Salomon is getting huge. The company is chasing $3 billion in annual revenue, and winter sports now account for only a relatively small part of the overall business. There are plenty of interesting corporate stories buried in that number, but most snowboarders probably don’t care how many shoes Salomon sells in New York, Paris or Tokyo. We care about something much simpler: is Salomon still going to make good snowboard stuff?

For snowboarders, that’s really the only part of this story that matters. Salomon has been around snowboarding long enough that it’s easy to take the brand for granted. Its boards, boots and bindings have been sitting on shop walls for decades. The Assassin has become one of those models almost everybody recognizes. The HPS line has given the company room to play with more directional shapes and specific riding ideas, and Salomon has managed to keep a complete snowboard program alive while plenty of larger sporting-goods companies have treated snowboarding like a seasonal category they can turn up or down depending on the year.

So the fact that snowboarding is now a smaller piece of the larger Salomon machine isn’t automatically a problem. It only becomes a problem if the snowboard side starts feeling like one.

The current Salomon Assassin is probably the easiest place to see why Salomon still matters. It’s technically an all-mountain freestyle board, but that label barely explains how people actually use boards like this anymore. The point is that you can leave the lift, hit a side hit, carve a groomer, duck into the trees, take a couple park laps, find some soft snow and not spend the entire day wishing you had brought something else. That’s increasingly what good snowboard design looks like. Not a board that supposedly does everything equally well, because those claims are usually bullshit, but a board with an actual personality that still gives you enough range to follow whatever looks fun.

Salomon has understood that for a long time. The Assassin isn’t interesting because it occupies a clever segment on a merchandising chart. It’s interesting because it fits the way snowboarders actually move around a resort. The snowboard industry spent years slicing riders into park riders, freeriders, all-mountain riders, powder riders and whatever other category helped organize a shop wall. Experienced snowboarders have always been messier than that. You ride snowboarding. The terrain decides the rest.

Where Salomon gets more interesting is when it stops trying to make something for everybody. The HPS program has historically given the brand room to explore more specific shapes, rider ideas and terrain preferences. Boards like the Sickstick helped normalize the idea that a directional snowboard could still be playful instead of becoming some stiff missile reserved for AK footage and perfect heelside turns.

That’s exactly the kind of product program a huge company could easily decide isn’t worth the trouble, and that’s why it matters. Snowboarding needs brands with enough scale to make weird things. Not fake-weird graphics wrapped around the same generic shape, but actual weird things: different tapers, different lengths, different sidecuts, boards designed because somebody wanted a particular feeling rather than because a product manager found a hole in a spreadsheet. Big brands can afford to do that. The question is whether they still want to.

If Salomon’s snowboard business eventually becomes a couple high-volume models designed to offend nobody, then nobody in snowboarding is going to care how successful the rest of Salomon becomes. If the company keeps using some of that size to make HPS boards, experiment with materials, support riders and occasionally put something on a shop wall that makes you stop and ask what the hell it is, that’s different. That’s useful.

Snowboarding also doesn’t need Salomon to pretend it’s small. There’s a predictable reaction whenever a snowboard brand gets big where people start wishing it were still some tiny operation running out of a garage. That’s mostly nostalgia. Salomon has resources smaller brands don’t have. It can develop boards, boots and bindings together. It can invest in tooling, materials and testing. It can distribute product around the world and support riders at a level most snowboard companies could never afford.

Good. Use it.

The problem isn’t being big. The problem is when size starts smoothing off everything that made the product interesting in the first place. Snowboarders don’t need Salomon to look underground. We need it to keep listening to snowboarders. There is a huge difference between the two.

The boots and bindings matter here too. Salomon remains one of the companies capable of building the entire snowboard interface instead of just the plank. Boards get the graphics and most of the attention, but boots and bindings determine a huge amount of how a snowboard actually feels. A company that develops across all three categories has the ability to think about the ride as a system rather than three unrelated products sitting beside one another on a website.

That becomes more important as snowboarding gets increasingly distracted by convenience. Fast-entry bindings keep expanding. BOA continues replacing traditional lacing combinations. Every brand wants equipment to be easier, lighter and more accessible. None of that is inherently bad, but ease can’t become the whole objective. Experienced snowboarders will tolerate inconvenience if the product rides better. What they won’t tolerate for long is equipment designed by people who appear to have forgotten that. Salomon has enough history in snowboarding to know the difference. It needs to keep showing it.

There’s another danger when a company becomes much larger than the sport that helped build its credibility: the original culture can slowly turn into marketing material. Old photos, old riders, old graphics, archive drops, heritage language. Then you look at the current product and wonder where any of that attitude went.

Snowboarding already has enough brands selling nostalgia. Salomon’s history only matters if the current snowboard program still feels alive. That means putting good riders on boards, making snowboard films and edits worth watching, building products that reflect what those riders actually want, and supporting the people and places where snowboarding happens instead of simply using mountain imagery to make a larger company feel authentic.

Nobody needs another corporate campaign telling us how important snowboarding is. Make something good and we’ll figure it out ourselves.

That’s ultimately why the $3 billion number isn’t really the story, at least not for snowboarders. The story is what Salomon does with the snowboard side while the company around it becomes dramatically larger. Does the Assassin continue evolving because riders keep pushing it? Does HPS remain a legitimate playground for strange ideas? Do Salomon boots and bindings continue competing with the best snowboard-specific products in the market? Does the team still matter? Do the people running the snowboard program have enough freedom to occasionally make something that a broader corporate organization might not immediately understand?

Those are the questions worth asking.

Snowboarding doesn’t need Salomon to stay small. It needs Salomon to stay interested. Salomon can sell all the shoes it wants. Just keep making snowboards we’d actually want to ride.

Fifty years ago, Jake Burton Carpenter was making boards in Vermont and trying to convince people that standing sideways on snow wasn’t a fad. Today, Burton Snowboards is a global company with its own retail stores, international distribution, an enormous product catalog and a name that reaches far beyond snowboarding. Getting from there to here is one of the great stories in action sports, but Burton has now reached the point where the story gets more complicated.

On September 8, the company named Denny Bruce its new CEO, effective September 21. Bruce actually worked for Burton from 2003 to 2005 before moving through leadership roles at Vans, Skullcandy, Dickies and Gozney. Burton owner Donna Carpenter, who had served as interim CEO since June, remains chairman. Two days later, Burton officially kicked off its 50th anniversary with the first of five product drops covering different eras of its history.

Those announcements happening in the same week feels appropriate. One is about Burton’s past. The other is about its future. And the next part may actually be harder.

I Saw Burton From the Inside

I have a little more history with this story than the average observer. I was the Softgoods Design Director at Burton Snowboards from 1999 through 2003, during what I still consider one of the golden ages of snowboarding.

That was a period when the culture, product, athletes, magazines, videos and brands all seemed to be feeding off one another at the same time. Snowboarding was growing fast, but it had not yet been completely cleaned up and packaged for everybody. I was part of the team that launched Analog, and I was there as Burton’s Bio-Lite softgoods program evolved into Ronin and Radar.

What stands out looking back isn’t simply the products. It’s that Burton was willing to experiment. There was room for different identities inside the company, different aesthetics, different riders and different ideas about where snowboarding was going. That willingness to take risks is part of why Burton mattered, and it’s also why the question surrounding its next chapter is more interesting than simply who sits in the CEO’s office.

Burton Already Won

There was a time when Burton’s biggest challenge was convincing ski areas to let snowboarders ride. Think about how absurd that sounds now (with the exception of three lame-ass resorts).

Jake Burton Carpenter founded the company in 1977, when snowboarding barely qualified as an industry. Burton went on to help develop the equipment, support riders and push resorts to accept a sport that many of them initially wanted nothing to do with. Snowboarding won that fight. Burton won too.

Now comes a problem nobody worries about while they’re fighting the establishment: What happens when you become the establishment?

Burton isn’t the disruptive little snowboard company anymore. It’s the biggest snowboard company. That is an extraordinary achievement, but it’s also where things get dangerous.

The New CEO’s Résumé Tells You Something

Bruce isn’t an obvious caretaker appointment. His career since leaving Burton is almost a case study in the exact problem Burton now needs to solve. He has worked with companies that started with strong subcultural or utilitarian identities and then expanded far beyond their original audiences. More recently, he helped turn Gozney from a primarily European DTC business into a broader global omnichannel company.

Burton itself emphasized Bruce’s experience across wholesale, DTC and international distribution. More revealingly, the company said his mandate includes building the commercial architecture for Burton’s next phase of growth while protecting its relationship with core riders.

That’s the entire challenge in one sentence. Burton doesn’t need somebody to figure out how to make snowboards. It needs somebody to figure out how a culturally important snowboard company continues growing as a global consumer business without eventually becoming just another global consumer business.

Those aren’t the same thing.

Every Core Brand Eventually Faces This

The pattern is familiar in action sports. The core gives a brand credibility. Credibility attracts a larger audience. The larger audience creates growth. And eventually someone asks the obvious question: How much bigger can this get?

That’s when things can go sideways.

Snowboarding has watched brands expand far beyond the communities that originally gave them relevance. Sometimes they become enormous businesses. Sometimes the logo survives while everything interesting about the brand disappears. Burton has avoided that fate better than most.

One reason is structural. It remains privately held and owned by Donna Carpenter rather than answering to public shareholders. But private ownership doesn’t make the tension disappear. Burton still needs new customers. It still needs existing snowboarders to buy new equipment. It has to balance its own stores and website with independent snowboard retailers. It has to compete with both specialist snowboard companies and enormous outdoor brands.

And it somehow needs to remain relevant to a 20-year-old snowboarder without making the 45-year-old who’s been riding Burton boards since the ‘90s feel like the company no longer understands them.

That’s not easy.

The Archive Is Incredibly Valuable

Burton’s anniversary campaign demonstrates one advantage that can’t simply be purchased: history.

The first anniversary release goes all the way back to 1977 through 1987, with Burton revisiting pieces of its early product history while updating them for today. Then the company will move through four more eras of snowboarding.

That’s smart. There are riders today who remember when snowboarders weren’t welcome at many resorts. There are riders who grew up watching Craig Kelly. There are people whose first serious snowboard was a Burton Air, Custom or Balance. And there are kids riding Burton today whose parents weren’t alive when Jake started the company.

Very few snowboard brands can reach all of those people through their own history.

But history can also become a trap. The easiest way for a heritage company to announce that its best years are behind it is to spend all its time telling everyone how great things used to be. Burton’s archive matters only if it becomes a foundation for what comes next rather than a museum of what came before.

The Product Still Has to Be Weird

One encouraging thing about Burton is that despite its size, parts of the snowboard line remain decidedly specialized. Look at the Family Tree collection. There are directional boards, powder shapes, aggressive camber profiles and products designed for riders with very specific ideas about how they want to move through terrain.

That isn’t product designed to maximize the addressable market.

Good.

Because snowboarding doesn’t need Burton to optimize every snowboard for everybody. It needs the biggest company in snowboarding to retain enough confidence to make products that won’t necessarily make sense to everyone. The strange boards. The aggressive boards. The boards built because one great snowboarder wanted something different.

That matters.

I saw the same mentality on the softgoods side during my years there. Analog wasn’t created because Burton needed another generic apparel label. Ronin and Radar weren’t about making everything look the same. The interesting work happened when the company was willing to create distinct identities inside the larger Burton universe.

That kind of creative tension is worth protecting.

Snowboarding Doesn’t Need Another Lifestyle Brand

This is where Burton’s next chapter becomes important beyond Burton. The snowboard industry doesn’t particularly need the company to become a bigger lifestyle brand. There are plenty of lifestyle brands.

It needs Burton to remain a snowboard company that happens to be big.

There’s a difference.

That means continuing to invest in equipment, supporting snowboarders who may never become household names, backing shops and events, helping people get into snowboarding, developing products that won’t necessarily appeal to millions of consumers, and occasionally doing things that make absolutely no sense to somebody looking at snowboarding exclusively through a spreadsheet.

Some irrationality is healthy.

Snowboarding itself was irrational. Nobody needed to invent a sideways way to slide down a mountain. People did it because it was fun.

Fifty Years Is Worth Celebrating

Core snowboarders can be cynical about big brands. Sometimes that cynicism is deserved. But Burton reaching 50 years is objectively remarkable.

Snowboard companies disappear constantly. They run out of money. Founders leave. They get acquired. Distribution collapses. Product slips. Trends change. Retailers move on.

