X Games Introduces AI Judge for Snowboarding Event: A Glimpse into the Future of Sports Judging

Was that a 900 or 1080 on the halfpipe? X Games can now ask AI.

At this week's Winter X Games in Aspen, Colorado, judges will carefully cast their eyes over the athletes, as they have since the first edition of the games in 1997, scrutinizing each spin, flip and grab. But this year, another party will be unofficially weighing in as well: an AI judge. During the snowboard SuperPipe competitions, video cameras will capture the moves of each athlete, and artificial intelligence will take that information, do what artificial intelligence does and provide a score for the routine.

AI experiment in halfpipe judging at X Games will give snowboarders a glimpse into the future

The X Games will experiment judging halfpipe runs this week in Aspen using artificial intelligence, the cutting-edge technology that could someday play a role in the way subjectively judged sports are scored. Long a trendsetter in action sports, the X Games and its new CEO, freestyle skiing great Jeremy Bloom, teamed with Google founder Sergey Brin to build the technology. Using Google Cloud tools including Vertex AI, Bloom thinks this experiment has potential to change the game on halfpipes, then maybe on slopestyle courses, skating rinks and anywhere a judge is used to score a contest. "Part of subjective sports, we see it all over the place, is that even at their best, humans can get it wrong," said Bloom, who was a freestyle skier at two Olympics while also playing college football at Colorado. "Sometimes getting it wrong has huge implications. What if we could give judges superpowers and they could see things they couldn't see with the human eye, and this technology could help inform them?" The specter of a judging mistake lingers over every high-stakes contest, and even with its more laid-back vibe, snowboarding, which is now a fixture in the Olympic program, is no exception. At the last Winter Games in Beijing, the sport narrowly avoided a potential scandal in the men's halfpipe final. Japan's Ayumu Hirano landed the most difficult trick in the sport -- a triple cork -- as part of a strong, top-to-bottom run, but was ranked behind another rider who didn't do the trick after two rounds. Snowboarding experts were aghast on social media. Had Hirano not pulled off the trick again on his third round, his score from Round 2 wouldn't have been enough for the gold medal he eventually won. In another episode, Canadian slopestyler Max Parrot acknowledged not grabbing his board on a run that earned him a gold medal, a key element that judges missed but that could be picked up on close review of the video. The AI at the X Games this week won't have any impact on the official scoring, but will be a gauge of what's possible in the future. Bloom said thousands of hours of halfpipe footage, along with the judging criteria, have been loaded into a system that will be shown on the TV telecast and be made available to the live judges. The AI will be programmed to watch haflpipe practice and predict the top three finishers. Then its powers will be used to judge and commentate on three different riders as they go down the halfpipe. "It's early days, but the technology sort of blows your mind," Bloom said. "It's the power of what it can do when you give it clear direction. It's pretty amazing what this thing can do." In snowboarding, judges look at elements like the height of the jumps, the difficulty of the tricks and how well they're executed. They ultimately deliver scores on a 100-point scale based on how runs stack up against each other. It's a nuance unlike figure skating or gymnastics, where individual tricks have specific point values. Bloom says all that is being taken into account as they work through the experiment. He does not envision a future with no human judges. "I don't think this replaces the judges," Bloom said, "but I think it gives them power to ensure objectivity."

AI experiment in halfpipe judging at X Games will give snowboarders a glimpse into the future

The X Games will experiment judging halfpipe runs this week in Aspen using artificial intelligence, the cutting-edge technology that could someday play a role in the way subjectively judged sports are scored. Long a trendsetter in action sports, the X Games and its new CEO, freestyle skiing great Jeremy Bloom, teamed with Google founder Sergey Brin to build the technology. Using Google Cloud tools including Vertex AI, Bloom thinks this experiment has potential to change the game on halfpipes, then maybe on slopestyle courses, skating rinks and anywhere a judge is used to score a contest. "Part of subjective sports, we see it all over the place, is that even at their best, humans can get it wrong," said Bloom, who was a freestyle skier at two Olympics while also playing college football at Colorado. "Sometimes getting it wrong has huge implications. What if we could give judges superpowers and they could see things they couldn't see with the human eye, and this technology could help inform them?" The specter of a judging mistake lingers over every high-stakes contest, and even with its more laid-back vibe, snowboarding, which is now a fixture in the Olympic program, is no exception. At the last Winter Games in Beijing, the sport narrowly avoided a potential scandal in the men's halfpipe final. Japan's Ayumu Hirano landed the most difficult trick in the sport -- a triple cork -- as part of a strong, top-to-bottom run, but was ranked behind another rider who didn't do the trick after two rounds. Snowboarding experts were aghast on social media. Had Hirano not pulled off the trick again on his third round, his score from Round 2 wouldn't have been enough for the gold medal he eventually won. In another episode, Canadian slopestyler Max Parrot acknowledged not grabbing his board on a run that earned him a gold medal, a key element that judges missed but that could be picked up on close review of the video. The AI at the X Games this week won't have any impact on the official scoring, but will be a gauge of what's possible in the future. Bloom said thousands of hours of halfpipe footage, along with the judging criteria, have been loaded into a system that will be shown on the TV telecast and be made available to the live judges. The AI will be programmed to watch halfpipe practice and predict the top three finishers. Then its powers will be used to judge and commentate on three different riders as they go down the halfpipe. "It's early days, but the technology sort of blows your mind," Bloom said. "It's the power of what it can do when you give it clear direction. It's pretty amazing what this thing can do." In snowboarding, judges look at elements like the height of the jumps, the difficulty of the tricks and how well they're executed. They ultimately deliver scores on a 100-point scale based on how runs stack up against each other. It's a nuance unlike figure skating or gymnastics, where individual tricks have specific point values. Bloom says all that is being taken into account as they work through the experiment. He does not envision a future with no human judges. "I don't think this replaces the judges," Bloom said, "but I think it gives them power to ensure objectivity." © 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Winter X Games Will Test A.I. Judging for Snowboarding

