Alex Hall takes second place in Men’s Ski Street Style at the X Games Street Style Pro at Copper … [+] Mountain
In freestyle skiing and snowboarding, rail jam has a casual connotation. One thinks of skiers and snowboarders lapping through a terrain park—on a tow rope or by foot, in a set order or not—performing tricks more for one another than for judges.
Indeed, the beauty of rail jams is their accessibility; all that’s required to participate is a board or a pair of skis and boots. No $275 day pass or $1,000 flight to a mountain town needed here. For Midwest and East Coast skiers and riders without access to elevation or powder—or both—rails are the most fun you can have on your board or skis.
But that doesn’t mean you won’t see plenty of rail jams out West—or that they’re always casual and loosely structured. With an increasing participant base and growing sponsor support, rails, as much as halfpipe and slopestyle, are a legitimate way for a freeskier or snowboarder to launch a career.
That was especially apparent at the new X Games Street Style Pro at Copper Mountain, which ran concurrently with the U.S. Grand Prix halfpipe competition on December 20 and 21.
The Street Style Pro, which saw male and female skiers and snowboarders compete back-to-back in a jam session format, was the first to be held under a new partnership between X Games and U.S. Ski & Snowboard.
The X Games Street Style Pro ran one month out from X Games Aspen 2025, where ski and snowboard street style will debut as full-fledged medal events.
“One of our big goals is growing the visibility of the sport and our athletes, and we do that through our events and opportunities for our athletes to compete,” U.S. Ski & Snowboard CMO Guy Slattery said. “We know X Games is a massive part of that.”
X Games and U.S. Ski & Snowboard have until now been relatively siloed entities—one reason being that X Games was formerly owned by ESPN, while competitor NBC owns Olympics media rights.
“So once X Games became private, we realized we had an opportunity to talk to them and figure out how we could collaborate more,” Slattery said.
From the X Games side, new CEO Jeremy Bloom—a former competitive skier and two-time Olympian—has served on the U.S. Ski & Snowboard board of trustees for several years and is uniquely well positioned to bring the two entities into the fold together.
“We agree that collectively we’re the tide that lifts all boats,” Bloom said. “The more that we can do together to build heroes and tell our athletes’ stories and garner as many fans as we possibly can to watch the spectaculcar things these world’s-best athletes can do, the better both organizations are.”
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Thus, the Street Style Pro at Copper Mountain represents the two organizations “coming together in a way we think is synergistic and can better support our athletes,” Bloom said. And both parties agree Copper was the ideal host.
Copper is no stranger to hosting world-class events; in the early 2000s, it was the Gravity Games, where the resort debuted its brand-new superpipe, and then U.S. Grands Prix and Dew Tour followed.
But Dew Tour is off the schedule for 2025—and possibly forever. So Copper Mountain jumped at the opportunity to fold another large-scale event with X Games into its U.S. Grand Prix competition weekend.
“It’s very exciting for us,” said Copper Mountain president and general manager Dustin Lyman, adding the resort is regularly sought out to host these kinds of events.
“We’ve been building our 22-foot halfpipe for over 20 years now, and we have a highly capable team of experts that are able to put on these events,” Lyman said. “The street style component that X Games is hosting here is something that we have done before with Dew Tour and it was just incredibly successful, so we know we can do it. To be able to fit it in with the Grand Prix and combine the two events is a perfect fit for them and a perfect fit for us.”
The magnitude of the U.S. Grand Prix—with Olympic qualification points on the line—during the day compared with the party atmosphere of the Street Style Pro at night offered something for everyone over the weekend. Concerts kicked off immediately following the evening’s competitions.
“Street style is a really popular event,” Lyman said. “People love it, and especially a nighttime event, we always draw a ton of people to participate and be part of the energy for that. It’s just really fun.”
What’s more, in 2022 Copper Mountain’s Woodward facility became an official training center for U.S. Ski & Snowboard athletes in the lead-up to the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympics, deepening the relationship between the national governing body and the resort.
X Games historically has been almost fully invite-only, but the Street Style pro acted as a qualifying event for the new X Games Aspen street competitions—the top three athletes in each discipline earned an automatic invite to Aspen.
If any athletes who finished on the podium had already received an invitation to X Games Aspen, the automatic berth went to the next-highest-placing rider(s) or skier(s).
The Street Style Pro, held on December 21, itself had a qualifier on December 20—the Next X Street Style competition—that ran in conjunction with U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s Revolution Tour. The governing body describes Rev Tour as “a stepping stone for athletes making the transition from competing at the grassroots level to the elite level.”