Burton survived snowboarding’s explosive growth. It survived consolidation. It survived the rise of online retail and DTC. It survived the death of its founder. And it’s still privately owned.

That’s worth recognizing.

For me, there’s another layer to it. I was fortunate enough to spend four years inside Burton while snowboarding was exploding culturally. I watched the company launch ideas, kill ideas, reinvent categories and try things that weren’t guaranteed to work.

That’s the Burton worth remembering.

Not because everything from that era needs to be recreated. It doesn’t. But because the willingness to experiment was part of what made the company important in the first place.

Burton spent its first 50 years helping snowboarding go from something resorts wouldn’t allow to a global sport and culture. Its next challenge may be almost the opposite: Can the company keep snowboarding interesting now that snowboarding is established?

Denny Bruce takes over a business with more resources, recognition, history and reach than Jake Burton Carpenter could possibly have imagined.

That’s the opportunity.

It’s also the risk.

Because growing Burton is easy to understand.

Growing Burton without becoming less Burton is the hard part.

For an industry that’s supposedly mature, crowded and increasingly difficult to break into, snowboarding suddenly has some new blood.

Armada is officially entering snowboarding.

And this week, a new independent company called Subjekt Snowboards is launching its first collection.

On paper, these two launches have almost nothing in common.

Armada comes into snowboarding with decades of brand recognition in freeskiing, established distribution, retailer relationships, professional athletes and the infrastructure to launch a complete snowboard category immediately.

Subjekt is taking almost the opposite route: six snowboard models, direct-to-consumer distribution and a deliberately specific idea about the rider it wants to reach.

One is entering with scale.

The other is entering with focus.

What’s interesting is that both apparently looked at the snowboard market in 2026 and came to the same conclusion:

There’s still room for something new.

Armada Isn’t Testing the Water

Armada’s move into snowboarding has been coming for a while, but the size of the company’s first complete line makes its intentions pretty obvious.

The 2026/27 Armada snowboard collection consists of nine boards, spanning Resort Freestyle, Park & Street and Natural Freeride. See the Armada 2026/27 snowboard collection

That’s not a three-board experiment designed to figure out whether snowboarders will accept a ski company in their space.

It’s a snowboard program.

And Armada’s categories are worth paying attention to.

Not just park.

Not simply all-mountain.

Not simply freeride.

Resort Freestyle.

That may be the most interesting phrase in the whole launch.

The centerpiece is Danimals’ Beatnik, a directional board Armada describes as being built for all-mountain freestyle riding: side hits, rollers, berms and top-to-bottom laps rather than being confined to the park.

Then there’s Stefi Luxton’s Do-Si-Do, a women’s directional twin built around a similarly broad interpretation of freestyle.

At the other end of the line is the Sicko, a tapered directional snowboard aimed at natural terrain and deeper snow.

The company isn’t abandoning parks or street riding—the lineup includes plenty of that—but it clearly isn’t defining freestyle exclusively by what happens between park fences either.

Armada describes Resort Freestyle as taking the freestyle mentality outside the park and onto side hits, natural quarters and rollers around the mountain.

That’s a pretty good description of how an enormous number of snowboarders actually ride.

Then There’s Subjekt

At almost the opposite end of the business spectrum is Subjekt Snowboards.

Instead of nine boards and an existing international distribution machine, Subjekt enters with six models covering freestyle, all-mountain/freeride and powder.

The launch lineup consists of the Touchy, Test, Matter, Ridicule, Drop and Line, with the Matter offered in both men’s and women’s versions. Prices currently run from $535 to $575.

The individual boards are here:

Touchy — true-twin camber park and freestyle.

Test — asymmetrical twin camber.

Men’s Matter — directional all-mountain.

Women’s Matter — the women’s all-mountain version.

Ridicule — all-mountain/freeride.

Drop — powder-focused directional riding.

Line — another directional powder platform.

You can also browse them by category: Park & Freestyle, All-Mountain & Freeride and Powder.

The most revealing board in the collection might be the Matter.

Subjekt describes it with a simple premise: “The Whole Mountain Is the Point.”

It’s a directional camber-with-early-rise board designed around groomers, natural terrain, powder and aggressive turning rather than one narrowly defined category of riding.

That idea tells you more about the brand than a page full of construction buzzwords probably could.

Its tagline does too:

“snowboards for grown-ass riders”

That’s not really about putting an age restriction on snowboarding.

It’s about what riding often turns into after you’ve been doing it for a while.

You may still ride the park.

You may still spin.

You may still launch every side hit you can find.

But somewhere along the way, the objective changes.

Fast groomers. Trees. Bowls. Banks. Berms. Powder stashes. Natural transitions. Side hits. Good turns.

Eventually, the whole mountain becomes the terrain park.

Two Completely Different Ways Into the Business

This is where the comparison gets more interesting than simply looking at the boards.

Armada represents one way of entering today’s snowboard market.

It already has brand recognition.

Athletes.

Retailers.

Marketing infrastructure.

International distribution.

And, maybe most importantly, credibility within winter-sports culture before selling its first full snowboard collection.

Subjekt represents another route entirely.

Build a smaller collection.

Sell directly to the rider.

Own the customer relationship.

Avoid trying to satisfy every possible snowboard consumer.

And build the company around a very specific point of view.

That’s a much harder way to acquire customers.

But it also has an advantage.

A traditional wholesale brand ultimately needs enough breadth to occupy meaningful retail space.

A direct-to-consumer brand can afford to be narrower.

The internet rewards specificity.

Subjekt doesn’t have to become everything to everybody.

It needs the right snowboarder to read “snowboards for grown-ass riders” and immediately understand what it’s talking about.

The Weird Part Is How Similar the Riding Looks

Strip away the massive difference in company size and the two launches start to overlap in an interesting place.

Look at Armada’s language around the Beatnik:

Side hits.

Rollers.

Berms.

Top-to-bottom resort laps.

Powder.

Freestyle riding around the mountain.

Now look at what Subjekt is building around:

Groomers.

Trees.

Natural terrain.

Powder.

Carving.

Side hits.

The whole mountain.

These aren’t identical brands.

They’re not chasing exactly the same snowboarder.

But there’s clearly a shared idea underneath both collections:

Snowboarding doesn’t have to happen inside a designated piece of terrain.

That sounds obvious.

Maybe it should.

But snowboard equipment has spent decades being divided into increasingly specific categories.

Park.

Freestyle.

All-mountain.

Freeride.

Carving.

Powder.

Backcountry.

Those categories are useful when you’re shopping for a snowboard.

They’re considerably less important when you’re standing at the top of one.

Experienced snowboarders tend to ride whatever looks fun.

Maybe That’s the Bigger Story

The interesting thing about Armada and Subjekt arriving at roughly the same moment isn’t simply that there are more snowboard logos in the world.

It’s what they’re betting on.

Armada didn’t develop nine boards because it thinks snowboarding has run out of places to go.

Subjekt didn’t enter one of the most established hardgoods markets in action sports because every snowboarder is already perfectly served.

Both see room.

And both seem to see some of that room outside the old assumption that riders need to fit perfectly into one riding identity.

We’re seeing pieces of that elsewhere in snowboard design too.

Directional twins are everywhere.

Freeride boards are getting more playful.

Freestyle boards are increasingly being sold as tools for riding beyond the park.

Carving is getting attention again.

Powder-inspired shapes have escaped powder days.

And the resort itself increasingly seems to be reclaiming its place as snowboarding’s playground.

Not simply the chairlift that gets you to the park.

Not merely the access point for the backcountry.

The actual mountain.

Maybe snowboarders are getting older.

Maybe designers are getting better at building boards that cross traditional categories.

Maybe people are simply remembering why they started snowboarding in the first place.

Probably some combination of all three.

New Blood Is Good

Neither company gets a pass simply for showing up.

There will be plenty of time to decide how Armada’s complete snowboard line performs once more riders get on it.

There will also be plenty of time to find out whether Subjekt can carve out meaningful space in a market full of brands with decades of history behind them.

The products still have to deliver.

The brands still have to earn credibility.

And snowboarders still have to decide whether any of this deserves their money.

But companies at opposite ends of the industry deciding that snowboarding is worth investing in is a healthy signal.

Armada is entering with nine boards, serious resources and immediate industry visibility.

Subjekt is entering with six models, a DTC business model and an intentionally specific rider in mind.

Two very different bets.

One encouraging conclusion:

Apparently, snowboarding still has room for new ideas.

Snowboarding is supposed to go quiet in summer. The lifts stop, the trade-show chatter fades, and the industry disappears into camps, catalogs and edits until the first storm lights everything back up.

That did not happen in 2026.

Between June and August, freeride became an Olympic discipline, X Games started building regional franchises, Shaun White pushed The Snow League into the Southern Hemisphere, and community-led projects opened real doors for riders outside the usual pipeline. At the same time, North America’s summer snow window got shorter again.

It was not a sleepy offseason. It was a preview of the fight over what snowboarding becomes next.

Snowboarding Became a League Sport

X Games is no longer content to be one big weekend. On September 16, it will hold the first Winter X Games League draft in Los Angeles, splitting 40 athletes among four regional clubs: New York, Park City, Whistler and Golden State. Each club gets ten athletes, five women and five men, with skiing and snowboarding represented across superpipe, big air, slopestyle and knuckle huck.

The general managers are not random suits. Dave Sypniewski, Sharalee “Haze” Hazen, Ryan Stutt and Jonny Moseley know the culture, the athletes and the events. Barrett Christy is advising New York. That matters because the league is trying to manufacture regional identity inside sports that have always been built aroun

The inaugural Winter X Games League will divide athletes among Golden State, Park City, New York and Whistler.

d individual riders.

The pitch is simple: give fans rosters, points, strategy and rivalries to follow across a season instead of asking them to care for one weekend in January. More continuity could mean more attention, better sponsorships and more stable opportunities for riders. The strange omission is streetstyle, the one format that most naturally connects contests to the clips people actually watch.

Shaun White is attacking the same problem from a different direction. The Snow League’s second season begins with a World Challenge at Cardrona, New Zealand, on September 18 and 19. Sixteen snowboarders and freeskiers will represent North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and a Challengers team before the regular season goes to Aspen, Park City and LAAX.

The Cardrona format has one genuinely smart idea: a 720 spin cap in the semifinals, followed by unrestricted riding in the final. That gives style, amplitude and line choice room to matter before the tricks go fully nuclear. A one-hit tiebreaker adds another wrinkle without pretending every run can be reduced to a spreadsheet.

Both leagues are solving the same business problem. Snowboarding has elite athletes and huge moments, but it has never had a dependable season-long story for casual fans. More events, better pay and sustained visibility are good. Forced rivalries and sponsor decks are not culture. If the riding turns into content inventory, the audience will smell it immediately.

Freeride Got Its Olympic Invitation, Along With FIS

The biggest news of the summer was also the most complicated. Freeride skiing and snowboarding were added to the 2030 Winter Olympics in the French Alps. A discipline that spent decades defining itself outside traditional contest structures will now stand on the biggest traditional contest stage in sports.

The upside is obvious. Olympic money can expand national programs, create opportunities for riders who cannot bankroll a backcountry career, and show a massive audience the kind of snowboarding many of us actually care about most. The risk is just as obvious. FIS acquired the Freeride World Tour in late 2022, so the existing tour is the likely qualification pipeline. Natural Selection remains outside that system, even though it features many of the riders and venues that define modern freeriding.

Sage Kotsenburg was right to be skeptical about the “FIS-ification” of freeride. A sport built on reading uncontrolled terrain is about to be filtered through the same institution snowboarders already criticize for judging, qualification and format decisions. The best outcome is real investment without sanding off the discipline’s instincts. The worst is an Olympic field selected for navigating a bureaucracy instead of navigating a mountain.

Qualification details will tell us which version we are getting. For now, the validation and the danger are both real.

The Pipeline Kept Getting Wider

Not every important development came with a league office or an Olympic logo. The Uninvited Boarding Pass, created with She’ll Be Right and Burton, is bringing a qualifier to Cardrona on September 26 for women, girls and non-binary riders who have never competed in an Uninvited event. The winner earns a place at the 2027 Utah Invitational and NZ$4,000 toward travel.

That is what legitimate development looks like. Find talent where it lives, create a visible next step, and help remove the travel bill that usually keeps the same people outside the gate.

