Not so long ago, I was seated in a bustling bar hundreds of miles away from the mountains, cold drink in hand, while a TV screen slung from the wood-paneled walls showed a different, astounding world.
On it, skiers flipped and pirouetted through a blizzard, doing stunts that a few decades ago viewers probably would’ve considered witchcraft.
This was the big air shootout at X Games Aspen, one of the finest examples of elite human performance. And yet, as far as I could tell, no one else was interested. It may as well have been an infomercial about car tires. What gives? Are triple corks really that boring?
I’m biased, though. To the general public, and many diehard skiers for that matter, freestyle skiing has long been a funky sideshow. If you’re not seeing it in person or keeping tabs on your favorite athletes, the X Games is good for an Instagram reel’s worth of astonishment, but not much more.
Well, that’s how it is now. What appears to be a bold shot to take the X Games mainstream is underway, presenting the most real chance in years—maybe ever—at making big air something people actually crane their necks to see in crowded bars. And more eyeballs on skiing is good news for fans and athletes alike.
The effort is called the X Games League, a big venture equipped with every modern bell and whistle imaginable, including sports betting and a multi-stop tour. What’s perhaps most important about the league is this, though: teams.
During an upcoming draft, four geography-based “clubs” (New York City and Park City have been named so far) will assemble rosters composed of skiers and snowboarders. Throughout the winter, the athletes will throw down in the usual X Games events, like slopestyle or knuckle huck. At the end, whichever team comes out on top will take home what X Games calls “a whole lot of money.”
This is a smart play. Teams are a key ingredient of sports fandom. They provide belonging, group identity, and vicarious thrills. It sounds silly, but when you back a certain jersey and they win, it feels like you won, too. The same goes for defeat, adding stakes. Those stakes could bring fresh excitement to the blur of tricks X Games deals in.
That’s been one of the greatest challenges for freestyle’s promoters. In terms of technicality, the highest levels of the sport are on par with gymnastics. The complex tricks look cool, of course. But when you compare them to the straightforward awe of a dunked basketball and a flashing scoreboard, they’re inaccessible. People who aren’t total ski nerds need a reason to care. X Games League is trying to give them one.
It probably won’t be easy, however, to convert new fans. Many big sports benefit from real-life connections people form in childhood. They play baseball in the rec league, or shoot hoops after school, making the transition to lifelong fandom more straightforward. Skiing, in contrast, is expensive and niche.
Thankfully for X Games, foreignness doesn’t have to stop a league from getting off the ground. Look at Formula 1. Between 2018 and 2025, the sport’s fanbase grew 63%, reaching above 800 million. Do you own and regularly drive a Formula 1 racecar? Probably not. Do you—or someone you know—follow Formula 1? Those odds are much higher. Just like freestyle skiing, high-speed car racing is distant from most people’s lives. With the right structure in place, though, they both have enough adrenaline to make for good television.
While this doesn’t guarantee success for the X Games League, Formula 1 shows that a path exists (and perhaps hints that X Games needs its own Drive to Survive—a documentary series key to Formula 1’s growing popularity). It makes sense that when the X Games League was first announced, its backers compared it to Formula 1.
All the prospective X Games hoopla does come with baggage, though—at least for the kind of jaded skiers I hang around.
For one, there’s the AI judging. Yes, X Games has tested an AI that can judge tricks. They have said that the gizmo, called Owl, won’t replace people. Still, despite its all-consuming hype, AI is about as popular in some corners of skiing as paving Grand Teton. Much of that distaste comes from freestyle’s soulful streak—skiing, after all, is more of an art form than a quantifiable sport. It’s not yet clear what role Owl will play in X Games League. But a whiff of AI is enough to make plenty turn up their noses. X Games would be wise to keep in mind what’s always made action sports special: humans.
Meanwhile, sports betting’s explosive growth is controversial and has real social costs. Yet, when it comes to gambling, X Games is all in. In a splashy press release earlier this year, the brand announced a partnership with an online casino to “revolutionize action sports betting.” Depending on who you ask, wagering $300 on Alex Hall’s next performance is thrilling or grimly dystopian.
We shouldn’t need betting or AI to care about skiing. The truth, though, is that alongside the team format, they give this next chapter of the X Games more momentum. Suits, for now, seem willing to throw money at AI, and any burgeoning sports league needs money. Secondly, sports betting has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry, upping the ante—literally—and potentially pulling less invested fans in.
If welcoming these less savory elements looks like a Faustian bargain, it’s worth considering what skiing could gain if the X Games League takes off.
Viewership and attention drive sports revenue. There’s a simple reason mainstream sports players earn millions while freestyle skiers largely make comparative peanuts: way more people follow the NBA or NFL. We don’t have to accept the precarious “pro skier” as a fixed truth, though. Freeskiers deserve salaries beyond sponsorship deals or unpredictable prize winnings—a structure X Games League is attempting to create. For this to last, however, freestyle’s fanbase has to expand, and that may necessitate some thorny changes.
Then, there’s the prospect of more X Games. During its inaugural season, three X Games League winter stops are planned, shaping the circuit into something you could think about for more than a few days at a time. This pales in comparison to other sports options, but it’s a solid start, hinting at storylines made possible by season rivalries. If X Games captures even an ounce of the drama around the Knicks-Spurs finals matchup, they’ll have won.
Skiers will have, too. In an increasingly noisy world where attention is measured in seconds rather than minutes or hours, we could all use more magnetic, culture-defining moments. I want to clap my buddy on the shoulder when an underdog team ekes out a narrow win. And I want that excitement to involve my favorite sport.
A few weeks after watching the X Games alone in a bar, I caught a glimpse of where all this could go if fantasy meets reality: a group of guys huddled around a TV, staring intently at a basketball game.
Given their level of attention, they could’ve been diplomats, managing something serious, like a white-hot global flashpoint that might go south. Instead, they couldn’t look away from another group of taller guys repeatedly throwing a ball at a hoop. When the ball went in at the right time, they roared.
Will freestyle skiing one day share the same devotion, however arbitrary? I don’t know. But the X Games, with its ongoing experiment, is poised to find a definitive answer.
