Industry News
This year’s X Games in Aspen, Colorado, may have given us a peek into what snow sports competitions may look like in the future. The X Games’ main event on opening night was the Men’s Snowboard Superpipe, which saw the debut of artificial intelligence (AI) in assisting with the competition’s judging. This is the first time that AI has assisted with judging in a snow sports competition.
X Games partnered with Google Cloud and used its Vertex AI to observe the snowboarders’ runs and then give a score using a judging framework. The AI was programmed to closely watch every run and then provide a score to the judges. TV broadcasters also received the AI’s score and shared it with viewers. Despite the use of AI, the scoring of the competition was ultimately up to the human judges.
In addition to scoring the competition, it analyzed the runs from the practice session before the final. After analyzing the practice runs, A.I. then made predictions on how each athlete would score, ultimately creating a prediction of the podium.
The A.I.’s framework made it very precise. It was built by using hours of existing snowboard competition data, and it can pick up small details of runs that may be challenging for the human eye to see.
“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,” X Games CEO Jeremy Bloom said in an interview with USA Today.
Snowboarding is not the first sport that has seen AI play a role in officiating. Major League Baseball has been experimenting with AI umpires to call balls and strikes in games. Some soccer leagues, such as La Liga, have introduced AI to assist in making offside calls. Other sports are sure to follow suit, as researchers continue to find ways to improve AI in many different domains.
The introduction of AI-assisted judging comes amidst a massive change as X Games is set to become X Games League. This new team-based format will allow for year-round competition instead of a once-a-year competition. In addition to teams, the new format will also allow athletes to earn additional compensation beyond the $2.4 million purse that is awarded for each X Games event.
The introduction of A.I. is one of the many steps X Games has taken that will change the way ski and snowboarding competitions work. AI, paired with the X Games League, shows just how ready for change professional skiers and snowboarders around the world are.