SEEN’s “Tumble 4 Ya” worked from the other end. The crowdsourced queer snowboard video mixed professionals, beginners and everyone between them. No points. No draft. No attempt to make every rider fit the same level or aesthetic. Just a community making itself visible on its own terms.

That contrast was one of the healthiest things about the summer. Snowboarding can build bigger stages without making every stage look the same. It needs the league and the local qualifier, the Olympic broadcast and the rough community edit.

Summer Snow Kept Shrinking

While promoters talked about year-round schedules, the physical window for summer snowboarding in North America kept contracting. Mammoth closed for the season on June 7. At Timberline, the target was July 19, nearly a month earlier than the previous summer. As we wrote in June, low snow pushed camps to shorten sessions, change plans and look elsewhere.

Slush took the longer view in its report on Mount Hood. Palmer has not been classified as a glacier since the 1980s. Glisan was formally declared extinct in 2023. Every glacier on Hood is receding, and the Oregon Glaciers Institute says roughly half of the named glaciers in the Oregon Cascades have already disappeared or are expected to disappear by 2050.

Summer riding did not disappear. Woodward Copper kept the park moving. Crews dropped edits from Hintertux, Chile and New Zealand. Big Snow continued to prove that an indoor hill in New Jersey can become a real scene when riders treat it like one. Snowboarders will always find a patch and make something happen.

Still, the irony is impossible to miss. Snowboarding is building year-round media products while losing part of the year it has historically used to build riders. Summer camps are not a luxury. They are where kids get repetitions, coaches develop athletes, crews form and the next generation starts to believe it belongs here. Lose that engine and the effects will show up everywhere.

The Rest of the Industry Kept Moving

The summer’s smaller stories all pointed toward an industry trying to professionalize without giving up ownership of its culture. Danny Kass became head coach of the U.S. big air and slopestyle snowboard team, putting one of the most influential riders of his generation inside the national-team structure. That is a long way from the Grenade days, but it also means the people who shaped modern snowboarding are increasingly the ones shaping its institutions.

Riders also kept turning influence into ownership. Zeb Powell built “Zeb’s Closet” with Burton, while Su Yiming launched his own streetwear label, Süugar. Neither move is just another signature colorway. Both put a rider’s taste, name and audience closer to the center of the business.

Burton continued testing seaweed-based TPSea Flex sleeves as a replacement for single-use plastic packaging. Meanwhile, the independent-resort economy showed both sides of the current reality. Utah’s Cherry Peak hit the market for $22.5 million, while the Freedom Pass grew to 21 independent ski areas, giving participating passholders three days at every member mountain. One story says how hard it is to keep a small hill alive. The other shows that cooperation may be the only way many of them compete with the mega-passes.

Even Hollywood noticed. HBO Max picked up “Lifties,” an A24-backed comedy from Jimmy Tatro and Dan Lagana about four mountain-town friends dealing with an acquisition by an “Ikon-like” company. That could be painful. It could also be the first mainstream show in a while that understands resort consolidation is not background scenery. It is the plot.

The Last Word

The summer did not point in one direction. Snowboarding got more professional while its culture stayed decentralized. Freeride gained an Olympic platform while the qualification fight remained unresolved. Athletes built brands and leagues while the glaciers under summer camps kept pulling back.

Growth is not the enemy. Blandness is.

The next questions are simple. Will the new leagues pay riders fairly and let them shape the formats? Will Olympic freeride include the athletes who actually define freeriding? Can summer camps survive a shorter and less reliable season? Can mainstream exposure make snowboarding bigger without sanding off everything weird, local and difficult to package about it?

Snowboarding did not take the summer off. It spent the summer deciding what it wants to become.

Mt. Hood’s clock is ticking faster than usual this year, and if summer turns are on your radar, read the fine print before you commit to the drive up.

Timberline is the only lift-served summer snow in North America, full stop. The Palmer Snowfield runs on natural snow alone, no guns, no backup plan, just whatever the winter banked up high on the south side. This past season banked less than usual. The mountain came into spring sitting around 66 inches at 6,000 feet, off a season total near 297 inches against an average closer to 400. That math doesn’t lie. The current target for last chair is July 19, weeks ahead of the August shutdowns we used to count on, and a real step in from last year’s August 17 close.

So the move is simple. Go now. June still has Mile Canyon Park spinning down low with pipe, jumps, and rails before the whole operation migrates up to Palmer for the back half. The camps are running their usual circus, High Cascade and Windells loading the lanes with groms and pros alike, and the public always gets a ribbon to lap. Just don’t dawdle. Once that snowfield thins out it goes quick, and there’s no making more.

If your summer itch needs a longer scratch, point your compass south. The whole bottom half of the planet is just clocking in for winter.

Australia kicked off the first weekend of June with Perisher, Thredbo, Buller, Falls Creek, and Hotham all turning lifts on early storm snow and a lot of guns. Manage expectations down there this year. The seasonal read leans below average with an El Niño threat hanging around, so it’s more about the scene than the snowfall.

New Zealand is the better all-around bet for a trip. Coronet Peak jumped early in late May, with the Remarkables, Cardrona, and Mt. Hutt filling in through mid-June. The forecast points to a soft opening and then colder southwest flow through the guts of the season, which is exactly when you want to be there anyway.

Chile is where I’d put my own money. The high central Andes, Valle Nevado, La Parva, El Colorado up top, and the steep cathedral that is Portillo, all sit in the zone the El Niño signal favors most this year. Valle and La Parva are tied tighter together now under one ticket, so you can lap thousands of acres without sorting out logistics. Argentina’s heavy hitters, Catedral above Bariloche and Las Leñas in Mendoza, open later toward the end of June into July, and Las Leñas on a good cycle is a beast worth the gamble.

The Last Word

Hood is your quick fix and it’s fading fast, so treat July like a deadline. The Andes are your real summer mission, and this looks like a year to chase the high terrain in Chile. Either way, the snow doesn’t wait for anybody. Pack the sunscreen, book the ticket, and go get a few more before the lifts stop spinning down south too.

It’s over. Or close enough. A handful of resorts are still spinning lifts on a prayer and a north-facing pitch, but for most of us the season ended a few weeks ago, whether we were ready or not.

That post-season feeling is its own thing. Part relief, part grief, part already-thinking-about-next-year. If you’re in that headspace right now, here’s how to close out the season like someone who’s done this a few times.

1. Tune and store your board the right way. Don’t lean it against the garage wall and walk away. A proper end-of-season hot wax seals the base and keeps it from oxidizing over a Utah summer. A lot of shops run storage tune specials right now when they’re not slammed. Get it done while it’s still on your mind.

2. Assess your gear honestly. That binding that was “probably fine” all season. The boot liner that’s been packed out since January. Now is the time to be real with yourself. Buying in the offseason means actual selection, not whatever’s left on the rack in November when everyone else woke up at the same time.

3. Lock in next year’s pass before prices go up. Ikon and Epic early renewal windows are either open or opening soon. This is the lowest price you will pay, full stop. The people complaining about pass prices in October are the people who didn’t buy in April.

4. Book early-season trips now. If you’re the type to chase turns in November, accommodations near Mammoth, Keystone, or Loveland are bookable now at prices that won’t exist come fall. And if you want to go full lifer about it, both Chile and New Zealand open in June. Valle Nevado and Cardrona are calling.

5. Write down what actually mattered this season. Best days. Worst gear decisions. Runs you want to hit again. It sounds unnecessary now but it’s genuinely useful when you’re staring at gear pages in August trying to remember why you were so done with your setup. Future you will appreciate the two minutes it takes.

The offseason is already underway. Might as well make it count.

Three weeks in April, and the snowboard industry quietly went sideways.

Not sideways like a laid-out heel-side carve. More like a wobble you don’t notice until you’re already going down. In the span of a few weeks, the world’s largest snowboard company lost its CEO, the last major board factory in America changed hands again, and a beloved brand’s parent company continued its slow-motion identity crisis in plain sight. If you only read about snowboarding to find out what gear to buy next season, you might have missed all of it. You shouldn’t have.

Here’s the rundown.

John Lacy Is Out at Burton

After nearly 29 years with the company, Burton CEO John Lacy is leaving. He started in 1997 answering phones in rider services, worked his way through product development and global sales, became president in 2015, and stepped into the solo CEO role in February 2020, just months after Jake Burton Carpenter died. He ran the company through a pandemic, a gear-buying boom, the inevitable hangover that followed, and everything in between. Now Donna Carpenter, widow of Burton’s founder and chairman of the board, is stepping back in as interim CEO while the company searches for a permanent replacement.

The official word from Burlington is that this is a mutual decision, a planned leadership transition, not a response to business performance. And maybe that’s true. Burton is a private company, so the actual financials stay close to the vest. What’s publicly known is that 2023 sales were expected to top $352 million and the brand controls an estimated half the market share in snowboarding worldwide. That’s not a company in freefall.

But context matters. Lacy took over under the shadow of Jake’s death, navigated one of the most disruptive stretches in the outdoor industry’s recent history, and now exits without a named successor. The search is on. Donna holds the wheel in the meantime, which is not nothing. She’s been deeply embedded in this company for decades, and Burlington knows her. Still, a CEO transition at the world’s dominant snowboard brand is not a small thing, and the question of who comes next and from where will say a lot about where Burton thinks it’s going.

Mervin Gets a New Owner. Again.

On April 10th, Mervin Manufacturing, the Sequim, Washington maker of Lib Tech, GNU, and Bent Metal, announced it had been acquired by Spring Capital Group, a private investment firm based in Eugene, Oregon. Altamont Capital, which bought Mervin out of the wreckage of Quiksilver back in 2013, has exited.

For those keeping score, this is ownership change number three since Mervin’s founders Mike Olson and Pete Saari built the place. Quiksilver, then Altamont, now Spring Capital.

The new owners make a point of not being traditional private equity. Spring Capital describes itself as “a private investment group started by two brothers and a partner who are still in the business,” Shop Eat Surf Outdoor and their pitch is “patient capital.” Their portfolio includes BlackStrap, UBCO Electric Bikes, New Seasons Market, and Elmer’s Restaurants, which is an eclectic mix, but also suggests they’re not in the habit of flipping assets for a quick return. Mervin CEO Anthony DeRocco stays in place, the existing leadership team stays in place, and the factory in Sequim, still the longest-running snowboard factory in America and one of the last making boards on domestic soil, stays in Sequim.

The “business as usual” line is the same one Mervin put out when Altamont bought them in 2013. And to be fair, that turned out to be mostly true. The brands kept their identities. The factory kept running. But the fact that Mike Olson and Pete Saari’s company is on its third set of private equity owners is its own story. Mervin has always represented something specific to the snowboard world: independent, weird, technically ambitious, made in America. Those things can survive ownership changes. They can also quietly erode under enough of them.

GNU co-founder Pete Saari recently acknowledged in a trade publication that the market felt like it was “still recovering from a post-Covid extended hangover and challenged snow years.” Boardsport SOURCE That’s the environment Mervin just navigated under Altamont. Whether Spring Capital brings the runway the brand needs to come out the other side is genuinely unknown. The optimistic read is that a patient, long-term investor with regional ties is exactly what Mervin needs. The skeptical read is that every private owner of Mervin has said roughly the same things at the press release stage.

The Arbor Situation Is Complicated

This one is the least definitive of the three, but the rumblings are real. Arbor itself, the snowboard brand, is not in obvious distress. New GM Matt Patti came aboard in early 2024, the company has been hiring aggressively across sales, marketing, and product, and the 25/26 line is solid. Patti told trade press that the brand’s financials are “not bad today” while acknowledging there are significant untapped opportunities in DTC and international distribution.

The more interesting story is at the parent company level. Arbor is owned by Kent Outdoors, a Park City, Utah-based platform backed by private equity firm Seawall Capital. And Kent Outdoors has had a busy, unsettled couple of years. They moved their headquarters from Ohio to Utah in late 2023, brought in a new CFO in April 2024, secured a $100 million credit facility from Eclipse Business Capital around the same time, and brought in a new CEO, Randy Hales, shortly after. They also sold off the Kona Bicycles brand following a strategic review.

That’s a lot of change at the top of a company that also happens to own your snowboard brand. A new credit facility and a leadership overhaul can mean a company is getting its house in order for growth, or it can mean the house needed some serious work. Both things can be true at the same time. What’s notable is that while Arbor the brand is pressing forward with genuine investment in people and product, the corporate structure around it is clearly in flux. The relationship is described publicly as Arbor “managed by agreement with the Arbor Collective,” which has always been the somewhat unusual arrangement. How that agreement holds up through parent company transitions is worth watching.

