Shaun White’s The Snow League And NBC Sports Ink Media Rights Deal

For 16 years and over the course of five Winter Games, viewers watched snowboarder Shaun White on NBC as he earned three Olympic gold medals.

Now, in a full-circle moment, NBC Sports has landed the media rights to White’s new winter sports league, The Snow League.

The multi-year deal will see each of The Snow League’s events broadcast live on Peacock with encore presentations on NBC. The league’s inaugural four-event season will begin in Aspen, Colorado, on March 7–8, 2025, with the remaining three global stops yet to be announced.

In The Snow League’s first season, there will be four men’s and women’s snowboard halfpipe events, with freeskiing being introduced midway through the season. In future seasons, the league hopes to include more disciplines like big air and slopestyle.

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The partnership “will showcase the incredible talent in snowboarding and freeskiing and bring the thrill of the competition to a whole new level,” White said. “We hope to inspire the next generation of athletes, and there is no better platform to help showcase our athletes and their stories than NBC Sports.”

Indeed, U.S.-based snowboarding fans struggle to watch the sport’s events consistently.

Broadcast rights to FIS events are not centralized, so there are different rules for watching domestic and international events. Then, standalone events like X Games have no impact on the World Cup schedule—for better or worse—making the entire landscape seem fragmented. (Incidentally, however, X Games also has plans for its own winter sports league.)

That’s a major reason why White wanted to start a professional league in which athletes will accumulate points over the course of a season to contend for world champion status. The F1 model was consistently cited by White and his team as inspiration for The Snow League.

The soaring popularity of F1 is due in large part to the show Drive to Survive, which embeds cameras with drivers and teams throughout the season and allows viewers to peer under the hood.

To that end, The Snow League also plans to utilize NBC’s high-level production and storytelling to allow viewers to keep up with professional skiers and snowboarders in a way that’s never been done before.

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White also knows as well as anyone how difficult it is for snowboarders to make a living based on competition alone, excluding lucrative sponsorships and endorsements that only go to a select few. The total prize purse for The Snow League’s first season will total more than $1.5 million.

The partnership also comes just over a year out from NBC’s broadcast of the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympics. While The Snow League events won’t serve as Olympic qualifying opportunities, viewers can follow along with the athletes in the lead-up to the Games.

“Shaun White is a true icon and his vision for The Snow League has us excited for this next evolution in our long-time partnership,” said Joe Gesue, senior vice president, NBC Olympics & Paralympics programming & executive editor.