For the first time in three years, action sports fans will have the chance to attend Summer X Games live and in person this July.
And what they’ll find is a reimagined and revamped eight-day, multi-city tour, culminating in the skateboard, BMX and Moto X medal events on finals weekend July 21–23.
The tour will begin in San Diego on July 16 with Real Street and Real BMX best trick medal events, featuring 10 athletes from both skateboard and BMX.
Then, the event will move to Los Angeles with a launch party and pop-up competition before moving to Ventura County Fairgrounds and Event Center for finals weekend. True to form, the three-day event will also include a festival and live musical performances.
X Games California 2023 will be a ticketed event through Fever, and fans can join a waitlist for early access to tickets, which go on public sale May 10 at 9 a.m. ET.
Among the 150-plus invited athletes who will compete at this year’s event are Sky Brown, who just took gold at the skateboard park world championships ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympics; vert and big air technician Elliot Sloan, whose private backyard Sloan Yard park hosted X Games vert events in 2022; Nyjah Huston, who just recently returned to competition at SLS after recovering from a torn ACL; and women’s street gold medalist from X Games 2022 Momiji Nishiya, also fresh off an SLS podium finish.
It projects to be a statement event for X Games’ new ownership, private equity firm MSP Sports Capital, which acquired a majority interest in X Games from ESPN Productions in October 2022. The X Games Aspen event in January was largely already planned when MSP Sports Capital and new X Games CEO Steve Flisler took the reins, so Summer X Games 2023 is the first event the team can truly put its stamp on.
Flisler previously served as vice president of original content at Twitch, and he also has a background in live event production in the esports as well as stick-and-ball realms, including NBCUniversal and the Olympics.
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As such, Flisler is uniquely well-positioned to carry out the new vision for X Games as a standalone business, which is marrying what fans see in real time on the broadcast or in person with a robust universe of supplemental content, including qualifying events prior to finals weekend and behind-the-scenes with the athletes.
For fans who have watched X Games for many years, what will look different this time around?
“You’ll see a really deep storyline that comes together over two months and specifically eight days as we get into mid-July,” Flisler told me by phone.
“We’re hard at work building out our home base where our broadcast is going to take place and how all of our athletes and the legends participate in that broadcast,” Flisler added. “We’re going to continue to include some new sport disciplines as medal events as well as demos. Ultimately, we hope to be awarding some amazing medals to even new athletes—there’s a lot of up-and-comers on the womens’ and men’s side, and we’re hoping we can stay true to positioning the athletes at the center of X Games, telling their stories, giving a lot of content both across our live broadcast and across the social platforms, so people get to know a whole new generation of athletes.”
The most dramatic change for this summer’s event is that it’s not a singular event at all, but rather a whole season of competitions leading up to finals weekend.
On May 12–14, X Games Japan 2023 in Chiba will kick off the summer season, with a number of athletes qualifying through to finals weekend. Then in June, Tony Hawk’s Vert Alert, which is in its third year in Salt Lake City, will serve as an official X Games qualifying event, with the men’s and women’s podium finishers clinching their spots in the summer finals.
X Games Japan will also see skateboarding legend Hawk return to competition in the best trick event. He had planned to do that last year, following up on his surprise reappearance in X Games competition in 2021’s best trick event for the first time since he retired in 2003, but he has been on a long road to recovery after breaking his femur in March 2022.
Hawk has been serving in an advisory and ambassador role for X Games—Flisler has found his conversations with Hawk invaluable as he steers the ship into the future—but Hawk the competitor returning to the lineup will make for appointment television.
Fliser describes Hawk wearing three different hats in the X Games world—Hawk the competitor, Hawk the broadcaster and Hawk the ambassador/advisor.
“It’s a privilege and honor for us to have Tony as part of our extended team and learn from everything that he has done wearing those three different hats over the years,” Flisler said.
By folding Vert Alert into the road to X Games, the brand continues to be a home for that discipline, which did not become an Olympic sport like its park and street counterparts and which has few other medal-event competitions within action sports. Advocating for the continued success of vert has become Hawk’s driving focus.
“I didn’t want Vert Alert to be this auxiliary event that was on its own; I wanted it to be much more included in other skate events and spoken about in the same light,” Hawk told me. “Having it become an X Games qualifier is step in the right direction. Bringing that discipline more awareness is great. I’m also grateful we’ve had the support form the Utah Sports Commission every year, so much so that this year we have an arena, which is a big step forward. It does seem to grow every year.”
It all ties into Flisler and the new leadership team’s overarching goal: to leverage all these events to build up the stakes for X Games finals weekend and to get more athletes involved in the competition series.
“We’re being very deliberate about building out the summer season to really accomplish a couple of things,” Flisler said. “The primary one is we start to build the stakes of qualifiers, get to know the athletes, hear their stories—what’s going to be tracking all the way to mid-July.”
Much of Summer X Games’ 2023 programming will look familiar, but the brand does have some surprises up its sleeve that will be announced over the coming weeks.
In addition to the traditional lineup—skateboard park, street, street best trick, vert and vert best trick; BMX park, park best trick, street, dirt and dirt best trick; Moto X best trick, quarterpipe high air and best whip—there will be new sport disciplines and new sport demos joining the slate.
Though X Games has not announced or confirmed this, if Vert Alert men’s and women’s podium finishers qualify for finals weekend, it stands to reason women’s skateboard vert is returning to the X Games program for the first time since 2011. That would be an exciting development as the women’s side of the sport has exploded with talent and competitors.
While the best way to enjoy all the elite action sports athletes at X Games have to offer is watching in person, for those who can’t make it to Southern California, 50-plus hours of competition will be broadcast on ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC and streamed online.
The last time X Games was held in its traditional format with live spectators was in 2019 at Minneapolis’ U.S. Bank Stadium. X Games Minneapolis 2020 was meant to be the last one under ESPN’s contract with Minneapolis, where the event had been held since 2017, but it was canceled due to Covid-19.
In 2021 and 2022, X Games got creative, holding its slate of competitions at private training facilities throughout Southern California, with no fans in attendance.
Now, in 2023, X Games is seeing a major investment from California tourism nonprofit Visit California as well as Amtrak Pacific Surfliner, whose Ventura stop is part of the Fairgrounds parking lot, steps away from the location of X Games finals weekend.
“For decades, California has been the epicenter of action sports, producing some of the most talented athletes in the world. It’s only fitting that the X Games make their way back to the ultimate state for play to celebrate the culture that inspired these incredible events,” Visit California president & CEO Caroline Beteta said.
The athletes are excited about finals weekend in Ventura, as well.
“I love any excuse to visit Ventura,” Encinitas native and Olympic skateboarder Bryce Wettstein said. “Ventura is a quaint little beach town right on the ocean, with lots of great fish restaurants and fun breweries. You can walk almost everywhere through the small downtown. There's also a long pier you can walk out on too. There’s also at least six skateparks in Ventura as well.”
Skateboarder Curren Caples said that he was “hyped” to have X Games coming to his hometown.
While Moto X athlete Axell Hodges enjoyed the unique opportunity to host closed competitions at his private facility in 2021 and ’22, he’s also looking forward to a full, open event this year.
“After two years at the Slayground, it’s actually going to be really dope to ride in front of thousands of fans again at Ventura X Games,” Hodges said. “I’m stoked!”
Marlyss Auster, Visit Ventura CEO/President, said that hosting X Games is a realization of a longtime goal.
“This has been a vision of mine, the Visit Ventura team and Ventura partners to build relationships to bring an internationally recognized event to Ventura,” Auster said. “The brand alignment is spot on and I am thrilled that the X Games will be a part of the fabric of our community.”
