Our Saturday Report

Here’s the correction in full. Our earlier post reported Hayden Zablotny as the 2026 men’s champion — the 96.00/94.35/94.00 podium we printed Saturday. None of that stands. The men’s final didn’t reach a finish: nine riders in, high winds ended it, and nothing from Saturday carries any official standing, including every score and finishing position listed in that earlier recap.

We’re not going to pretend that didn’t happen or quietly swap the numbers out. The honest version is simpler: that post described an outcome the event never actually produced, and this one is the correction. If you read Saturday’s recap, the numbers in it (the podium, the margins, the four zeros) don’t reflect what happened. What’s in this post does.

What This Means for Zablotny’s Title Defense

Here’s the one piece of good news buried in a messy weekend for the defending champion: Zablotny’s 2025 title isn’t going anywhere, because nobody beat it. A canceled event with no winner doesn’t strip a prior champion of anything. It just means 2026 sits on the books as a year with no result, the way a rained-out match doesn’t get recorded as a loss for either side. Zablotny’s back-to-back bid didn’t fail Saturday. It just didn’t get the chance to finish, one way or the other.

A Rare Contrast to the Women’s Final

The timing makes the men’s cancellation sting more than it might in isolation. Robin Goomes’ women’s final ran clean two days earlier on the same 25th-anniversary course, full field, no weather stoppage, decided by three-quarters of a point in a finish that made actual Rampage history. Same mountain, same week, same wind risk sitting out there the whole time. It just didn’t show up until Saturday.

Who Should Care About This

Anyone who read Saturday’s Zablotny recap. That post is wrong. This one has the real outcome: no champion, a voided leaderboard, and why.

Freeride fans tracking Szymon Godziek. A 90.00 that would’ve been a real contender for the win is sitting in competitive limbo instead, with no path to being retroactively certified.

Anyone who follows Carson Storch. A hard crash and a helicopter evacuation is the kind of update worth a direct check rather than a secondhand summary. He was cleared and returned to the venue.

Who Should Skip This

Readers wanting a full trick-by-trick card. Nine riders ran before the stoppage. There’s no complete field to break down run by run.

Anyone looking for a rescheduled date. This is reported as a cancellation, not a postponement. There isn’t a makeup event on the calendar to point to.

The Bottom Line

Red Bull Rampage 2026’s men’s final ended with no champion after high winds forced organizers to stop competition with only nine of eighteen riders down. Szymon Godziek’s 90.00 led when the stoppage hit, ahead of Jaxson Riddle’s 85.87 and Kade Edwards’ 84.12, but none of it counts under Rampage’s own rules, which require a completed field before naming a winner. Carson Storch’s hard crash and helicopter evacuation mid-card was the scarier moment of the day; he was cleared by medical staff and returned to the venue. Our earlier post naming Hayden Zablotny as back-to-back champion was wrong, and this is the correction — Saturday produced no winner, and his 2025 title stands untouched because nothing replaced it. The women’s final ran clean two days earlier on the same course. The men’s never got the chance.


Reporting sourced from Pinkbike’s results coverage of the canceled men’s final, Pinkbike’s venue updates on Carson Storch’s crash, Singletracks’ report on the lack of a men’s winner, Brujula Bike’s coverage of the cancellation, and St. George News’ reporting on Carson Storch’s airlift and the local riders’ week.