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This year’s event will be the first since ESPN sold the extreme sports competition to a private equity firm, with Masekela returning after a 10-year break.
By Alex Weprin
Media & Business Writer
The X Games are getting a creative shakeup in their first iteration since ESPN sold the extreme sports competition to the private equity firm MSP Sports Capital.
After a 10-year hiatus, The X Games will bring back Selema Masekela as host of the event, which will take place in Aspen, Colorado Jan. 27-29. ESPN personality Victoria Arlen will be his co-host. Masekela will also host an X Games preview show on ESPN Sunday, Jan. 15.
“I hope that we can get people fired up on the past, and also help them to realize that the present has actually never been better,” Masekela tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I hope that you know, the people who were kids then and who are parents now can get psyched to sit with their kids, and that this is something that can be generational, that they can watch with families and pass it on.”
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Masekela hosted the games for 13 years, departing in 2012 to join NBC Sports. He has since worked on the Winter Olympics, among other projects.
ESPN founded the X Games in 1995 as an extreme sports complement to the Olympics, which did not feature popular sports like snowboarding and skateboarding (both have now been added as Olympic sports, in part due to pressure from the X Games).
“Without the X Games, the relevance of cool that the Olympics has today would not exist,” Masekela says. “I firmly believe that the implementation of snowboarding and freeskiing and skateboarding and BMX into the Olympics, was a life saving injection in being relevant to culture. And that all came from X Games, there’s no other event that has been able to do that for a subculture.”
This year’s games will be televised on ESPN and ABC, with some events also streaming on YouTube and Twitch.
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