What It All Means

Zoom out and these three stories point to something larger. Snowboarding is not immune to the same forces grinding on every other specialty industry right now. Post-pandemic inventory corrections, rising lift ticket costs suppressing participation, compressed retail margins, and the ongoing pressure of warming winters have made the board business harder than it looked during 2021 when everyone bought a snowboard in a panic. The brands still standing are either big enough to absorb the hits, independent enough to stay nimble, or lucky enough to have the right ownership at the right time.

Burton’s transition is significant because Burton is not just a company. It is the market. Whoever eventually takes the CEO chair there sets a tone for the whole industry. Mervin’s sale is significant because Lib Tech and GNU have always been an ideological counterweight to the corporate end of snowboarding, and every new private equity layer makes that position harder to hold. And Arbor’s situation is a reminder that a brand can be doing everything right at the product level while the financial scaffolding around it quietly shifts.

None of this is necessarily bad news. Business is business, and companies get bought and sold. But snowboarding has always had a particular allergy to the feeling that the people running things don’t actually ride, don’t actually care, and are just here for the exit. Right now, a lot of the people running things are in transition. That’s worth paying attention to.

The Last Word

The best outcome in all three of these scenarios is that the riding stays good. That the boards stay innovative, the brands stay weird in the right ways, and the people who actually built these companies still have a voice in how they’re run. That’s not guaranteed. It rarely is. But it’s worth saying out loud, and it’s worth asking about, because the snowboard industry doesn’t get to be what it is without the culture that built it. That’s not something you can acquire in a term sheet.

If you’ve been paying attention to snowboarding for any stretch of time, you know John Jackson. “John J” has been one of the sport’s most respected names for the better part of two decades, with a film catalog that reads like a greatest hits list: early breakout parts in “Hifi” and “The Empire,” iconic work with Standard Films and Brain Farm, plus “That’s It, That’s All” and “The Art of Flight” cementing his place in the upper tier of snowboarding’s all-time greats. More recently, the Red Bull series “The Book of John J” offered a more personal look at the man behind the riding. He lives in Verdi, Nevada, with his family, and he’s still very much out there chasing it.

So when Gordini announced this week that John J has joined their athlete roster, it makes sense on every level. Vermont-based and independently owned since 1956, Gordini has quietly built a reputation for serious handwear and performance socks without a lot of noise. They’re not the loudest brand in the room, but riders who’ve spent time in their gloves tend to stick with them.

John J currently runs three Gordini pieces, and they’re worth knowing about.

Gordini Polar Glove

The Polar is Gordini’s coldest-day weapon. Built around 700-fill DownTek insulation on the back of hand, Megaloft synthetic in the palm, a goatskin leather grip, and an extended gauntlet cuff with drawcord closure. AquaBloc waterproof/windproof insert keeps things dry when the weather gets nasty. This is a proper big-mountain glove.

MSRP: $142.99 | gordini.com

Gordini Front Line Midi Glove

The Midi is the versatile layer you reach for when you don’t need a full gauntlet but still want real warmth. Primaloft 100g insulation, 4-way stretch softshell, and a Kevlar palm that actually holds up. Works as a standalone on cold-but-manageable days, or layers under a shell mitt when conditions turn. Packable and low-profile.

MSRP: $60.99 | gordini.com

Gordini PYCO Sock

The PYCO is an ultralight, over-the-calf ski sock designed to perform without bulk. For a brand that’s been at the sock game long enough to win an ISPO award for their Winhall construction, the PYCO is a solid pick for riders who want a thin, precision fit inside a stiff boot.

MSRP: $27.99 | gordini.com

The Last Word

Gordini adding John Jackson to their team roster alongside Julian Carr, Delilah Cupp, and Michael “Bird” Shaffer signals something intentional. This isn’t a brand throwing money at a big name for visibility. It’s a brand that makes serious handwear pairing with a rider who takes the mountains seriously. Fits.

Spring contest season just delivered its two most culturally vital events of the year, and the takeaway couldn’t be clearer: the snowboard world doesn’t need a stadium, a massive title sponsor, or a broadcast deal to throw an unforgettable party. It just needs riders who care, mountains that deliver, and a crew willing to show up for each other. From Vermont’s rich heritage roots to Utah’s raw, send-it energy, Homesick at Stratton and the Bomb Hole Cup at Brighton reminded everyone why grassroots events remain the beating heart of snowboarding.

Homesick at Stratton Mountain, Vermont (March 20–22, 2026)

East Street Archives and Stratton Mountain teamed up for the fourth annual Homesick festival, cementing its place as the East Coast’s premier celebration of snowboard culture. Founders Gary Land — legendary photographer — and Barry Dugan built something authentic that riders actually look forward to, rather than something manufactured for clout.

The three-day on-hill program united legends, current pros, up-and-comers, and everyday shredders across every age and ability:

• Friday, March 20 – Planet Zebulon Rail Jam (Lower Suntanner): Hosted by Zeb Powell (Stratton Mountain School alum and one of snowboarding’s most creative forces), this event featured expanded pro men’s and women’s divisions alongside open and grom categories.

• Saturday, March 21 – Powers Retro Pipe (East Byrneside): Olympic gold medalist Ross Powers returned to help judge on a throwback halfpipe carved by Stratton’s Parks crew on a slope that hadn’t seen one in decades. The session perfectly blended early-2000s nostalgia with modern progression.

• Sunday, March 22 – OG Downhill (Suntanner): The weekend closed with head-to-head dual slalom racing straight out of snowboarding’s raw origins. This year introduced a dedicated adaptive athlete division — a long-overdue and widely praised addition.

Off the hill, Homesick’s cultural programming was just as strong. Pioneer rider and artist Jamie Lynn made a major appearance, teaming with his 1910 brand (co-founded with artist Schoph) for the 1910 Print Show at the Burton Store in Stratton Village. The exhibit featured collaborative limited-edition prints, graphics, and apparel that beautifully captured snowboarding’s artistic heritage. It fit seamlessly alongside the Dawning Exhibit, Vintage Board Room, book signings, live music, and endless community hangs. Jamie Lynn’s presence alongside figures like Shannon Dunn, Ross Powers, and Zeb Powell created an atmosphere thick with legacy and inspiration — proving snowboarding culture isn’t a side attraction; it is the main event.

The Bomb Hole Cup at Brighton Resort, Utah (March 28–29, 2026)

Out West, the fifth annual Bomb Hole Cup proved that low snow can’t kill good vibes when the community steps up. Brighton’s park crew and the Bomb Hole team built two ripping snake runs despite lean conditions, and the energy never dipped.

Day One – March 28: Banked Slalom + Splitboard Race
A massive, inclusive field of riders, groms to veterans, pros to adaptive athletes, snowskaters to vintage setups, attacked two berm-filled courses.

Pro Banked Slalom Results:

• Pro Men: 1st Grey Katko (fastest run of the day at 23.75 seconds), 2nd Hunter Goulet, 3rd Sawyer Reivich.

• Pro Women: 1st Freya Hammerlein (25.075 seconds), 2nd Emily O’Connor, 3rd Mela Stalker.

Notable Winners:

• Splitboard Race: Shane Campbell (his third consecutive victory). Standouts also included Noah Gates (Super Grom Boys), Airish George (Grom Girls), and Jason Walker (Adaptive).

Day Two – March 29: Park Showdown (Freestyle/Slopestyle)
The event flipped to pure creative chaos on Brighton’s park features. Pros opened with mandatory 900s, then unleashed all-out attacks on rails, boxes, jumps, and the infamous limo launch. The format rewarded style, progression, and big energy.

Overall Bomb Hole Cup Champions (combined performance):

• Pro Men: Grey Katko

• Pro Women: Mela Stalker

Grey and Mela’s dominance across both natural terrain racing and technical park riding made them clear, well-deserved weekend warriors.

The Last Word

Two mountains. Two completely different vibes. One undeniable truth.

Homesick honored snowboarding’s East Coast soul by bringing icons like Jamie Lynn and 1910 into the fold while growing organically. The Bomb Hole Cup kept it raw, ridiculously fun, and deeply inclusive despite thin snow. Neither chased mainstream approval. Both were built by riders, for riders — with community as the core principle, not a marketing angle.

These are the events worth showing up for: the ones that look and feel like snowboarding actually looks. Two down, both absolute bangers. The community is alive and thriving.

See you at the next one.

We’re thinking about launching a quarterly digital mini-zine — a proper PDF, designed and curated, landing in your inbox four times a year. Gear deep-dives, cultural takes, photography, the kind of content that deserves more than a scroll-and-forget feed.

The ask would be $5 a month for paid subscribers. That’s it.

But before we put the work in, we want to know if it’s worth it to you.

Drop your vote and feel free to leave a comment. Your honest take shapes what we build next.

There’s a specific type of person who walks into the coffee shop after a morning session and looks like they actually belong in a mountain town. Not the resort tourist in rental gear, and not the guy who overdressed for après. Just someone who looks like they live there, move around in whatever weather shows up, and don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it.

That’s the look. And it’s harder to pull off than it seems.

Mountain streetwear in places like Park City, Telluride, and Crested Butte has always carried a working-town undertone. A little utilitarian, a little worn in, nothing too precious. The people who actually shred for a living don’t walk around in technical outerwear 24/7, but they don’t exactly swap into khakis either. There’s a middle ground that acknowledges the environment without advertising it.

SPC/LST, out of California, gets this right. The Encounter_01J ($365) is a British Millerain® waxed bomber with Primaloft® insulation and YKK® Excella zippers. It looks like something a working man in 1965 would have worn, except it’s warm, weather-resistant, and machine-washable. The boxy drop-shoulder fit works over a sweater or flannel equally well. If you want something lighter and slightly more streamlined, the Cognis ($275) is a Cordura® crinkle insulated jacket with a military-pocket vibe that pairs just as naturally with the Civilian pant ($110) - a stretch twill chino cut from organic cotton and recycled Repreve® that travels clean and moves freely. SPC/LST makes everything in the USA with a lifetime warranty, which is a statement most brands aren’t willing to make.

Finisterre is a UK-based brand primarily known in the surf world, but their approach to cold-weather technical clothing translates directly to mountain life. The Firecrest Jacket in Deep Sea ($205) is a lightweight recycled poly insulated layer that sits under a shell or stands alone on a mild afternoon. The Barents Sweater in Pecan ($160) is a proper wool knit that looks right in a bar or on a chairlift. The Bolster Full Zip Fleece in Buckwheat/Navy ($180) rounds out the layering system with a recycled-poly construction and a colorway that doesn’t scream anything in particular. All three have a salt-air, weather-beaten aesthetic that reads as understated even when it’s doing a lot of work.

For Reals: Every serious snowboarder has a bag problem. The Brown Buffalo Duffalo ($295+) is a 50L duffle built from Cordura® 1050D ballistic nylon with full-grain leather handles, a butterfly-style opening, and a dedicated shoe compartment that fits boots or dirty kit. It’s a gear bag that doesn’t embarrass you at the airport. Pair it with the Concealsling ($155+) for daily carry - a compact 2.8L cross-body in the same materials, tight enough to not bounce around, organized enough to actually be useful.

And then there’s the pop. The Party Shirt International Surf Southwest Stretch Tech ($59) is a four-way stretch, moisture-wicking button-up with a print that reads somewhere between desert and lineup. It’s not a snowboard brand making a party shirt. It’s a party shirt company making something you can actually move in. Worn open over a tee at the right spot, it’s the only piece in this lineup that announces itself.

The Last Word

Mountain town style isn’t about trying to look like you ride. It’s about looking like you do, whether you’re on the hill or not. These brands understand the assignment.

Back in August, we laid out the case for why letting kids ride free isn’t just good PR, it’s the only real play the industry has if it wants a future. The argument was simple: cost is the single biggest barrier to getting young people on snow, and if resorts actually care about growing the sport, they need to act like it. We called it a disruptive campaign to reignite the soul of winter sports. You can read that piece here.

Well, somebody was listening.

Mont du Lac Resort, sitting right on the St. Louis River in Superior, Wisconsin, just announced that starting with the 2026/27 winter season, every skier and snowboarder 15 and under rides free. No asterisks. Free season passes, free lift tickets, for all youth in that age group. The resort expects to open the door for more than 1,500 youth during the coming season alone. That’s not a marketing stunt, that’s a genuine commitment to pipeline development, and it deserves recognition.