Snowboarding is the latest sport to embrace technology as a judge, at least partly, at this week's X Games. At this week's winter X Games in Aspen, Colo., judges will carefully cast their eyes over the athletes, as they have since the first edition of the games in 1997, scrutinizing each spin, flip and grab. But this year, another party will be unofficially weighing in as well: an A.I. judge. During the snowboard SuperPipe competitions, video cameras will capture the moves of each athlete, and artificial intelligence will take that information, do what artificial intelligence does and provide a score for the routine. It's a trial run: Humans will still decide the official scores and the medals, as usual, but commentators and TV audiences will see the A.I. evaluations, too. Jeremy Bloom, the chief executive of X Games and a former freestyle skier, sees A.I. as a potential "superpower" for judges. "I would say sometimes humans make mistakes," Mr. Bloom, who also played in the N.F.L., said in an interview. "That's not to say the A.I. won't make mistakes, too, especially in this early form, but our goal is to give this tool to judges, so that they can use it in their booth." Technology has taken on more and more roles policing professional sports. Line judges in tennis have largely given way to electronic calls, cameras make offside rulings in soccer down to the millimeter and even Major League Baseball is testing automated strike zones. But judging and scoring sports like snowboarding have largely remained the domain of humans. In time, however, A.I. might become an important tool for judges, not just in snowboarding but also in a host of judged events like diving, surfing and break dancing. An A.I. tool called the Judging Support System has already been used by judges at gymnastics' world championships. The International Olympic Committee, in its "A.I. Agenda" released last year, said that "A.I. can help to reduce human bias in judging and refereeing" and "offer real-time analysis," though it acknowledged it was "still at the beginning of its A.I. journey." At the X Games at Buttermilk Mountain in Aspen, this week, A.I. will be helping to judge the SuperPipe event, in which snowboarders perform tricks by launching off a U-shaped chute that's 20 feet high or more. The A.I. tool that will be used at X Games was developed in collaboration with Google Cloud. (Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, is a longtime friend of Mr. Bloom's.) The technology could be helpful in other ways, too. In addition to spitting out scores, the tool can provide crucial information about individual snowboard runs. After all, when announcers or judges immediately declare a blur of limbs and a board to be, say, a triple 1620, how sure are they? "Sometimes you get the tricks wrong because they're spinning so fast," Mr. Bloom said. "But this model, because it can watch the video in slow, slow motion, is really accurate in its ability to say, 'Well, that was a cab 1400.'" A.I. could also help the athletes in their training, Mr. Bloom said, by providing insights on runs, jumps and how judging works. He noted that when he was an athlete, he wasn't permitted to talk to judges, making it difficult to determine which trick would be scored the highest. But the A.I. tool X Games is using has the ability, Mr. Bloom said, "to remember every run in the history of ever," helping athletes hone both their tricks and runs for higher scores. Mr. Bloom sees a role for A.I. in a number of sports, or "anyplace where the eye can't keep up with what the athlete is doing." Judged sports have garnered a particular reputation for occasionally producing bogus winners, as fans mutter darkly about judges delivering a low score. A.I. has the potential to quiet those complaints. (Or, more likely, to change them to complaints about that darned biased A.I.) So will the day come when A.I. takes over and puts human judges out of business entirely? "I don't think so, personally," Mr. Bloom said. "But I do think that A.I. in partnership with judges can bring more objectivity to subjective sports, and that's what's really important to me." "Look, sometimes we humans need some help," Mr. Bloom added. "And if you could give us the ability to see tricks better and see landings more clear and better understand the judging framework, I can use that as a resource as I'm calibrating my scores. Man, that's pretty cool."

