(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- The most dangerous feat in snowboarding six years ago was the cab double cork 1440. It required athletes to drop backward into a halfpipe, flip twice and spin four full rotations at more than 22 feet in the air.
While trying to perfect it before the 2018 Winter Olympics, both Shaun White and his main rival, Ayumu Hirano of Japan, ended up in the hospital. White walked away with some five dozen stitches to his face and Hirano with injuries to his liver and left knee that were inches away from being much worse.
They both landed the trick at the Games. White earned gold; Hirano clinched silver. Today, advanced variations on this move are ubiquitous, not only for snowboarders but also halfpipe freeskiers, including American Olympian Nick Goepper, whose double cork 1620 adds an extra half-spin.
For almost as long as these winter sports have existed, athletes such as White, Hirano and Goepper have one-upped these high-consequence feats despite little ability—outside of rare sponsorships from Burton, Völkl and other brands—to make any real money.
Without his sponsors’ patronage, Goepper says, he’d spend $50,000-plus on expenses like flights and hotels to participate in World Cup tournaments where his winnings for the 2023-24 season, despite four top-five finishes, topped out at a mere $7,685. In an Instagram post, he said if he’d notched four top-five finishes in tennis opens, he’d have earned $1.9 million. Even in bowling and darts, those achievements would bring in $67,000 and $235,000, respectively—without the risk of landing in the hospital.
White is pledging to fix this conundrum with Snow League, the first competitive federation exclusively built for snowboarders and freeskiers. It kicks off with a series of four halfpipe events, beginning this March in Aspen, Colorado, with about 36 athletes from 15 countries expected to participate.
His goal is to make it into an international year-round circuit to showcase the next generation of talent, complete with the same types of media deals and glitzy commercial partnerships that turned surfing and Formula One into meaningful slices of the sports economy.
A five-time Olympic champion and snowboarding’s most high-profile face, White has developed a fortune of roughly $65 million through brand endorsements, media appearances, investment opportunities and business ventures, including his own video game franchise. He knows that the rest of the pro snowboarding world could never dream of that kind of remuneration—or even much of a living wage, for that matter.
Most snowboarders have to choose between traveling to contests that can help them qualify for the Olympics (but that no one will watch) or those that come with larger viewership, sponsorship opportunities and halfway decent prize purses.
“You have to run in circles to patch together a living,” White says. He calls this lack of economic opportunity and fragmented competition structure “the sport’s worst enemy.”
White grew up in San Diego, a hub of surf and skate culture during the 1980s and ’90s. His mother, a waitress, and his father, who worked for the water department, would camp in a van in resort parking lots around Southern California so the kids could ski and snowboard. White was as good on concrete as he was on the snow, earning the mentorship of skateboard legend Tony Hawk and turning heads as the first athlete to compete in both the Winter and Summer X Games in 2003. He’d eventually go on to win 23 career X Games medals and almost every snowboarding accolade imaginable.
“People are always asking me when the next Shaun White is going to emerge,” White says. “They’re out there. There just hasn’t been a space to discover them yet.”
The snowboarding field is ripe for more attention. Even though participation in downhill skiing has leveled off the past few years, participation in snowboarding jumped 10%, to 9.9 million Americans last season, according to data from Snowsports Industries America—an all-time high. The recent addition of freeskiing, skateboarding, surfing and mountain biking in the Olympics has boosted their mainstream appeal. As such, other entrepreneurs are eyeing the space.
On June 13, four days before White’s initial announcement, the X Games released news that it will start the X Games League in 2026, featuring sponsor-supported teams of athletes competing in four summer and four winter events a year, including snowboarding and skateboarding. Its investors and advisers include Australian snowboarder and four-time Olympian Scotty James, who’s married to F1 heiress Chloe Stroll.
The Natural Selection Tour, a seasonal snowboarding competition created by pro Travis Rice, will be expanding to surf, freeski and mountain biking next year, with the first event taking place in Micronesia in January. The Rockstar Energy Open, a US skateboard competition that premiered this summer, has also hinted at the addition of a snow circuit.
But White says he has two crucial components to attract the best talent. The biggest advantage is that the events will also count as Olympic qualifiers. The Snow League will also, finally, give individual snowboarders an annual world title to chase.
“When I had my undefeated season [in 2006] and won every competition on the circuit, an interviewer asked me how it felt not to be a world champ,” White says in an exclusive interview with Bloomberg that reveals several new details on his plans. “That disconnect has always stuck with me.”
The money isn’t bad, either. The potential earnings were the first detail about Snow League to make headlines: In its premier season, it will offer a total prize purse of $1.5 million, the highest in the sport. It will be split into $250,000 winnings for each event, with an additional $250,000 for season champions.
Investors backing the league include Blackstone Inc.’s David Blitzer and former NFL star Larry Fitzgerald Jr. Range Sports is advising on media rights and a commercial partnerships strategy.
By positioning itself as a sports league, rather than action or extreme sports, White says the Snow League can attract sponsors from the luxury and fashion spaces the way tennis and golf do. Snowboarder Chloe Kim is sponsored by Breitling AG. Eileen Gu, the gold medal-winning freeskier, has made more than $30 million in endorsements from Louis Vuitton and Tiffany & Co.
White’s own snowboard company, Whitespace, collaborated with Moncler SpA last winter to design the luxury brand’s first snowboards. (They cost $1,650 and were introduced on a runway built into the snow-covered slopes in St. Moritz.)
These brands are finding a market with disposable income: Of the 4.6 million recreational snowboarders in the US, more than 60% come from households with an annual income of $100,000 or more, according to the National Sporting Goods Association. Those are golf-level numbers.
The Snow League’s chief operating officer, Ian Warda, a former vice president at Burton, says an extra attraction here is that fans will be able to hit the slopes and watch the sport’s idols take to the halfpipe all in one day—at destinations that were probably on their short lists anyway. “If you’re planning a trip to the Rockies or Switzerland, our event is the week to choose,” he explains. (This is possible at some PGA tournaments, though it’s difficult to pull off.) Warda pictures US Open-like luxury activations and VIP experiences during those weeks: Think fancy box suites, access to athletes, or Champagne-fueled après parties.
A docu-style series, White adds, is in the works in an attempt to capture the same energy that Netflix’s Drive to Survive did to skyrocket F1’s viewership and help kick-start the careers of up-and-comers.
Stories that capture the rivalries, the comebacks from injuries and the training that goes into learning new tricks create an emotional investment in the athletes, he argues.
The average person probably still won’t be able to appreciate the acrobatics involved in a cab double cork 1440 by the end of the Snow League’s inaugural season. But White does anticipate his new halfpipe circuit will catapult athletes such as Hirano—who’s still competing—and Canadian freestyle skier Cassie Sharpe to global stardom by winter 2026.
Spotlighting that next generation is the key to the Snow League’s success—one that unlocks the long-term viability of the sport that made White a household name.
But White knows that people who buy a ticket are also there to see him.
“I plan to be at every event for meet-and-greets, to get feedback from the athletes,” he says. “And I’m definitely going to ride the halfpipe to make sure it’s up to standard.”
(Update adds details of Natural Selection Tour expansion in 15th paragraph.Subsequent update adds audio narration.)
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