Now, MDL isn’t Whistler. The resort runs 11 scenic runs and a terrain park with over 20 rotating features, situated right along the St. Louis River near the Minnesota border. It’s a family mountain in the truest sense, the kind of place where someone gets their first chairlift ride, links their first turns, discovers that snowboarding is actually the greatest thing on earth. Those hills matter, probably more than the big-ticket destination resorts ever will, because that’s where the next generation actually starts.

The economics of snowboarding participation have been broken for years. Lift tickets at major resorts have spiraled to the point where a family day on the mountain competes with a car payment. The sport has quietly been pricing out exactly the demographic it needs most, kids. MDL is cutting through that noise with a policy that’s hard to argue with.

The program is expected to become one of the most accessible youth ski programs in the Midwest. For a region with a deep, cold-weather culture and no shortage of stoke, that’s a meaningful distinction.

The question now is whether other resorts are paying attention. A regional hill in Wisconsin just raised the bar. What’s the excuse for everyone else?

The Last Word

Programs like this don’t just fill chairs on slow Tuesday nights, they build riders for life. Every kid who gets their first real season on snow without their parents having to sweat the ticket cost is a potential lifer, a future gear buyer, a season pass holder, a person who passes it on to their own kids someday. MDL gets it. The sport needs more of this energy, and it needs it fast.

Full disclosure upfront: this isn’t a lap or two around the block take. I’ve been riding the Jones Howler and Mercury FASE bindings all season at Park City Mountain Resort, in everything from early corduroy to wind crust to the powder days the Wasatch actually delivered this winter. So here’s where things actually land after some real mileage.

The Howler

The Howler is a new model for ‘26, a directional freeride board designed in collaboration with Victor de Le Rue and Elena Hight, and it shows. This thing was built with serious terrain in mind, but the design stops short of being a dedicated freeride sled. It’s got a blunted, minimally tapered shape that keeps switch riding honest, and a high full-camber profile that gives the tail real authority at takeoff and genuine stability on landing. The mid-stiff flex (think a 4 out of 5) is in that sweet spot where the board doesn’t feel locked up but will absolutely hold an edge when you ask it to.

What’s notable is how well it actually carves for a directional shape. The thing rips a clean turn on hardpack and groomers without feeling twitchy or demanding. The construction deserves some credit here: Koroyd in the nose section kills swing weight and keeps the front end from getting wobbly in variable snow, while Bcomp Carbon/Flax stringers under the bindings suck up chatter and add the kind of torsional stiffness you want when the mountain gets sketchy. The core is a triple-density bamboo, paulownia, and poplar mix that keeps the board lively without making it nervous.

The tapered directional shape means the nose has more real estate than the tail, which is the right call for float, but the tail is still kicked up enough that riding switch is a non-issue. This is genuinely a quiver-killer for the rider who wants one board to handle all-mountain duty, park laps, and the occasional steeper excursion. Jones built it to be ridden shorter than a traditional freeride board, too, which gives it an agility you wouldn’t expect from a board with this kind of stability at speed.

MSRP: $699.95 | jonessnowboards.com

Mercury FASE

The FASE system is Jones’ answer to a question the industry has been fussing over for a while: how do you get the locked-in feel and performance of a traditional two-strap binding without the chairlift shuffle and morning-cold fingers struggling with ratchets? Their answer is the FASE Fast Entry System, and it’s a legitimately clever piece of engineering rather than a gimmick.

Here’s the honest truth though: there’s a break-in period. Out of the box, the entry and exit feels a bit stiff and deliberate. It takes a few sessions before the mechanism loosens up and the whole slide-in, snap-down motion starts to feel as quick and natural as Jones promises. Once it clicks, though, it actually does what they say. Getting off the lift and dropping in without stopping to strap your rear foot is one of those small quality-of-life things that you don’t fully appreciate until you go back to a traditional binding and realize you’ve been wasting time for years.

Performance-wise, the Mercury FASE is a solid all-mountain binding. Medium-stiff flex (4/5), asymmetrical AsymFlex highback that gives you edge drive on hard carves but enough give to tweak a grab without feeling like you’re fighting the setup. The Fusion XR baseplate sits low-profile and has a natural flex underfoot that doesn’t kill the board feel. The DualFlex ankle strap is one of the better ones out there, stiff enough in the core for responsiveness, softer at the edges for all-day comfort. Weight comes in at 895 grams for a medium, right in line with other premium two-straps.

The universal mount disc works with 4x4, 2x4, and channel setups, so it pairs with anything. The FASE system itself comes with a lifetime warranty.

MSRP: $369.95 | jonessnowboards.com

The Last Word

Paired together, the Howler and Mercury FASE make a genuinely capable all-mountain setup. The Howler is confident enough to point it somewhere serious but forgiving enough that you’re not fighting it when the terrain gets casual. The FASE bindings reward patience out of the box; put in a few days and you’ll wonder why strap-in systems took this long to evolve. Both pieces are built with real material and construction thoughtfulness, not just marketing copy, which matters when you’re evaluating gear from behind thirty-plus years of industry experience rather than a press release.

Milan-Cortina 2026 is in the books, and depending on which slope you were watching, you either witnessed snowboarding at its most compelling or a soap opera masquerading as a ski competition.

Let’s start with the mess. Freestyle skier Hunter Hess kicked things off by announcing to a press conference that representing the United States gave him “mixed emotions.” The resulting firestorm consumed the opening days of the Games, triggered a presidential broadside on Truth Social, and turned Hess’s family into targets of harassment and death threats. To his credit, Hess qualified and competed. But the self-inflicted wound was hard to watch. You want to make a political statement? Fine. But maybe not at the opening press conference of the most-watched Winter Games in a decade, when your job is to go ski a halfpipe.

Then there was Eileen Gu. Born in San Francisco, raised in America, educated at Stanford, and competing once again under the Chinese flag. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau paid her and fellow American-born-turned-Chinese-athlete Zhu Yi a combined $6.6 million in 2025 alone to qualify for these Games. Gu finished with two silvers and a halfpipe gold, became the most decorated female freeskier in Olympic history, and managed to avoid answering a single question about human rights in China. She said she hadn’t done the research. You either buy that or you don’t.

Meanwhile, over on the snowboard side of Livigno Snow Park, the riders did what snowboarders do: they put their heads down and rode.

Chloe Kim showed up with a torn labrum, won silver in the halfpipe, and pulled 17-year-old Gaon Choi in for a hug after the Korean phenom dethroned her. Jake Canter threw a double underflip and a massive backside 1980 on his final run to bronze in men’s slopestyle when it counted. Japan dominated the park and pipe in a way that was impossible not to respect. And through all of it, there was no controversy, no press conference theater, no distractions. Just snowboarding.

The cherry on top came from the ice. The USA men’s hockey team won their first gold since the 1980 Miracle on Ice, with Jack Hughes burying the overtime winner against Canada in a game that Connor Hellebuyck essentially won by himself with 41 saves. And the women backed it up, going undefeated through the entire tournament, with Hilary Knight tying it in the final minutes and Megan Keller ending it in overtime. A clean double gold in hockey felt like the right punctuation mark for an American team that just wanted to compete, not perform.

The Olympics are done. The FIS circus has packed up its judging panels and subjective scoring and headed home. Now it’s just snowboarding again: Natural Selection, banked slaloms, the Bomb Hole Cup, and the season still running hot through spring. No politics. No press conference theater. No flags of convenience.

That’s the sport we signed up for. Go shred!

Back in January, I wrote The Olympic Illusion, arguing that the Olympics had never fully figured out what to do with snowboarding. That the sport’s biggest stage was still, after nearly three decades of Olympic competition, fundamentally broken. Two weeks into Milano Cortina 2026, I wish I had been wrong.

I wasn’t.

Across every judged snowboarding discipline at these Games, something went sideways. Not once, not in a single controversial call that could be dismissed as a fluke. Over and over, across halfpipe, slopestyle, big air, and snowboard cross, the judging either sparked outrage, defied logic, or raised questions the sport has been unable to answer since the day FIS took over the program in 1998. The thread connecting all of it isn’t bad luck. It’s a broken system that nobody in power has the will to actually fix.

Let’s go event by event.

Snowboard Cross: The Call That Broke the Internet

If you only followed one moment of Olympic snowboarding this cycle, it was probably Nathan Pare.

The 21-year-old American from Maine was in his Olympic debut, and he ran one of the great quarterfinal comebacks in snowboard cross history. Dead last coming out of the start, Pare fought his way forward, got tangled briefly with Spain’s Lucas Eguibar on a turn, and then launched off the final jump to cross the line in first place. The kid thought he had won. NBC cameras caught his pure, unfiltered joy. And then the judges reviewed the footage and handed him a red card, ruling the contact with Eguibar “intentional.”

“That’s insane,” Pare told a nearby judge, and you could hear every bit of it on the broadcast.

It was insane. The NBC broadcast team said it didn’t look intentional. The contact was the back of Pare’s board clipping the front of Eguibar’s as he squeezed through a turn, moving from fourth to third, already ahead in the corner. The rule book in snowboard cross defines interference across three categories: intentional, involuntary, and incidental. Only intentional contact triggers a red card and disqualification. Involuntary and incidental result in a yellow card at most. The jury looked at the same footage the rest of the world saw and saw intentionality where almost no one else did.

What made it worse was what happened next. Two French snowboarders, Jonas Chollet and Loan Bozzolo, advanced to the semifinals in Pare’s place. Eguibar, who had every right to be frustrated, defended the ruling. But even his defense made the sport’s problem clear. “The rule is really clear,” he said. And maybe it is, written down. The problem is that “intentional” is a judgment call, and judgment calls at the Olympics carry enormous stakes. One jury’s reading of “intentional” cost a 21-year-old his shot at an Olympic medal in his first Games.

This is what happens when the adjudication of human intent is treated as a straightforward factual matter.

Women’s Halfpipe: When the Hardest Trick Loses

Chloe Kim landed a double cork 1080.

For those who don’t ride halfpipe, here’s the context: the double cork 1080 is the hardest trick in women’s halfpipe. Kim put it down on her first run and scored an 88. South Korea’s Gaon Choi, who did not attempt that trick, won gold with a 90.25. Japan’s Mitsuki Ono took bronze.

Kim got silver. She was gracious about it. She congratulated Choi and said nothing publicly about the judging. Which is exactly what you’d expect from Kim, who understands the sport’s culture better than most. But the quiet debate that followed her run was anything but quiet online, and it pointed at something real.

The halfpipe scoring system doesn’t reward individual tricks with point values. Judges assess the entire run as a package using criteria that include difficulty, amplitude, variety, execution, and progression, then assign a single number from 1 to 100 based on an “overall impression.” Those judges eliminated the high and low scores, averaged what remained, and arrived at 90.25 for Choi, who posted bigger amplitude on her best hits, around eight inches higher than Kim’s peak air.

So who was right? That’s genuinely debatable, and that’s precisely the problem.

When a scoring system produces outcomes where the athlete who lands the most technically demanding trick in her discipline loses to someone who didn’t attempt it, the sport cannot clearly defend its own results. Not because Choi didn’t deserve the gold, she may well have, but because the framework for explaining why has so much room for interpretation that it invites lasting skepticism. Amplitude vs. difficulty. Overall impression vs. trick hierarchy. The sport has been arguing about this for 30 years and has never landed on an answer that sticks.

Kim never said a word about it. That kind of grace is part of snowboarding’s culture. But silence shouldn’t be confused with the problem not existing.

Men’s Snowboard Slopestyle: When Qualifying Means Nothing

If the Pare DQ was the moment that broke the internet, the men’s snowboard slopestyle final on Wednesday was the moment that broke the sport’s own internal logic.

Here’s what happened in Livigno: New Zealand’s Dane Menzies led qualifying with an 86.06. Norway’s Marcus Kleveland, two-time world champion, was second at 81.86. Canada’s Mark McMorris, the most decorated slopestyle rider in Olympic history with three consecutive bronzes, qualified third at 81.81. Those were your three favorites going into the final.

None of them medaled.

