Just relax you are snowboarding in a dumpster fire. A big week in snowboard competition news, let's get into it.
Torment Weather Report: Never too late for a winter storm warning. While most of the United States is experiencing historic heatwaves, two Northwestern states are expecting a short-lived winter storm delivering up to 14″ of snow in the Montana and Idaho Mountain Passes.
There's a 48-hour probability of snow between Monday morning and Tuesday evening, and after checking the National Weather Services' snowfall report, it looks promising. 1 to 4 inches in Butte to Anaconda, 2 to 5 inches at Ovando, Georgetown Lake, Macdonald Pass, and Homestake Pass, and 5 to 14 inches in higher terrain.
We'd be surprised if you haven't heard the news surroundings Shaun White's latest endeavor. Not Whitespace, not his investment in We Are Camp (parent company to HCSC), but a completely new halfpipe contest series set to "redefine future of winter sports competition." Who knows if that Shaun-proclaimed end result will play out, but what we do know is there will be a $1.5 million purse and a head-to-head bracket system to get to that coin.
The Snow League is definitely a breath of fresh air in snowboarding's competitive landscape, but at the moment we're more concerned with 10 things the Flying Tomato can't live without. #3 is a non-negotiable.
To further the conversation around progressive contest formats, X Games just unveiled a brand new concept to the world of action sports. Coincidental? Planned competition (pun intended)? Probably a bit of both, but either way a new contest league is coming in 2026. What differentiates this from The Snow League is that the X Games will be focusing on cross-discipline teams with both men and women.
“In essence, we’ve used Formula One as a model for this new X Games League,” said Jeff Moorad, Executive Chairman of X Games and Principal of MSP Sports Capital. “To that end, we are creating a year-round calendar and introducing new commercial opportunities to accelerate the overall growth of X Games. These opportunities will provide a secure and sustainable future for our most important stakeholders – the athletes."
You can't bring up Brown Cinema's Knights of the Brown Cinema without reminiscing on Brown's eponymous project from 2018. Those days laid the groundwork for everything you witnessed this past fall, and a lot of that can be traced back to Brock Nielsen and Keegan Valiaka.
Those two are an integral part of Brown Cinema, and two days ago Brock, the man behind it all, surprised us with a reedit of Keegan Valiaka's footage from their first project. Some footage from 2017-2019 you've probably already seen, and some you definitely haven't.
Bringing it back to 2020 with an Arthur Longo ollie that landed on the cover of Issue THREE. He's been boosting even higher since then, and recently did an interview with Whiteout Mag recapping the past season. Following a broken rib that kept him out of the Natural Selection Tour this year, he discusses his upcoming project with Cannon Cummins and Jadyn Chomlack, his transition to painting post-injury, and his new collection with Volcom.
"I started painting when I was living in Berlin about five years ago. And I developed this theme around human’s domination of nature and the animals. In one way the animals could be a symbol of a god, or something… and in another way, we just kill them and eat them. So it’s something I like to show with humans in opposition to nature. So that’s very generally my theme, and I think it gives the art a deeper meaning."
Instagram Clip of the Week: Heal up, Marcus Wilson.