A Growing Sports League Bets Big on Thrilling Viral Videos

Travis Rice has been disrupting snowboarding ever since he came onto the scene in 2001. A virtual unknown at 18, he showed up at California’s Mammoth Mountain for his first major event and sprung a backflip with a 180-degree twist across a 117-foot gap jump in the snowpark. Not only was the trick super-technical, but it also had never been performed on such an epic scale, spanning a distance as wide as two semi trailers. He was just getting started.

Now the Wyoming native is an industry legend, known for taking freestyle acrobatics—which were typically reserved for the relatively safe, man-made terrain parks of the X Games—into the backcountry in epic destinations like Alaska and British Columbia, where he snowboards off precipitous cliffs, straight down rock faces and between glades of trees. His 2011 documentary The Art of Flight, which he co-produced and starred in, would forever raise the bar for action sports movies with its sky-high tricks and cutting-edge cinematography.