China’s Su Yiming, who qualified eighth with a 72.78, won gold with an 82.41 on his opening run. Japan’s Taiga Hasegawa, who also qualified outside the top five, took silver with 82.13. Jake Canter of the United States, the ninth qualifier, claimed bronze with a 79.36 on his final run. The 8th, 9th, and 10th place qualifiers finished 1st, 2nd, and 3rd in the final, in exactly that order. The top three qualifiers went 7th, 4th, and 8th respectively.

That kind of qualifying-to-final inversion doesn’t happen in well-designed systems. It happens when the judging is so volatile that the numbers in one round have almost no predictive relationship to the numbers in the next.

The score compression in the middle of the final standings told an equally troubling story. The riders who finished 5th through 10th, names including Red Gerard, Romain Allemand, Dane Menzies, McMorris, and 17-year-old Ollie Martin, were separated by less than two points. Gerard finished 6th with 76.60. McMorris finished 8th with 75.50. Cameron Spalding was 10th with 75.13. Over a point and a half separated six of the best slopestyle snowboarders alive. At that margin, a single judge’s read of how clean a tail grab looked can change the leaderboard by three positions.

The cruelest moment went to Kleveland. A two-time world champion who had never managed an Olympic medal in three attempts, he put down what riders and commentators acknowledged was a serious final run, a Cab butter 1620 and double Todeo 1080 combo that looked like podium material. Then he waited. The scoring took what felt like an eternity. When it finally came back, he had 78.96. He missed bronze by 0.40 points.

Marcus Kleveland, one of the most technically creative riders of his generation, left his third Olympics without a medal because of less than half a point in a scoring system that can’t explain its own decimals.

McMorris was equally philosophical about it. Still recovering from a concussion, pelvic bone bruising, and strained abdominal muscles after a crash in Big Air training earlier in these Games, he put together clean runs and still couldn’t find the scoreboard. “I’m proud just to have made another final,” he said. There was no spin in it. Just a legend who understands better than most that the judging at the Olympics is not a reliable translator of what actually happens on the mountain.

Su’s win, for what it’s worth, has an almost poetic dimension to it. At the 2022 Beijing Games, he was widely considered to have been robbed of slopestyle gold when judges missed a glaring error by gold medalist Max Parrot, failing to catch a missed grab that the head judge later admitted cost Su the top spot. Su went on to win Big Air gold that week and left Beijing with two medals, but the slopestyle injustice stuck. Four years later, he came back and won it cleanly. The judging finally got one right for him, at least.

But the 2026 final as a whole was hard to defend. Winning scores hovering in the low 80s while the field collapsed around a punishing course with undersized jumps, scores ranging from 82 down to 75 across the bottom half of a twelve-man Olympic final, and the complete irrelevance of qualifying performance to final outcomes. The system didn’t malfunction in a single moment here. It just consistently failed to tell a coherent story about who rode best.

The Systemic Issue That Nobody Wants to Name

Here is the thing I want you to understand: none of what happened in Livigno this February is new.

At Beijing 2022, judges admitted they had made a mistake in a slopestyle event after a television replay showed a rider failing to complete a grab that had already been credited in the score. The admission was remarkable in its honesty. It was also remarkable because it confirmed what riders, coaches, and anyone who has watched competitive snowboarding for more than a few seasons already knew: the judges are working with incomplete information in real time, making irreversible calls on tricks that happen in fractions of a second at 50 miles per hour.

In halfpipe, slopestyle, and big air, the judging framework is built on something called “overall impression.” The acronym coaches use is DAVE-P: difficulty, amplitude, variety, execution, and progression. But here’s the honest truth about DAVE-P. Those five criteria aren’t weighted against each other with any transparency. There’s no formula. There’s no published rubric that tells you how much more a triple cork outweighs perfect amplitude, or whether variety trumps execution when a rider goes for broke. It’s gestalt scoring, which is another way of saying it’s a feeling, and feelings at the Olympics have consequences.

The men’s slopestyle and big air events here were no different. Riders who spent years designing run strategies around what they thought judges wanted still walked away uncertain whether their reads were correct. The halfpipe men’s final produced its own debates about whether the panel was rewarding height or trick complexity. Big air, which reduces the equation to essentially two or three tricks and a final score, remains arguably the most nakedly subjective event on the snowboard schedule.

None of this is the judges’ fault as individuals. Most of the judges working these events know snowboarding. The problem is structural. The framework they’re working within is built for a different era of the sport, when the trick ceiling was lower and the performance gaps between runs were larger. In 2026, when the top twelve halfpipe finalists are all capable of putting down elite runs, the margin for error in judging has essentially disappeared. And the system has not kept up.

FIS and the Ownership Problem

I’ve written about this before, and it keeps being worth saying: FIS controls Olympic snowboarding, and FIS has never fully understood what it governs.

The International Ski Federation took over the Olympic snowboard program in 1998, effectively pushing out the sport’s original governing body, the ISF. That takeover was never about improving snowboarding. It was about control, about who got to put their name on the sport when the television cameras showed up every four years. The result has been 28 years of a sport administered by an organization whose primary competency is alpine ski racing, attempting to apply judging frameworks borrowed from gymnastics and figure skating to a culture that grew out of skateparks and backcountry powder.

The judging controversies at Milano Cortina 2026 are downstream of that. When Pare got DQ’d, when Kim’s double cork 1080 wasn’t enough to win, when every scored run produced a result that someone could reasonably question, those weren’t isolated errors. They were the predictable output of a system that was never built to handle what snowboarding has become.

What Actually Needs to Change

The sport needs two things, and it has needed them for a long time.

First, adjudication transparency. For judged events, the scoring breakdown should be public and immediate. Not just the final number, but how each judge weighted each criterion, what triggered score reductions, and what specific elements pushed a run above or below comparable scores. Gymnastics publishes this. Figure skating publishes this. There is no reason snowboarding should still be operating on numbers that appear from nowhere and require faith rather than explanation.

Second, snowboard cross needs an explicit standard for what constitutes intentional versus involuntary versus incidental contact, with video examples published before every major competition. The category of “intentional” should require clear evidence of deliberate redirection toward another rider. A board clip in a turn is not that. Nathan Pare did not deserve to go home.

The Part That Doesn’t Change

I’ll say what I said in January, because it’s still true: snowboarding is better than this.

The riding in Livigno was extraordinary. The progression in every event has been extraordinary. Watching riders push the limits of what’s physically possible on a snowboard, at the Olympics, in front of the largest audience the sport will ever reach, that part is real. That part is worth caring about.

But the Olympic stage will keep failing snowboarding as long as the structure around the riding remains frozen in place. Judging reform isn’t a conversation for after the medal ceremonies. It’s the conversation that should have happened years ago, and keeps getting deferred until the next controversy forces it back into view.

Milano Cortina 2026 forced it back into view. Again.

The question is whether anyone in a position to actually change something will still be paying attention in four years.

As the world turns its attention to the Winter Olympics, feeds will flood with glossy montages of gold medals and perfectly groomed halfpipes. But for those who know where to look, the real story isn’t happening on the podium. It’s unfolding on the wind-whipped trails of Sugarloaf.

For champions, snowboarding is less about being noticed and more about being forged. It’s built through environments that demand obsession, focus, and relentless time on snow. And when the world watches the best drop in this month, the conversation inevitably circles back to Carrabassett Valley Academy (CVA).

CVA has become synonymous with a certain kind of mastery. Riders who emerge from its ranks carry an edge not measured in social media likes or sponsor contracts, but in precision, intelligence, and an instinctive understanding of their equipment. This is where talent meets infrastructure, and ambition meets opportunity.

Alumni Spotlight: The Maine-Forged Edge

While Olympic broadcasts highlight flash and spectacle, insiders know where true technical riders are bred: The Loaf. CVA alumni don’t simply appear on podiums. They’re built from years navigating some of the most variable, unforgiving terrain on the East Coast. From legendary pioneers to era-defining icons like Seth Wescott, the CVA lineage is defined by precision, resilience, and a relentless attention to detail.

“CVA isn’t just about learning how to win; it’s about learning how to ride. When you spend your formative years negotiating Maine’s fickle snow, you develop a level of edge control and spatial awareness that becomes a permanent advantage,” says one alumnus.

It’s a distinctive philosophy. Riders learn to read conditions, anticipate changes, and respond in real time. They don’t chase trends—they chase excellence.

Shaping the Sport: The Jeremy Jones Proof Point

CVA’s influence on snowboarding isn’t limited to start gates and finish lines. It extends into the very way the sport understands terrain, consequence, and responsibility.

Jeremy Jones ’93 is one of the most consequential snowboarders in the sport’s evolution. An 11-time Big Mountain Rider of the Year, Jones helped define what technical mastery looks like in consequential terrain. His riding elevated big-mountain lines from spectacle to discipline, emphasizing preparation, line choice, and respect for the mountain.

Jones is also the founder of Protect Our Winters (POW), one of the most influential climate advocacy organizations in action sports. Through POW, he’s connected the technical understanding of snow and terrain with stewardship, ensuring those who follow have winters worth riding. His path underscores a broader CVA truth: mastery doesn’t end at the podium. It extends into leadership, longevity, and responsibility. The same technical foundation that produces Olympic champions also produces riders capable of shaping the culture itself.

Beyond the Podium: The CVA Difference

CVA is more than a school. It’s a high-fidelity training ground for athletes serious about their craft. While the world waits for the Olympic cycle to care about snowboarding, the crew in Maine is grinding, season over season.

At its core, this is about community. A binding culture that understands the importance of roots and lineage. CVA stands as the Independent Guard of competitive snowboarding, guided by three core pillars:

1. The Laboratory of Sugarloaf
   Riding the Loaf demands a level of precision and articulation that is unmatched in softer Western resorts. Here, the mountain is the ultimate arbiter of skill. It doesn’t care about followers or highlight reels. It only cares about the edge you hold, the line you carve, and the control you exhibit.

2. Academic Rigor Meets Alpine Grit
   This isn’t a casual gap year or some dirtbag sabbatical. CVA offers a college-prep curriculum alongside a world-class training program. The mind and body are sharpened simultaneously. Riders emerge not just as athletes, but as disciplined, well-rounded individuals capable of performing under pressure.

3. The Technical Craft
   At CVA, gear isn’t fit and drip; it’s an extension of the rider. Understanding sidecut radius, core profiles, and base structure isn’t academic. It’s functional. Mastery of equipment translates directly to control, speed, and performance. It’s the difference between a podium finish and a DNF.

The Chess Match at Speed: The SBX Factor

Halfpipe and slopestyle earn the slow-motion replays, but for those who value pure technical truth, Boardercross (SBX) is the ultimate test. It demands explosive power, carving finesse, and tactical intelligence all at once. Every race is a chess match at 50 mph. CVA riders spend their seasons learning to maintain control on firm, variable terrain, threading lines that would unseat lesser competitors.

SBX is objective. The clock and the finish line do not care about popularity, style points, or social reach. Riders who have mastered the line and found the gap move forward. It’s a meritocracy built on performance, not perception.

The Hole Shot: By the Numbers

Olympic dreams are often sold as lottery tickets … a world of subjective judging and sponsor influence. In freestyle, the field is crowded, trends shift, and “flavor of the week” tricks dominate. SBX offers a different path. The high barrier to entry and the emphasis on technical skill make the field smaller, more focused, and more meritocratic.

Training at an academy with a dedicated track and elite coaching doesn’t guarantee fame—it guarantees preparation. CVA athletes take the hole shot knowing they own their path to the world stage.

CVA’s Snowboarding Lineage

If the hole shot represents control over your own destiny, CVA’s Olympic history shows what that control looks like over time.

CVA’s impact on Olympic snowboarding didn’t happen overnight. It was built turn by turn, season by season, on firm snow and harder lessons. Long before snowboard cross became a headline event, CVA riders were already shaping what competitive snowboarding would look like on the world stage.

The academy’s Olympic history reflects both the evolution of the sport and CVA’s ability to stay relevant over decades:

• Mark Fawcett ’90 | Olympic competitor in 1998 and 2002, representing the formative period of snowboard racing and competitive progression.

• Adam Hostetter ’93 | 1998 Olympian, part of the first wave of CVA riders translating East Coast discipline to the global stage.

• Jeff Greenwood ’94 | 2002 Olympian, known for speed, consistency, and race intelligence.

• Seth Wescott ’94 | Olympic gold medalist in 2006 and 2010, the most visible proof point of CVA’s foundational approach paying off at the highest level.

From the sport’s early Olympic days to the modern era of snowboard cross, CVA’s riders share a common thread. They aren’t relying on subjectivity or timing. They’re prepared to perform when the gate drops.