X Games adds new twist: An artificial intelligence judge for snowboard event

A new study shows that rising Gen Z and millennial workplace leaders are embracing artificial intelligence tools in their industries. The Winter X Games will have an entirely new participant when the sports event slides into action later this week: an artificially intelligent judge. During the X Games Aspen 2025, an experimental Google Cloud-based AI technology will be used to analyze and judge competitors in the snowboard superpipe events. The AI judge's scoring won't have an impact on the outcome, but will be evaluated for actual use in upcoming X Games events. "Our goal is ... that maybe this could be a tool that sits next to judges, so you have four judges and then this (as an actual) judge, or it could be a piece of technology that judges could interact with, just to make sure they saw the trick appropriately," Jeremy Bloom told USA TODAY. The AI judge, which analyzes live video of the snowboarders' runs, can more accurately capture "the landings and the grabs and all those types of things," and could be used by the human judges to "give them superpowers," said Bloom, who became the X Games CEO in December 2024. AI has a growing play in sports AI judging has been experimented with in some sports already. Artificial intelligence software tracked all the gymnastics contestants at the 2023 World Championships in Antwerp, Belgium, the MIT Technology Review reported. The AI judging system didn't replace human judges, but those judges could use it to resolve an inquiry. Major League Baseball is experimenting with robot umpires calling strikes and balls, possibly in 2026. Some soccer leagues including Serie A and La Liga use an semi-automated offside technology and the Premier League had planned to begin using it during this season but postponed its deployment in September 2024, ESPN reported. AI refereeing makes sense when the technology is ready, says Bloom, a champion freestyle and moguls skier and two-time Olympian. He also played football at the University of Colorado and made it to the NFL with the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers. "Some referees get it wrong and sometimes the impacts are really high," he said. "I always come back to the athletes, because I know how much they care, and I know much they prepare, and I know how much they deserve objectivity across subjective sports." An artificially intelligent judge has 'amazing precision' After his sports career, Bloom founded B2B tech marketing firm Integrate, which was acquired by private equity firm Audax. When Bloom took over as CEO of the X Games in December 2024, he called a friend with more than passing knowledge in AI: Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Brin stepped down as president of parent company Alphabet in 2019, but remains on its board. Both have an active interest in action sports and Brin asked Bloom, "What do you think we could do together?" and floated the idea of building "the world's first AI judge that can use every cutting edge piece of technology that possibly exists on the bleeding edge to bring more objectivity to these subjective sports, you know, like X Games." The AI judges uses Google's Vertex AI development platform, which is also used by England's Football Association to help its national teams evaluate future players, while international fitness company Technogym uses it for its AI-driven virtual trainer, Technogym Coach. A collection of high-definition cameras will capture the snowboarders' runs and the video will be analyzed by the AI software - its "judging framework" model trained on countless hours of snowboarding data, Bloom said. "It's going to watch every millisecond of a run, and be able to judge things like economy of motion, which is important to superpipe snowboarding ... (and) the execution of that back flip," he said. "It can see if a rider drags their hand, which is a point deduction. It knows what a good landing looks like and what an okay landing looks like. And it knows with amazing precision." The technology will be part of the broadcasts Thursday night for the men's Snowboarding Superpipe final and Saturday for the women's snowboarding Superpipe final. The X Games will be broadcast on ABC, ESPN and on Roku streaming devices. When the AI analysis of a snowboarding run is shown during the broadcast, the AI software can also be a commentator and describe the action in the language of the contestant. "What the viewer will see, I think, is a glimpse into the future, a real technological glimpse into the future of where this can go," Bloom said. Look for more use of AI judging during the X Games Sacramento in August and in 2026 when X Games launches an 8-team global league. "When we acquired X Games, our goal was to reimagine unique fan experiences and increase access to the world's premiere athletes," said Jeff Moorad, CEO of X Games parent company MSP Sports Capital, in a statement. MSP acquired the X Games in October 2022 with ESPN retaining a minority share. "The X Games partnership with Google is a great example of how we intend to use technology to enhance that experience." Follow Mike Snider on Threads, Bluesky and X: mikegsnider & @mikegsnider.bsky.social & @mikesnider. What's everyone talking about? Sign up for our trending newsletter to get the latest news of the day

X Games will experiment with an AI judge for the first time this week in a new collaboration with Google

The X Games have always been about pushing boundaries, and this weekend in Aspen, it's about to do so yet again -- by showcasing a new way to judge competitions. The X Games will debut an AI judge for the first time in Aspen during its upcoming event starting on January 23, showcasing new technology that should help improve objectivity in subjectively scored sporting events. It could also be something of a preview for the future of sports and contest judging. The experimental AI judge was developed in collaboration with Google Cloud, and will be used during one event -- the snowboarding SuperPipe competition -- and the AI judge's scores will not be factored into determining the winner.

