BOULDER, Colo. — The X Games started more than 30 years ago, and the Winter Games have been taking place in Aspen since 2002. Now, the action sports are flying into a new era: the X Games League will launch this summer.
Instead of standalone events, it will feature four teams — based in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Sao Paulo — competing against each other. Athletes will earn points for their team toward a championship title.
Some of the athletes committed to jump into the new league, according to the X Games League website, include snowboarder Chloe Kim and skier Eileen Gu, both Olympic gold medalists.
Denver7 sat down with X Games CEO Jeremy Bloom, a Loveland native, former CU Buffs football star and former Olympic skier.
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Bloom said there will be a learning curve for fans, but he said the X Games already cleared a big hurdle by getting athletes to buy in to the new format.
“This is the first time ever where it's going to be like, well, you have a team in Sao Paulo going against a team in LA, and that LA team has athletes from all over the world, but it's X Games Club LA, and it's X Games Club Sao Paulo,” Bloom explained.
He said his team is “reinventing” the games.
“This is a different way to think about action sports,” Bloom said. “For the history of forever, it was the U.S. guy versus the French guy. And that's been the Olympic model, the World Cup model, and so forth and so on.
The inaugural X Games League Draft will take place in Los Angeles on March 12. The league will feature skateboarding and BMX in the summer and skiing and snowboarding in the winter.
Through his start-up Owl AI, Bloom is also at the forefront of an effort to use artificial intelligence to eliminate human error and bias from referees and judges in different sports.
