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LawyersSnowboarder Pat Fava tests out rails at the X Games “street” course during a practice session on Thursday. On Saturday, Fava will compete in the first street style competition at X Games Aspen in over a decade.“Street style” skiing and snowboarding has returned to X Games Aspen for the first time in over a decade.
The street course is built to resemble features found in an urban environment. Urban skiing/snowboarding is a type of freestyle riding where athletes ride on pieces of built environments like staircases and rooftops. The style initially grew popular in the early 2000s, mostly on the U.S. East Coast and in Quebec.
At least a few athletes competing in this year’s street competition specialize specifically in urban riding. For many, the street competitions are the only X Games events they will compete in this year.
“It’s cool for (X Games) to finally bring it back. … It’s a different kind of riding and you can do it how you like,” said snowboarder Zak Hale, whose only X Games event this year is the street style snowboarding competition.
Pat Fava, another street style snowboarder, said he enjoys urban riding because he gets a “great feeling from flying through some steel.”
Fava said the street course was “epic” and that course designers “killed it.”
The “plaza-style” course features six individual rails, with two flanking a plywood staircase meant to mimic an urban environment. The rails range from 12-28 feet in length, with one being made from a bike rack. The course also contains walls and a hanging bell that athletes can attempt to ring during their runs.
Chloe Butel, the X Games’ first female course builder and venue manager, said the course provides an array of options allowing athletes to change up each run and transition from one rail to another without touching the ground.
“It’s a little more creative, more technical and less high speed,” Butel said.
This year, the X Games will include two non-medal competitions on its street course — an elimination game called “SLVSH” (pronounced “slush”) for skiers today and a judged street style competition for snowboarders on Saturday. Both events include men and women.
Today’s SLVSH game will break down in head-to-head competitions between individual skiers. Much like a game of HORSE on a basketball court, skiers will execute a trick on the street course and then challenge their competitors to copy it exactly. With each failure to copy a trick, a skier will receive a letter. Once a skier has received all five letters in “SLVSH,” it’s game over. The last competitors standing will receive cash prizes.
Josh Rakic, vice president of content at X Games, said he first considered holding a SLVSH event while talking to professional skier Matt Walker in early 2023; he has been developing the idea since then. X Games hosted a “SLVSH Cup” competition at Snowmass Mountain on Jan. 17, which included skier Ferdinand Dahl, who also will play SLVSH today.
The snowboarding street style competition, on the other hand, will be a more traditional format. A panel of judges will evaluate each of the 20 athletes (10 women, 10 men) based on originality, difficulty, creativity, style and trajectory. Athletes will have an unlimited amount of runs within a 20-minute timeframe to show off their best tricks and style in a type of competition known as a “jam session.”
The street style competition was initially set to be the only X Games event streamed exclusively on TikTok, though Rakic said it also may stream live on YouTube.
In general, Rakic said including street events in this year’s X Games is part of a broader strategy to focus on athletes’ personalities and creativity. Rakic said audiences are showing high demand for shows of self-expression in action sports.
During a press conference on Thursday, X Games Chief of Sports Culture Selema Masekela also mentioned that organizers are adding more weight to style and personality, rather than the raw size and scale of tricks. Masekela said the sheer size of tricks has received growing importance in freestyle skiing and snowboarding in recent years.
Masekela noted that skier Alex Hall, also present at the conference, was the first skier to land a 2160 (a trick involving six full rotations) at X Games, adding that he never thought he would even say that number in discussions about freestyle skiing and snowboarding.