X Games will test AI from Google Cloud for judging snowboarding competitions

The aim is to deepen fan engagement, and provide valuable insights that resonate with both fans and athletes, said Jeremy Bloom, CEO of X Games and a veteran of the sports business, in an interview with GamesBeat. X Games will debut a new experimental AI technology developed in collaboration with Google Cloud, during the Superpipe competition at X Games Aspen 2025, with a goal of bringing new insights and a deeper level of engagement to fans. The event from January 23 to January 25 is sold out and will see tens of thousand of people, with billions of impressions across social, web sites and linear partners. The tech will debut at an event on Thursday at the X Games in Aspen. One of the human leaders among the X Games judges was part of the team to implement it. "The first thing it will do is watch practice and we'll ask it to predict who the top three will be" among the snowboarders, Bloom said. "It's also going to take over everything for free riders, and it will commentate the entire run and draw back on the history of the athlete." Bloom said the sport has a global fan base and it will share the commentary in multiple languages like Japanese. After that, it will judge the athletes based on a score. The x Games medals won't be given out based on that AI score in this particular X Games in part because the tech is so new and it isn't necessarily perfect yet, Bloom said. But you will be able to see how the AI judge compares to the human judges. "We're excited to show it and preview it and show the power of the things that it does," Bloom said. "I think it's the future of sports." It's built on Google's Vortex large language model. Bloom said it is good at doing the things you ask it to do and you can train it on footage of events, like what a good landing looks like versus on excellent landing. Bloom said the aim isn't to replace human judges but to bring more accuracy, fairness and transparency to what has to date been a purely human subjective process. It's like the use of "instant replay" by basketball referees, but in the case of snow sports, no such technology is used. It's all based on what a human judge sees in the moment of the competition. "You have to make sure it knows every trick in snowboarding," Bloom said. "Understanding economy of motion looks like is a difficult problem." The AI technology aims to explore the potential for enhancing objectivity in judged sports, increasing fan engagement, and providing athletes with additional insights into their performances. It will analyze the men's and women's Superpipe competition event. The men compete on Thursday and Saturday. As X Games celebrates its 30th anniversary, the introduction of this technology represents a step toward exploring how emerging technologies like artificial intelligence might complement human judges and offer fans a more detailed understanding of the competition. It will watch qualifying rounds and make a judgement that will be shown to the crowd and the live event after a certain time delay. The crowd will see the results from human judges. The event has snowboarding and skiing for both men and women, with a total of 18 different events. "I've had this idea in my head for decades," Bloom said. "With the technology that we have at our disposal, mistakes (in judging) should never happen. It was shaped by my two decades as a professional athlete." Bloom said the tech is cutting edge and it will bring a lot of transparency and fairness to judging. u' "I don't think this would have been possible last year," he said. "It's showing up in ways that surprise me. Athletes say it's like having a coach in a pocket." How It Works X Games AI uses Google Cloud's tools, including Vertex AI and advanced large language models, to analyze video footage and capture data on metrics such as airtime, trick difficulty, and execution. The system is designed to provide deeper analysis of each run, offering fans additional layers of understanding. The tech was developed with input from X Games judges, athletes, and analysts to ensure alignment with the competition's needs. "This is just the beginning," said Bloom. "AI is still in its early development when applied to action sports, but I'm blown away by what our model can already do. Aspen will allow us to test its capabilities and explore how it might enhance transparency, fairness, and engagement for fans and athletes alike." Part of Broader Changes The introduction of X Games AI aligns with X Games' ongoing efforts to evolve its competitions. In 2026, the Action Sports Games League (XGL) will launch a new team-based format, where athletes can compete for both individual and team recognition. The league will also include interactive features such as fantasy sports, betting, real-time analytics, and expanded opportunities for fan engagement. "While X Games AI is an early experiment, it reflects our commitment to exploring ways to improve competition and fan experiences," added Bloom. "We look forward to gathering feedback from its debut in Aspen and refining the technology based on those insights." X Games Aspen 2025 will provide an opportunity to evaluate the tool's performance and gather input from stakeholders. Further updates on X Games AI and its potential applications are expected in the coming months. Jeff Moorad, CEO of MSP Sports Capital, said in a statement, "When we acquired X Games, our goal was to reimagine unique fan experiences and increase access to the world's premiere athletes. The X Games partnership with Google is a great example of how we intend to use technology to enhance that experience."