And when the next heat loads, that lineage isn’t history. It’s live.

Boardercross at the Winter Olympics: West / East Coast Viewing Schedule

For fans on the West Coast, catching the SBX action live requires some early mornings—but it’s worth it.

Here’s the lineup:

• Men’s Boardercross Qualifiers: February 9, 7:00 AM PST / 10 AM EST
  The first rounds set the tone. Watch carefully to see which riders take the early “hole shots” and assert control through the variable courses.

• Women’s Boardercross Qualifiers: February 10, 7:30 AM PST / 10:30 AM EST
  A tight field and lightning-fast pack racing. Ideal for studying line choice and edge precision in real time.

• Men’s Boardercross Finals: February 12, 6:00 AM PST / 9:00 AM EST
  The elite riders clash head-to-head. Expect split-second decision-making and textbook edge control under pressure.

• Women’s Boardercross Finals: February 13, 6:30 AM PST / 9:30 AM EST
  Where speed meets strategy. This is the moment to see which athletes have honed both precision and power throughout the season.

• Mixed Relay SBX: February 15, 8:00 AM PST / 11 AM EST
  Teams combine explosive starts, carving finesse, and tactical intelligence. Watch the gap strategy unfold as athletes push to the finish line.

Pro tip: Set DVRs or streaming reminders. Boardercross moves fast, but the lessons in line strategy and control are worth the early wake-up call.

U.S. SBX Athletes to Watch at Milano-Cortina

With Olympic rosters set, snowboard cross at Milano-Cortina will showcase the sport’s full spectrum: legacy racers, proven contenders, and the next generation of precision athletes. Each of the riders below arrives at the start gate with a background built for speed, consequence, and control.

• Nate Pare (*CVA Post-Graduate Class of 2024)
  Competing at the 2026 Winter Games, Pare represents the newest generation of U.S. snowboard cross athletes. His inclusion signals continued momentum as the discipline evolves on the world stage.

• Nick Baumgartner
  A four-time Olympian (2010, 2014, 2018, 2022) and mixed team gold medalist, Baumgartner remains one of the most battle-tested racers in snowboard cross. His longevity and race intelligence continue to define elite SBX performance.

• Faye Thelen
  A four-time Olympian (2010, 2014, 2018, 2022), Thelen brings unmatched experience to the women’s field. Her sustained presence at the Olympic level reflects durability, composure, and technical discipline under pressure.

• Liam Moffatt (*CVA Class of 2015)
  An Olympic competitor in 2022 and returning in 2026, Moffatt spans Olympic cycles with consistency and control. His trajectory reflects adaptability across changing courses, formats, and race dynamics.

• Jake Vedder
  A 2022 Olympian known for explosive starts and calculated line selection, Vedder represents the modern SBX racer. His approach balances aggression with precision in head-to-head competition.

• Cody Winters
  Also a member of the 2022 Olympic team, Winters adds depth and intensity to the U.S. field. His reputation for attacking variable terrain makes him a constant presence in fast, physical heats.

• Stacy Gaskill
  A 2022 Olympian, Gaskill exemplifies the strength of the U.S. women’s snowboard cross program. Her racing emphasizes speed management, tactical awareness, and execution when margins disappear.

• Hanna Percy
  A member of the 2026 U.S. Olympic team, Percy enters the Games as part of the next wave of American SBX talent. Her rise reflects consistency, edge control, and decision-making at speed.

• Brianna Schnorrbusch
  Selected for the 2026 Olympic roster, Schnorrbusch brings a composed, analytical approach to pack racing. Her progression highlights the importance of precision and patience in high-variance competition.

Join the Ranks

Enrollment at Carrabassett Valley Academy is more than a choice; it’s an invitation into a lineage. It’s for riders who understand the Chairlift Code, respect the craft of their kit, and value days on snow above everything else.

From judged formats to head-to-head competition, snowboard pathways diverge quickly. CVA has long aligned with the path where preparation and execution decide the outcome.

The roster is set. Twenty-four American snowboarders are heading to Milan-Cortina next month, and this squad tells a story that’s equal parts legacy, youth movement, and redemption. The Games kick off February 6, and for the first time in over two decades, we’re watching a U.S. team that doesn’t include Shaun White. What we do have is something potentially more interesting: a mix of established champions, teenage phenoms, and riders who refused to quit even when everything told them they should.

Halfpipe: History in the Making

Chloe Kim is attempting something no snowboarder has ever done. Not Shaun White. Not Kelly Clark. Not anyone. If she wins gold in Milan-Cortina, she’ll be the first to three-peat. She’s 25 years old, took two years off after Beijing 2022, came back and immediately reasserted dominance. Just this month, she won her eighth X Games SuperPipe title, tying White’s record. She’s landed a 1260 in contest (first woman ever) and joined teammate Maddie Mastro in landing double cork 1080s. According to her coach, she’s landed a 1440 in practice but hasn’t attempted it in contest yet.

The women’s pipe squad also includes Mastro, a two-time Games veteran with 18 World Cup podiums, 19-year-old Bea Kim making her debut, and Maddy Schaffrick, whose story deserves its own telling. Schaffrick retired from competitive snowboarding at 20 years old. Not because her body gave out, but because her mind did. She was riding internationally at 14, burned out hard, and walked away for nearly a decade. She was coaching the halfpipe team at Beijing 2022. Now, at 31, she’s riding in Milan-Cortina. She’ll be the oldest American halfpipe rider to make a debut. Her second-place finish at the U.S. Grand Prix in Aspen wasn’t just a good result. It was proof that sometimes the long way around is the only way forward.

On the men’s side, 17-year-old Alessandro Barbieri from Portland is Team USA’s best shot at challenging the dominant Japanese and Australian riders. He became the first American ever to land a triple cork in contest this season, and he’s already got two World Cup podiums. He’s joined by Jake Pates, who rode at PyeongChang 2018 then stepped away for years before mounting a comeback, veteran Chase Josey, and first-timer Chase Blackwell. It’s a young squad going up against established international powerhouses, but Barbieri’s progression suggests the U.S. pipe program has legitimate medal potential.

Slopestyle: Youth Movement Meets Redemption

Red Gerard won gold in slopestyle at 17 years old in 2018, becoming snowboarding’s youngest-ever champion. He finished fourth in 2022. Now 25, he’s back with something to prove and the skills to back it up. He won X Games slopestyle gold in both 2024 and 2025, throwing down runs that included a switch backside triple cork 1620 and a backside 1800. He’s not the kid who stumbled into gold anymore. He’s a veteran looking to reclaim what he knows he can do.

Gerard is joined by Sean FitzSimons, a 2022 veteran from Hood River, Oregon, Jake Canter, who just clinched his spot with his first-ever World Cup victory at the Aspen Grand Prix, and 17-year-old Ollie Martin from Colorado, who earned two bronze medals at World Championships and a World Cup win to punch his ticket.

The women’s slopestyle roster is where things get really interesting. Lily Dhawornvej and Jess Perlmutter are both 16 years old. They’ll be the youngest U.S. snowboarders in Milan-Cortina. Both made their marks on the Nor-Am circuit with podiums in big air and slopestyle. They’re joined by Hahna Norman, also making her debut. This is a complete generational reset for U.S. women’s slopestyle. Two-time champion Jamie Anderson didn’t make the roster. The era that belonged to her is over. What comes next starts with these three.

Snowboard Cross: The Old Guard and Fresh Blood

Nick Baumgartner is 44 years old. This is his fifth Games. He spent the better part of two decades chasing a medal, coming close repeatedly, getting knocked out in controversial situations, watching younger riders claim the podium spots he wanted. Then in 2022, at 40 years old, he won gold in the inaugural mixed team event alongside Lindsey Jacobellis. Now he’s back for one more run, the oldest U.S. snowboarder ever. Again.

Baumgartner leads a men’s squad that includes Jake Vedder (Beijing 2022 veteran), Cody Winters (who also competes in parallel giant slalom), and Nathan Pare, the 2023-24 FIS Rookie of the Year making his debut.

On the women’s side, Faye Thelen is competing in her fifth Games. She’s been to Vancouver, Sochi, Pyeongchang, and Beijing. Now Milan-Cortina. She’s joined by Stacy Gaskill (Beijing 2022), and rookies Hanna Percy, just 18 years old from Truckee, California, and Brianna Schnorrbusch. This is a discipline where experience matters enormously, but fresh talent keeps the established riders honest.

What This Team Represents

The 2026 U.S. snowboard team is 24 riders strong across halfpipe, slopestyle, and snowboard cross. What makes this group compelling isn’t just the medal potential, though there’s plenty of that. It’s the range of stories. Riders like Baumgartner and Thelen who’ve been doing this at the highest level for over a decade. Legends like Chloe Kim attempting to make history. Comebacks like Schaffrick and Pates who walked away and found their way back. Teenage talent like Dhawornvej, Perlmutter, Barbieri, and Martin who represent where snowboarding is heading.

The U.S. leads the all-time medal count with 35. At Beijing 2022, American snowboarders brought home a significant portion of Team USA’s total haul. The expectation in Milan-Cortina is more of the same. But beyond the medal counts and podium predictions, this squad matters because it shows every possible path a snowboard career can take. The prodigies who make it look easy. The grinders who chase it for years. The burnouts who come back. The veterans who refuse to quit. The next generation pushing in.

Opening ceremonies are February 6. Competition starts shortly after. And for these 24 riders, everything they’ve worked for comes down to the next few weeks in northern Italy.

No pressure. Just opportunity.

Red Gerard, the slopestyle gold medalist who famously overslept before winning at the 2018 Olympics, now has his signature order available as a digital menu item. Starting January 15, you can fuel up like Red through the app and website with The Red Gerard Bowl.

What’s in Red’s Go-To Order?

The Red Gerard Bowl packs 48 grams of protein into a straightforward combination: chicken, extra white rice, tomatillo-red chili salsa, cheese, sour cream, and lettuce. It’s a simple, high-carb setup that makes sense for someone spending all day on the mountain.

This partnership is part of “Team Chipotle 2026,” which also features U.S. hockey players Matthew Tkachuk, Brady Tkachuk, Hilary Knight, and Taylor Heise. Red’s the only snowboarder in the lineup, which tracks with his position as one of America’s most recognizable riders.

Why Non-Endemic Sponsors Matter

Here’s the reality: most snowboarders can’t make pro-level money from board companies, outerwear brands, and boot manufacturers alone. The industry doesn’t have the financial depth of stick-and-ball sports. To actually earn a living, riders need partnerships outside traditional snowboard sponsors.

Red’s Chipotle deal represents a smarter direction than the energy drink route that’s dominated action sports for decades. While Monster and Red Bull have pumped serious cash into snowboarding, partnering with a fast-casual chain that actually serves real food feels more authentic. Chipotle is arguably the healthiest major fast-food option out there—fresh ingredients, no artificial additives, customizable nutrition. Plus, the food is legitimately good.

Behind the Scenes

The brand released an “Unwrapped” video series featuring Red and other Team Chipotle athletes discussing how they reached the top of their sports. You can watch Red’s episode here:

They’re also bringing back gold foil-wrapped burritos starting February 6 at all U.S. locations while supplies last—a nice touch for anyone looking to celebrate like they just landed a winning run.

The Last Word

Athlete partnerships with fast-casual chains aren’t new, but seeing a snowboarder get the same treatment as hockey players and tennis pros signals mainstream appeal. Red’s been a superfan for years, and this collaboration feels genuine to anyone who’s grabbed a burrito bowl on the way home from riding.

If you want to try The Red Gerard Bowl, it’s available now exclusively through the app and Chipotle.com.

The 2026 Winter Olympics kick off in Milan Cortina in less than a month, and if you’re expecting snowboarding’s judging controversies to have been resolved since Beijing 2022, I’ve got some disappointing news for you. We’re about to watch this broken system play out on the world’s biggest stage, and the riders who’ve dedicated their lives to progression deserve better.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Olympic snowboarding has been fundamentally flawed since day one, and the people running the show either can’t fix it or don’t want to. The International Ski Federation (FIS) has been snowboarding’s reluctant guardian for nearly three decades, and their track record speaks for itself. Missed grabs scored as perfect executions. History-making runs underscored by points that would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high. Athletes forced to land the best run in halfpipe history twice just to get the score they deserved the first time.

