Engadin 2025: athletes sharing competition footage, and Werner’s viral video, take social media interest to record heights

The FIS Snowboard, Freestyle and Freeski World Championships 2025 in Engadin (SUI) were warmly received on and away from the slopes with massive engagement on social media. 

The total reach across all relevant FIS channels was 24.8 million, almost five times the figure of 5m from the 2023 World Championships in Bakuriani (GEO). The tally of 1m interactions was seven times more than the 141,000 achieved two years ago. 

These numbers include a reach of 3m and 267,000 interactions generated by posts from athletes and National Ski Associations (NSAs) featuring competition footage via the FIS Content Exchange Platform (CXP).  

Launched at the start of the 2024/25 FIS World Cup season in Cardrona (NZL), the CXP has proved to be a resounding success with athletes and NSAs keen to share videos with their followers. In Engadin alone, 58 posts by athletes were viewed over 1.3m times and yielded 116,000 interactions with an average engagement rate of 7.3%. 

One video alone received more views than the 5m total reach from the last World Championships; Swiss athlete Pirmin Werner’s incredible recovery in the Aerials final attracted 5m views with 2.6m of those coming via Instagram and 1.8m on TikTok. 

This video’s success on Instagram saw that platform come out narrowly on top in terms of reach with 11.2m against TikTok’s 11.1m. However, TikTok boasted more interactions with 547,000 compared to Instagram’s 419,000.

After Werner, the next four most popular posts were all on FIS Freestyle’s TikTok page. Leading the way was Rasmus Stegfeldt’s spectacular POV run down the World Championship Moguls course.

Speaking of POV, FIS - supported by Sunrise - launched a new immersive experience in Engadin known as the Ski Cross Multi Viewer. With each athlete wearing a goggle-integrated camera, users were able to watch races through the eyes of their favorite athlete, capturing all the thrills and spills of this high-adrenalin discipline.

In host nation Switzerland, a total of just over 4.7 million viewers tuned in to 107 hours of coverage on SRG with almost a quarter of that number watching live. That represents a total market share of 8.6% with the live broadcasts attracting a market share of 10.4%. 

In countries without broadcast rights deals, YouTube regularly attracted four-figure audiences for live streams. Snowboarding was the most popular with 2,196 watching the Slopestyle finals. Australia made most use of the livestreams on FIS TV, accounting for 49.5% of total views.