Joshua Duplechian/X Games
X Games Aspen 2025 will kick off Thursday evening, but one event in particular may be giving us a glimpse into the future of all subjectively judged sports: the Men’s Snowboard Superpipe competition. That’s because the opening night’s main event will also be the debut of judging with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI).
There is nuance to the idea, however, as the Men’s and Women’s Snowboard Superpipe events of this weekend’s X Games will really just be a test run for AI-based judging. Human judges will still decide the outcomes of the X Games Aspen 2025 contest, while an AI judging system using Google’s Vertex AI will capture athletes’ runs and analyze the footage through a judging framework that’s already been built from hours of existing snowboarding data. For those watching the broadcast, that analysis will be shared with viewers.
An AI-based scoring system will also be used to judge practice runs before the event. The performances of athletes will be analyzed and the AI judging system will then be used to predict podium finishers.
“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,” X Games CEO and former freestyle skier Jeremy Bloom told USA Today. “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.”
This isn’t the first time AI has been incorporated into judged sports or the first time technology has been used to assist in officiating. Major League Baseball, for example, has seen more and more tech assistance incorporated into umpires reviewing close plays and isn’t far off from robots calling balls and strikes. However, we still haven’t seen artificial intelligence offer scores in sports that are subjectively judged.
“Part of subjective sports, we see it all over the place, is that even at their best, humans can get it wrong,” said Bloom to the Associated Press. “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?”