And yet, here we are again. Milano Cortina 2026 is three weeks away, and the core problems haven’t changed.

The Same Script, Different Olympics

If you watched the Beijing 2022 Olympics, you witnessed what might be the most egregious judging failure in snowboarding history. Max Parrot won slopestyle gold with a run that included a glaring mistake: he grabbed his knee instead of his board on his final triple cork 1620. The judges didn’t catch it. Head judge Iztok Sumatic later admitted the panel made a mistake, blaming inadequate camera angles and the pressure to score quickly for live television.

But here’s the thing: Sumatic is a good dude who genuinely cares about snowboarding. The issue isn’t individual judges making honest mistakes under pressure. It’s a framework that sets them up to fail. Four years later, identical infrastructure issues persist. Judges still work under intense time constraints. Camera coverage is still dictated by broadcast requirements rather than judging needs. And FIS, the governing body that’s supposed to advocate for snowboarding, continues to prioritize Olympic tradition and television schedules over getting it right.

Meanwhile, Ayumu Hirano had to land the greatest halfpipe run in history twice because the judges underscored his second run by over four points. Think about that. An athlete risking catastrophic injury had to repeat a historic performance because six professionals couldn’t get the numbers correct the first time. That’s not sport. That’s absurdity.

Mark McMorris, who’s lived through multiple Olympic judging controversies, put it bluntly in Beijing: “FIS doesn’t take care of us as much as they maybe should. They’re not caring about the snowboarding.” He’s correct. And nothing meaningful has changed since he said it.

The Chloe Kim Situation: A Microcosm of Everything Wrong

Two weeks ago, Chloe Kim tore her labrum during a training run in Switzerland. She won’t be able to snowboard again until right before the Olympics begin on February 6. Kim, who’s chasing history as the first woman to win three consecutive halfpipe golds, now faces the prospect of showing up to the biggest contest of her life without adequate preparation.

This isn’t bad luck. This is what happens when the Olympic qualification structure forces elite athletes to compete in a grueling circuit of World Cup events, X Games, and training camps, all while managing injury risk and trying to peak at exactly the right moment. Kim already pulled out of the U.S. Grand Prix in December with a shoulder injury. Now she’s racing against the clock to recover from a torn labrum.

The woman has won eight X Games golds and two Olympic golds. She’s proven everything there is to prove. And yet she’s required to keep grinding through qualifiers and tune-up events that add risk without adding value to her preparation. It’s broken, and everyone knows it.

Kim will likely still be the favorite if she makes it to the start gate healthy. But she shouldn’t have to navigate this obstacle course to defend a title she’s already earned twice.

FIS: The Wrong Organization Running Our Sport

Here’s a fact that should make every snowboarder uncomfortable: the organization running Olympic snowboarding is the International Ski Federation. Not a snowboard organization. Not a body created by snowboarders for snowboarders. A skiing federation that was handed control of our sport when the IOC decided to include snowboarding in the Olympics back in the ‘90s.

The cultural disconnect is real and it matters. FIS operates with a skiing mentality applied to a snowboarding context. They prioritize things that work for skiing but make zero sense for snowboarding. They answer to the IOC first and the snowboard community second. And when push comes to shove, broadcast television requirements and Olympic tradition win every single time.

Mark McMorris nailed it when he said judges are “doing this almost as a hobby” because they’re not compensated adequately for the pressure and responsibility of Olympic-level judging. How can we expect professional-caliber judging when we’re not providing professional-caliber support, training, and compensation for the judges?

The answer is simple: we can’t. But FIS has shown no meaningful interest in fixing this. An entire Olympic cycle has passed, and identical systemic issues remain.

The Natural Selection Alternative

The timing of Travis Rice’s Natural Selection tour makes the Olympic situation even more frustrating. Here’s a contest format that works: natural terrain, rider-focused judging, production values that enhance rather than compromise the competition, and an emphasis on the kind of snowboarding that actually matters to the community.

Natural Selection isn’t perfect, but it represents what snowboarding contests can be when snowboarders are running the show. Riders want to compete in it. The judging makes sense. The terrain showcases skills that translate to real-world snowboarding. And there’s genuine excitement around the events because they feel authentic to what our culture is about.

The Olympics should be learning from Natural Selection. Instead, we’re stuck with a format that’s more about television spectacle than authentic riding. FIS could implement better camera systems for judges. They could adjust time constraints to allow for more accurate scoring. They could compensate judges professionally and provide better training. They could listen to the athletes who are putting their bodies on the line.

But they haven’t, and there’s no indication they will.

The Women’s Snowboarding Paradox

Here’s where this gets complicated: for all its flaws, Olympic snowboarding matters more to women’s progression than anyone wants to admit. Research by Darrah Reid-McLean found that less than one percent of video parts in major snowboard films featured women. Meanwhile, at the Olympics, exactly 50 percent of the spots go to women.

The Olympics provide a platform, funding structure, and career pathway for female snowboarders that simply doesn’t exist to the same degree in video-based snowboarding. Events like the Uninvited Invitational and women’s divisions at Natural Selection are closing this gap, but the Olympics remain the most reliable platform for female riders to build careers and gain recognition.

So while men’s snowboarding might not need the Games, women’s snowboarding absolutely does, at least for now. That’s frustrating because it means we can’t write off this platform entirely, even when it repeatedly fails our riders.

The solution isn’t boycotting the Games. The solution is demanding they serve the athletes and culture rather than using us for television ratings.

What Needs to Change (But Probably Won’t)

The fixes aren’t complicated. They require FIS and the IOC to care about getting it right:

Give judges access to multiple camera angles and slow-motion replay. The technology exists. Use it.

Eliminate time pressure to score quickly for television broadcasts. Accuracy matters more than speed.

Compensate judges professionally and provide ongoing training and accountability.

Include rider representatives in decisions about contest format, judging criteria, and rule changes.

Design qualification systems that don’t force elite athletes to risk injury in meaningless tune-up events.

Prioritize rider safety and fair competition over television schedules and traditional Olympic protocols.

These changes would dramatically improve Olympic snowboarding. They would reduce controversies, increase fairness, and create contests that better represent what we’re about. None of them are technically difficult. They require FIS to prioritize snowboarding over their other interests.

And that’s precisely why they won’t happen.

The Last Word

I want to be excited about Milano Cortina 2026. I want to watch Chloe Kim chase history and see the next generation of riders push progression on the world’s biggest stage. I want Olympic snowboarding to be a genuine celebration of our culture.

But I also know what we’re walking into. Flawed judging infrastructure. FIS leadership that treats snowboarding as an afterthought. A disconnect between what the Olympics pretend to be and what they deliver.

Riders will put down incredible performances. New heroes will emerge. Progression will happen despite the system, not because of it. And when the judging controversies inevitably surface, we’ll have identical conversations we’ve had after every Games since snowboarding was included.

Our culture built this from nothing and deserves contests that reflect those values rather than compromise them for television ratings. The athletes risking everything on that halfpipe wall or launching off those jumps require infrastructure that works.

Until FIS and the IOC fix the fundamental issues with Olympic snowboarding, we’re not watching the sport’s pinnacle. We’re watching a flawed approximation, dressed up with pageantry and broadcast production.

The riders will show up and throw down anyway, because that’s what they do. But three decades into Olympic snowboarding, we shouldn’t still be having these conversations about these issues. The fact that we are tells you everything you need to know about who’s really running this show.

Spoiler alert: it’s not the snowboarders.

What separates a $75 Wildhorn from a $283 Smith I/O Mag when they both use magnets? Everything.

Magnetic lens systems have revolutionized goggle technology, but the gap between budget and premium engineering is massive. This guide explains what you’re getting at every price point and why interchangeable lenses fundamentally change how you ride.

Why Lens Swapping Actually Matters

Light conditions change constantly on the mountain. That perfect 15% VLT bluebird lens becomes dangerously dark when clouds roll in. Your 60% VLT storm lens turns the world into an overexposed mess when sun breaks through.

Riding with the wrong tint isn’t just uncomfortable; it’s dangerous. In flat light with a dark lens, you can’t see terrain variations or ice patches. Storm lenses in bright sun cause eye strain and reduced peripheral awareness. With quick-swap capability, you optimize vision in real-time instead of compromising for two-thirds of your day.

Traditional clip-in systems were such hassles that riders never swapped lenses. Magnetic technology takes 3-5 seconds even with gloves, which means you’ll actually use your spare lenses and experience the vision benefits interchangeable systems provide.

How Magnetic Systems Work

Premium systems like Smith’s MAG use 8 magnetic contact points plus dual mechanical locks. Even if magnets fail, side levers keep lenses attached. The magnets are N52 grade, the strongest available.

Anon’s Magna-Tech uses fewer but more powerful magnets. Dragon’s Swiftlock combines magnets with a single release lever. Budget brands like Wildhorn use rare-earth magnets with side-clip locks for reliable retention at accessible prices.

The difference isn’t magnet count. It’s magnetic field strength, manufacturing precision, and backup systems. Entry-level prioritizes value; premium adds engineering refinement for bomb-proof retention.

Safety note: Four years ago, snowboarder Shelby Perry’s magnetic lens popped off during a tree crash, resulting in permanent eye injury. Modern systems have dramatically improved with mechanical backup locks and stronger magnets. Budget goggles today are far safer than early implementations.

The Price-Performance Breakdown

Budget ($75-$100): Wildhorn Roca & Pipeline Wildhorn earned its US Ski Team supplier status by delivering legitimate performance at accessible prices. The Roca Pro ($79, spherical) and Pipeline ($89) feature rare-earth magnets with clip locks, Aurora lens technology with anti-fog coatings, and triple-layer foam. These provide honest optical performance backed by lifetime warranties. Perfect for riders logging 10-30 days who want magnetic convenience without premium investment.

Mid-Range ($99-$200): Where Value Lives The Wildhorn Maxfield Pro L ($99) delivers 185° Outlook field of view and Fenom lens technology, enhanced clarity and contrast through custom tapered design. Double anti-fog coating offers 3x effectiveness. At this price, you’re getting optical tech that typically costs $200+.

The Maxfield Pro L Photochromic ($160) is Wildhorn’s flagship, adding auto-adjusting lens technology to the same platform. The photochromic range covers wide VLT from bright sun to low light. This competes with Glade’s Fathom+ ($175-200) and costs half what Smith charges for photochromic models.

Glade Fathom+ ($199) features award-winning REVEAL technology that adjusts in 15 seconds with premium toric optics. The 4K upgrade delivers exceptional flat-light performance.

Premium ($250-$350): Engineering Excellence Smith I/O Mag ($283) is the gold standard. Eight magnetic contacts plus dual levers create bomb-proof retention. Spherical ChromaPop lenses filter wavelengths that cause color confusion, revealing terrain details other goggles can’t render. Available in three sizes plus low-bridge fits.

Anon M5 ($315) features flat-toric lens design with Perceive technology rivaling ChromaPop. The smoothest magnetic operation; lenses twist out and snap back with precision. Includes magnetic face mask for extreme conditions.

Dragon NFXs Mag OTG ($260) offers frameless design with Lumalens optics and Over-The-Glasses compatibility. The Solace IR lens blocks 99% of infrared rays, reducing eye fatigue on bright days.

What to Buy

Best Overall: Smith I/O Mag ($283). Unmatched ChromaPop optics, flawless magnetic system, inspiring build quality.

Best Value: Wildhorn Maxfield Pro L ($99). Professional-grade 185° FOV and Fenom optics at a price that challenges anything under $200.

Best Photochromic: Wildhorn Maxfield Pro L Photochromic ($160). Auto-adjusting lens tech, premium field of view, for less than competitors charge for standard magnetic systems.

Best Budget: Wildhorn Pipeline ($89). Functional magnetic swapping, comfortable fit, massive cylindrical field of view. Real value from a US Ski Team supplier.

The Last Word

Interchangeable lenses change your riding experience. Optimizing vision for conditions makes you faster, safer, more confident. Magnetic systems make this actually usable.

For 30+ day riders, Smith or Anon deliver optical advantages that compound over thousands of turns. For maximum value, Wildhorn redefined accessible pricing. The Maxfield Pro L competes with $200-300 goggles. The Photochromic brings premium tech for less than most charge for basic magnetic systems. The Roca and Pipeline prove quality doesn’t require premium pricing.

Choose the price point matching your budget, but don’t compromise on the core benefit: swapping lenses when conditions change. That’s what makes modern goggles worth the investment.