Do you remember that feeling of watching action sports athletes like Tony Hawk or Travis Pastrana pull off death-defying stunts on the X Games growing up?
At the turn of the millennium, the X Games dominated the culture, from Hawk’s landmark skateboarding games filling up your PlayStation time to shows like Jackass and Rocket Power dominating the airwaves. Skateboarding, motocross and other action sports events flooded ESPN and ABC on any given Sunday afternoon.
Heck, the direct-to-video Goofy Movie sequel was entirely centered around the X Games and action sports. They were everywhere, but it doesn’t quite feel that way any longer for those of us who grew up with action sports as a regular part of our sports diet. Did they go anywhere, or did we just pass the action sports league by?
As the competition celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, X Games CEO Jeremy Bloom affirms that the action sports league is still incredibly popular with young audiences. Perhaps it’s the older folks who have nostalgia for it that may have fallen off the wagon and have so much to catch up on as to where the new generation of action sports athletes have take these beloved competitions.
Bloom is a two-time Olympic skier, 10-time World Cup gold medalist and one of the best in the sport’s history. He’s also a former football wide receiver, having played at Colorado in college and spent brief NFL stops with the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers in the 2000s.
Now, Bloom works to guide the X Games into the future. In fact, the league just landed Monster Energy as a founding partner. For the Win spoke to Bloom about how to make the X Games relevant for nostalgic audiences, how to build new stars for action sports and how skateboarding culture intertwines with it all.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Action sports used to be a big part of the culture, but it seems like the popularity has waned a bit in recent years. What is your approach to reintegrating action sports to being more part of the modern lexicon?
It’s a fair point and something we think a lot about. And I think it’s due to a combination of things. Number one: Our brand reaches a very young audience. So you’re talking Gen Zs and early millennials are the core group of who engages with our brand. Some of us have sort of aged out and because we age out, it feels like the influence is perhaps less.
So, there’s a little bit of that. And then there’s also viewing behaviors have changed a lot, certainly since the 2000s. There’s streaming now, there’s TikTok now, there’s Snapchat, there’s on-demand content sort of everywhere. And so part of our strategy is purpose building this property for that time and those trends. So, making sure our content lives where our consumers want to consume it, not making them find us. Going back to the first point, we still have a huge global audience of young people.
I’ll put that into perspective. More young people watched us on TV at the Salt Lake City X Games in 2025 than the F1 race in Monaco. More young people watched us than the men’s semifinal match at Wimbledon. I get it, part of the sort of thesis is… especially at certain ages, we pay attention to other things, but even huge musical artists like Machine Gun Kelly reached out to us last year to play for free because he wanted to be in front of this audience.
And so we still have, I think, a really strong hold on, and I think our sports brand attracts a young audience like no other sports brand, but can we get better? Can we get bigger? That’s part of the strategy as we broaden our audience and build beyond where we are today. To the second point, once upon a time, ESPN thought of this as a traditional sports property. It was like, just put it on TV, on ESPN and ABC and everyone’s going to come. That’s just not our world anymore. We intentionally had a strategy going into Salt Lake. We wanted the most powerful moments, not just on ESPN and ABC, but almost in real time, spread across all the social platforms that you can possibly think of.
When we look back at minute-by-minute ratings of that Salt Lake City X Games, we can show signs of growth — when Ryan Williams landed the first ever triple backflip on a BMX bike, [it was posted to] TikTok, Snapchat in real time and that drove audience to ESPN and ABC. It’s one of the reasons why we grew millennials by 80%. We grew Gen Zs 328% year over year, and we grew total audience on TV by double digits. So, yeah, there’s a lot of things that I think we can do that we are focused on to bring this back to the casual sports fan, bring this back to a wider demo than just young people. But make no mistake about it as it relates to young people: X Games still influences in a significant way youth culture because of the music, because of skateboarding, because of BMX, because of snowboarding and skiing.
The X Games celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, at a time where you’re trying to bring new audiences in while also honoring the nostalgia of the league. How do you balance nostalgia with innovation?
It is something that we talk about all the time because, on one side, you want to bring that nostalgia back for guys like us to be like, “Oh my God, remember when [Travis] Pastrana did that double backflip? And, remember when Tony Hawk did that 900, remember when Sean White scored the perfect 100?”
