action-sports
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X Games sold the big moment. Now it sells the whole season.
The action sports institution has turned individual daredevils into teammates and cities into franchises. Its first league season offers a glimpse of the business behind the tricks.
David Stoddard
David Stoddard is a co-founder of Brixton, the Oceanside, California lifestyle apparel brand he started in 2004 with two friends and a single vintage-inspired hat. He built the company out of a garage after a decade working his way up from a $6-an-hour warehouse job at TransWorld Magazine, and grew it into a globally distributed brand known for heritage headwear and clothing. He now serves as a marketing and creative leader for the company, and speaks locally about entrepreneurship and betting on where you come from.
Jenna Woodhull
Jenna Woodhull is Chief Merchandising Officer at Sendero Provisions Co., the Waco, Texas apparel brand that started with a single hat in 2014 and now sells a full Western-meets-outdoor line. She has spent close to three decades in apparel, beginning as a Volcom sales rep in the late 1990s, moving through Hurley as National Sales Manager and Director of Retail Marketing, returning to Volcom as global VP of design and merchandising from 2010 to 2013, then co-founding the Newport Beach brand agency and showroom Band of Martians. She spent roughly ten years at Brixton, rising to Senior Vice President of Design & Merchandising and later Chief Merchandising Officer, before a stint as global head of women's product at Liberated Brands overseeing Volcom, Billabong and RVCA. She joined Sendero in February 2025 to run merchandising strategy, product vision and category expansion. She is known in the industry for balancing creative instinct with commercial discipline, and she describes her own style as vintage classic, usually finished with boots.
Knut Eliassen
Knut Eliassen is a Norwegian-American snowboarder turned marketing executive who serves as Chief Marketing Officer at Nitro Snowboards. Born in Minneapolis to a Norwegian father and a Minnesotan mother, he won a USASA national boardercross title at 15, moved to Norway at 16, and rode professionally for Nitro while completing a business degree at Handelshoyskolen BI. He joined Nitro in 2005 as a rider and rep, became the brand's global team manager, and worked his way up through sports marketing, marketing director, and VP of global marketing roles before being named CMO in 2025. Based in Salt Lake City, he oversees brand, media, social, video, and team departments for Nitro and L1 Outerwear, has produced and appeared in snowboard films including Hyped!, Boom, The Bad Seeds, and the documentary 28 Winters, and hosts Nitro's ten-part Learn To Snowboard tutorial series. His stated goal is simple: get more people onto snowboards.
Nitro Snowboards
Nitro Snowboards is a rider-owned snowboard company founded in 1990 in Seattle by Tommy Delago and Sepp Ardelt. Exclusively focused on snowboarding for 35+ years, Nitro designs and sells snowboards, boots, bindings, splitboards, outerwear, bags and accessories to riders worldwide. Known for innovations such as the mini-disc binding system, the TLS lacing system and early splitboard and asymmetric-camber designs, the brand builds most of its hardgoods development out of Oberammergau, Germany, and runs its board, binding and graphics work from Salt Lake City, Utah, while remaining independent and privately held.
David Lokshin
David Lokshin is the co-founder and CEO of Trace, an AI sports video company that places an autonomous camera on the sideline of youth games and hands each player a personalized highlight reel. He started the company in 2011 as AlpineReplay, a side project with his father Anatole, building GPS sensors that tracked skiers and snowboarders, then pivoted the same data-and-camera engine into team sports. A Harvard applied-math graduate who began his career trading FX options at Barclays, Lokshin describes Trace as 'the creator and keeper of memories.' The company has raised roughly $71.8M through a Series C and employs around 130 people from its Austin base.
Trace
Trace is an Austin, Texas sports technology company that uses computer vision, GPS sensors and AI to automatically film youth sports games and edit a personalized highlight video for every single player - no camera operator required. Originally founded as AlpineReplay to track skiing and snowboarding, the father-and-son team pivoted to team sports and built one of the largest video datasets in youth athletics. Trace has delivered millions of automated highlights to over a million athletes and raised a $47M Series C at a reported $190M valuation.