Of the 11 ski and snowboard athletes who competed in the Next X qualifier—half of whom also compete on Rev Tour—five advanced to the final. In some instances, that meant beating out Olympians and X Games gold medalists.
There are long-running rail jams across the country—some supported by big brands, such as Red Bull, or put on by national organizations like the United States of America Snowboard and Freeski Association (USASA), which holds its national championships at Copper Mountain.
But competing at a marquee event like X Games can change the trajectory of an athlete’s career.
“I’ve always seen X Games as the pinnacle of our sport, excluding maybe the Olympics only because it’s once every four years, but X Games growing up has always been the top,” said Alex Hall, who, in 2022, became the first male skier to medal in three disciplines at one X Games (big air, slopestyle and knuckle huck), then followed up that feat with a gold medal in slopestyle at the Beijing 2022 Games.
Of course, to view rail jams solely as an avenue for up-and-coming skiers and riders to launch their freestyle careers would be to miss the point.
To be sure, street style events should be included in freestyle competitions alongside slopestyle, halfpipe and big air as another competitive avenue for elite athletes. But at the heart of rail jams is spending time in the park with your friends.
“I think rail jams stand for something a little different than the rest of competition skiing in that they really represent the core of the sport,” said Olympic and X Games gold medalist Eileen Gu, who took first in women’s freeski halfpipe at the U.S. Grand Prix and then, hours later, won the Street Style Pro. She was the only athlete to participate in both events.
“The emphasis most definitely is on fun, it’s on personality, creativity, use of course,” continued Gu, who has fond memories of competing in USASA rail events at Copper Mountain when she was 10 years old. “But then it’s also mixed with the competition aspect with needing to link a run and of course valuing technicality.”
Colby Stevenson wins Men’s Ski Street Style at the X Games Street Style Pro at Copper Mountain
Veterans, like Gu, shared that they were inspired by the level of competition across the board, while up-and-comers were gobsmacked to be competing against skiers and riders they had emulated their whole careers.
Indeed, while many of the athletes who landed on the podium across the four disciplines were decorated veterans, not all were.
Landing on the women’s ski podium behind Gu were two skiers—Ella Andrews and Marion Balsamo—who had qualified the previous day at Next X. Andrews is also on the U.S. Rev Tour team.
In men’s ski, multi-X Games medalist and Olympic silver medalist Colby Stevenson took first, while Hall took second. Rounding out that discipline’s podium was rising slopestyle star Mikkel Brusletto Kaupang, who qualified into the final through the Next X event.
Because Hall and Stevenson had already earned invites to X Games Aspen, Evan McEachran and Siver Voll, who finished fourth and fifth, respectively, earned spots at X Games Aspen in addition to Kaupang.
In women’s snowboard, 15-year-old Lily Dhawornvej, who hails from Frisco, Colorado—just down the road from Copper Mountain—wowed the crowd and judges with her technical and stylish run. She finished third behind Iris Pham and Lex Hernandez-Roland, and all three riders earned spots at X Games Aspen next month.
Copper Mountain local and U.S. Revolution Tour snowboarder Lily Dhawornvej took third place at the X … [+] Games Street Style Pro and qualified for X Games Aspen 2025
In men’s snowboard, Frank Jobin, who finished first, and Benny Milam, who finished third, had been directly invited to the Street Style Pro final. But 16-year-old LJ Henriquez, who finished second, had gone through the Next X qualifier—where he’d finished first.
Henriquez hails from New Jersey—not a major snowboarding hub by any means, but he cut his teeth lapping the indoor park at Big Snow American Dream in East Rutherford, getting valuable freestyle reps.
Now the 16-year-old is on the Burton team and dialing in his slopestyle spins by training out West—and next month, he can introduce himself to the world at X Games Aspen.
When the judges called Henriquez’s name for second place, his friends and family—including fellow members of the TDI crew, who captured everything on film—exploded into cheers. By the time Henriquez was ready for his media interviews, he had lost his voice from all the screaming.
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“I don’t even know what to say,” Henriquez said. “Didn’t even think I was going to make the podium and they called me for second? I’m losing my mind, like, ‘What the hell is going on?!’”
Henriquez’s next goal? “An X Games podium in Aspen.”
And then? “Wherever the road takes me!”
It was exactly the kind of story the Street Style Pro was meant to produce—giving a rising star an opportunity to show off their skills and earn an invite to The Show at X Games Aspen in January.
In a few years, Henriquez may well look back at that X Games rail jam on a chilly December night at Copper Mountain as the inflection point that changed his career forever.