But, at the same time, you’ve got to balance that. We have to create the next Sean White. We have to create the next Pastrana. We can’t continue to rest on the brand laurels of folks that competed in some cases almost three decades ago. And so, one thing that we did is we launched the first ever alumni program at X Games.
We’re calling it the Legends program. We want all the former athletes to feel like they’re always welcome inside our family. And so we brought back all the legends to Salt Lake. Everyone from Tony Hawk to Bob Burnquist to Travis Pastrana, and we got those folks promoting those games on TV. Pat McAfee did a big piece on Pastrana before we got the Deegans, Brian and Haiden Deegan, huge in the moto sports world, on SportsCenter.
We brought SportsCenter back in. But I think beyond building the nostalgia, we’re focused on telling the stories of the current athletes who… are definitely not as well known as some of those other huge stars, but are just as good and innovative. In fact, we have a kid from Japan, his name’s Emmy. He’s 10 years old and he throws three back-to-back nine hundreds on a vert ramp. He’s 10, and he won a bronze medal at the Salt Lake. He’s the youngest ever to win a medal in Salt Lake. We have these incredible prodigies, we have these incredible stories. We have to get back to storytelling, which we’re focused on through a multiple sort of strategy. But, to your point, we have to tell these stories; we have to build the brands and the next champions.
Skateboarding culture is one of your biggest entry points for an audience. What’s the best way to continue to bring that audience into the fold?
Skateboarding is really interesting because you can sort of bifurcate the sport into two very distinct and different parts. You have the athletes and the fans who don’t love competition, right? They love going into a city and finding cool and interesting rails and — sort of really guerilla style — real authentic content. Then you have the side that cares about the competition side of skateboarding. And, as you know, skateboarding is now part of the Olympics. In fact, X Games is the reason skateboarding is in the Olympics. It’s the reason BMX is in the Olympics. By the way, it’s the reason skiing halfpipe is in the Olympics as well.
I think we really are the competition side of that coin. So, we’re not going to please everybody because some skateboarders, especially the older demo, there is a subset that doesn’t really think judges are cool and doesn’t really think corporate America is that interesting and doesn’t really care about that. We’re really focused on continuing to carve out this niche of: We are the Super Bowl for action sports. Most people don’t understand this or fully grasp it. It is at least four times harder to get an X Games invite than it is to make an Olympic team.
That’s just math, right? Because we only take eight athletes per sport. The Olympics takes 30 to 40 in some cases. In my case, there’s 55 skiers taken in freestyle moguls. And so, every one of our athletes knows where they were and what they were doing when they first got an invite to X Games. So, that’s our lane. We know that. We’re going to continue to double down there.
The audience that appreciates the Olympics and competition, we want to give them more things to love about us, better storytelling, lifting the athletes up like Arisa Trew, who is the absolute future of skateboarding. She’s 15; she’s won more X Games gold medals than any woman in history at 15. There’s Gui Khury, who’s dominating the vert skateboarding competition. He’s 16 or 17 from Brazil, and they’re just prodigies. That’s our lane. We know it, and we’re really trying to double down there and focus on it. But to your point, you’re right — skateboarding’s always been at the tip of the spear of youth culture and such an important aspect of everything that X Games is.
How do you build action sports stars in this day and age?
We have to do more storytelling beyond our audience. We had a big audience in Salt Lake. We thought we’d sell 25,000 tickets; we sold 40,000. We thought we’d get [certain] TV ratings. We tripled that in some cases, but we have to get to other audiences who aren’t going to come to our events. We are talking to a big movie studio right now about doing an X Games movie, a big theater release in ’26 or ’27. We have an original show concept, a competition show that’s different than X Games, where X Games athletes move into a house, they get on teams. You have all the drama.
I think we just need to get our athletes and our content in different sort of audiences in different circles to broaden our reach because we believe we have some of the most compelling personalities in the world. These athletes, they’re very opinionated, and they’re not shy to share their perspective. They’re not shy to argue and build, like all the things that the reality TV space loves, our athletes have. And they just happen to be the world’s best athletes in their sports. It’s widening sort of our net of appeal then beyond just our competition.
This article originally appeared on For The Win: X Games’ Jeremy Bloom talks future of action sports competition