Red Bull Rampage 2025, Bullseye!
Words By Ariel Kazunas
On October 10th, 2024, I watched as Robin Goomes became the first woman ever to compete at Red Bull Rampage. On October 17, 2025, I watched her drop in again, this time as a returning champion who would go on to win her second consecutive title.
And while just twelve short months passed between those two historic runs, it felt, as freerider and 2025 spectator Kaia Jensen put it, “like we’ve progressed ten years.”
I knew exactly what she meant – and couldn’t have agreed more. In 2024, it felt like we had all been holding our collective breath as Goomes and the other gals headed to the start platform. We knew that no complete runs or a slew of injuries would convince the naysayers out there that twenty-three years of “No girls allowed!” at Red Bull Rampage had been warranted.
Of course, our worst fears ended up being unfounded. The 2024 roster unflinchingly proved the skeptics wrong. They built creative lines, stomped runs, and demonstrated that they belonged right where they always knew they did: on bikes, at the highest level of their sport.
And the impact of that was immediate and immeasurable.
“You can’t do big features if you can’t do big features,” Jensen continued, pausing to really let the statement sink in. “And you’re only as good as the stuff you can build. A lot of women in the industry don’t have the money to have their own properties, their own yards, their own jumps at home. And so the only time we really get to ride the bigger and gnarlier features is when we go to events.”
“The women have always believed in themselves...But now the industry believes in them, too, and people are giving them the opportunity to actually go to these bigger events and grow"
To that end, Jensen credits the inclusion of women at events like Woolley Fest, Hardline, Natural Selection, and, of course, Rampage, with helping the women’s field progress exponentially in such a short period of time.
“This year at Woolley Fest it was insane to see just how different their mentalities were breaking in Woolley versus breaking things in over the years, just how much faster they get through stuff and how much more confidence they’ve been able to gain from having access. It’s unreal.”
Unreal, but not unexpected. Katie Holden, arguably the most dedicated advocate for the women of freeride, anticipated this exact outcome when pushing for a woman’s category in Rampage leading up to the 2024 decision: “The larger conversation here is ensuring that girls and women have an opportunity to be the best they can be (this means investment, media coverage, camps, jams, tools and resources) and creating competitive categories equal to their male counterparts.”
Because, of course, there were generations of athletes who came before this season’s crop of Rampage riders, who laid the foundation for what the women of freeride are accomplishing today, who pursued careers that were too often (and sometimes still) treated as footnotes to the “real” story of freeride, and who never saw their sweat equity manifest into industry equity.
Which is why Holden was speaking less prophetically and more practically when she insisted: “If you give them a target, they will hit it in droves.” And why she was proven so immediately right.
Case in point: twelve riders trekked south to Virgin, Utah, for Rampage this year, up from eight in 2024. The invite list was stacked and highly competitive, from veterans like Casey Brown and Vaea Verbeek to rookies like nineteen (turned twenty during the event) year old Janelle Soukup and twenty three year old Kirsten Van Horne.
That, and the 2025 women’s venue was the site of the 2014 and 2015 Men’s Red Bull Rampage competitions, preempting any of the sort of eye-rollingly wrong online commentary common during the 2024 event that the women weren’t capable of riding the same features as the men. And the conversation in 2025 wasn’t if each competitor was going to throw tricks, it was what, when, where, and just how big.
And while frustrating practice day injuries took competition day away from Chelsea Kimball, Casey Brown, Vaea Verbeek, CJ Selig, and Harriet Burbidge-Smith, each invited athlete proved, through their line choices, builds, first hits, link ups, and trick jump warm ups, why they had earned their spot – even and especially with intense rain and wind severely limiting their time on venue. (As Red Bull commentator Selema Masekela rightly describes it, Rampage is as an eight day endurance event, not a one day show.)
"The larger conversation here is ensuring that girls and women have an opportunity to be the best they can be (this means investment, media coverage, camps, jams, tools and resources) and creating competitive categories equal to their male counterparts"
Of the seven women who did line up on game day, each completed two full and flawless top to bottom runs, highlighting with their skill, poise, and comfort in extreme terrain just how fully they’d taken advantage of that bolstered industry support Holden knew would be so impactful.
Kirsten Van Horne dropped first and set a definitive tone with a huge sui on her biggest drop. Cami Nogueira muscled through residual pain from an elbow dislocation just days prior to grease one of the most technical and burly lines of the day.
Vinny Armstrong reminded us why she is the absolute queen of the whip. Janelle Soukup came back from a slam in practice that may have shattered her bike, but not her fun-first attitude, to become the youngest women’s field competitor to cross the finish line.
And a stylish Robin Goomes, a collected Hannah Bergemann, and a confident Georgia Astle found themselves in first, second, and third, respectively, at the end of the day on the podium.
Fourteen year old aspiring professional freerider Mayumi Wakefield watched it all go down. “It definitely feels different now that women are a part of Rampage,” Wakefield voiced when asked what she felt had changed in the past year since the women’s debut in 2024. “It makes the sport feel more open, and like there’s a real path for riders like me. Seeing that door open has changed how I think about my own future. The energy, the riding, and the support between the riders made me want to keep progressing and hopefully earn a chance to ride Rampage one day.”
Bergemann, who also won the McGazza Spirit Award echoed both Jensen and Wakefield in a post-event interview. “It’s been huge. Just since last year, since the women being given this platform, you’ve seen it: the women have taken it to a whole other level. Not just one little step but multiple steps higher. They’re learning insane tricks, hitting insane features, participating in incredible events. The list goes on and on. I’m on top of the world,” she ended, grinning big.
After witnessing what the women of freeride accomplished in 2025, I can safely state that they aren’t just hitting it – they’re landing bullseyes only.
“If you give them a target, they will hit it in droves.”