Are you ready for the Colorado Corkscrew? Or maybe the Colorado Chunder? The Denver Double Grabs?
“I am talking to a big ownership group in Denver,” X Games CEO Jeremy Bloom, the former Olympian, Loveland native and ex-CU Buff told The Denver Post recently. “They would want it to be the Denver — the ‘Colorado Somethings,’ fill in the blank. So (it’s) very possible.”
The “it” in question would be a team in “The X Games League,” one of the cornerstones of the extreme sport circuit’s changes planned for 2026 and beyond.
X Games Aspen, which is slated to wrap up Saturday night, featured new wrinkles such as AI judging and betting on events. The games plan to make even bigger leaps next year, most notably via a Formula 1-style calendar with pro-sports-styled teams that will compete for points over an eight-city tour/league schedule in 2026, with four stops in the winter and four in the summer.
Bloom, who joined the X Games as CEO this past December, added that potential owners in Denver, and other markets “will be able to pick the city that they tether their team to, so we’ll see. They’ll be able to select 10 athletes (for the franchise) per draft, and the goal is to find the athletes that have the highest on-podium percentage — because that’s how you score points. It’s pretty simple: The more podiums, the more team points that you get.”
The Winter and Summer X Games will soon feature 10-athlete teams composed of five men and five women each. Those teams will feature nicknames and identities linked to a specific city or region.
The team contracts will also include salaries, travel stipends and health care, giving the X Games more of an NFL/NBA/MLB/NHL feel and less of the one-shot or two-shots-a-year approach more akin to boxing and combat sports.
“We’re at a tipping point,” Bloom said during a recent interview with The Post. “We’re at a point of transformational change … if you think about adjacent leagues to us and some of the major (North American sports) leagues, there’s very few things you can do. It’s a slow, incremental change, it’s a slow process. It’s like a big cruise ship, you want to turn left, it’ll take a couple of days. We’re a bit more of a jet ski.
“I think we’re just scraping the surface. I really do. And it’s not going to be an overnight change, but we’re going to build a culture of experimentation. We’re going to try a lot of new things. And we have some big ideas.”
Bloom also wants the X Games’ media strategy to move, so to speak, to where the kids are. While ESPN and the Disney family remain bedrocks for core coverage, future content will put a greater focus on social media apps such as Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. One of the models is how Netflix’s “Drive to Survive” series helped F1, long a niche sport even for auto-racing fans in America, to find a foothold with U.S. viewers in recent years, particularly viewers 35 and under.
“I want our events to be more compelling,” Bloom said. “And what I mean by that is, sometimes you watch X Games of the past, especially over the past couple of years, and it’s sort of feel like I’m watching practice — cool practice, but practice. Where are the riveting moments? If I think about what was the most special, riveting, incredible moment in snowboarding history, I think it was Sean White’s last run at the Olympics. Why do I think that? Because he messed up on his first two runs and he had one shot, not three — he had one shot, on the last run, to win Olympic gold or not. Everybody knows he was riding off into the sunset.
“… In the famous words of Eminem: ‘If you had one shot, one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted …’ He didn’t say two shots. Or three shots. So we want to experiment with the format. We’re looking for our Tiger Woods wearing red on a Sunday moment, where everyone’s got to tune in and (there’s) a high amount of anxiety and pressure, and all those types of things. And when the athletes win, you can see what it means to them — you can really see it (with them) and you can see it on the crowd.”
Bloom noted that while a team based in Denver is a possibility in the new league format, a tour spot for Aspen, an X Games fixture for almost three decades, is still being worked out. The ex-CU football standout said that 35 cities from around the world have put in bids to host the Games as part of its expanded schedule.
“We are going to do everything in our power to make (a Colorado date) happen, for reasons that are obvious and maybe some that are not,” he said. “(The bid cities) are not only inviting us to their cities, they’re paying for us to go — and that’s where there’s a bit of a difference between sort of the legacy model and where we’re going. Change is hard. And so we have some work to do to remain in Aspen. We hope we do, truly.
“By all means, we’re going to try, as much as we can. But we’ll see.”
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