Two-time Olympic gold medalist Shaun White says ESPN excluded him from last month’s Winter X Games in Colorado because White criticised the network for a lack of commitment to the annual event.
White, one of the most storied competitors in X Games history and one of the biggest names in snowboarding, was not invited to the event in Aspen in January, to widespread surprise. ESPN admitted it had declined to invite White but failed to say why.
White told the New York Times he thought ESPN, which controls and arranges the X Games, was upset with remarks he made to Forbes magazine in October.
In the interview, White queried a percecived lack of ambition for the X Games from ESPN, and said X Games’ attempt to expand globally was a failure because ESPN refused to change its marketing platform, instead using “the same announcers, same people, same competitors” and ultimately “diluting” the brand in the US market.
“X Games went global; it was a huge failure,” White said at the time.
“Yeah, I had some constructive criticism, I guess,” White told the Times on Friday. “It wasn’t really criticism. It was more public information.”
An ESPN spokesman, Danny Chi, denied that the comments had led ESPN to leave White off the list, but Chi would not explain why White was not invited. “It’s our policy not to discuss the details of our invitation process publicly,” Chi said.
White holds the X Games record for gold medals with 15, and has 23 medals overall. He has competed in the winter and summer games in snowboarding and skateboarding.
