Will Gadd Biography

For more than 25 years Will Gadd has been one of the top adventure sports athletes in the world. Now he’s taking the lessons he learned while succeeding in some of the world’s toughest environments and sharing them with audiences ranging from Nike to Exxon Mobile to incarcerated youth.

Will won the X Games, set two world records for paragliding, and safely led numerous large TV and research expeditions into highly dangerous—and rewarding—environments. He climbed up a frozen Niagara Falls, flew a paraglider over the Grand Canyon, and taught his kids (and doctors and oil sands workers) to positively manage risk with the direct, entertaining and effective tools he learned through a lifetime of living on the edge.

He speaks with personal humour and professional depth on effective and widely applicable tools to do great things while staying safe, building team resiliency, succeeding in low-knowledge environments, and doing what the everyone said was, “Impossible!” He has shared more than 200 high-end presentations to groups from American Express to Hydro One. Most recently he and his teams found new life forms in glacial caves for a Discovery TV show, and helped a planetary scientist sample the world’s oldest rocks in Canada’s Arctic.

Will is an award-winning author, film maker and (no awards) dad in Canmore, Alberta, Canada. He is still sponsored by Red Bull, Arc’teryx and other leading brands. His newest book project is titled, “Surviving and Succeeding in High-Hazard Environments,” published spring ’24, based on his own experiences and interviews with ten of the top medical, industrial, corporate and military risk managers in the world.