The Ventura County Fairgrounds and Event Center will host X Games California 2023, the first ticketed, large-scale summer X Games since 2019, the global action sports brand announced Wednesday.
"Summer is the marquee event and it's been the bedrock and cornerstone of what X Games is," X Games CEO Steve Flisler told ESPN. "It's important for us to restore the brand to having a summer pinnacle event. That is our mission and objective, to put summer X Games back on the map and bring fans back to the spectacle."
In 2020, ESPN canceled the summer X Games for the first time in its 25-year history because of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the following years, moved to a scaled-down model held without spectators at training facilities around Southern California, the epicenter of action sports.
X Games California 2023 will span eight days, first in San Diego and Los Angeles, and culminate in three days of skate, BMX and Moto X competition in Ventura July 21-23. It also marks the return of women's skateboard vert, which was last contested at X Games Los Angeles in 2010.
The three-day event will see fans in the stands, a fan festival, food and live music at a summer X Games event for the first time in four years and be broadcast on ESPN, ESPN2, ABC, YouTube and Twitch. It will also be the first large-scale X Games event in California since the franchise left Los Angeles in 2014 for Austin, and later Minneapolis.
The competition will begin with Real Street skateboard best trick and Real BMX best trick in San Diego on Sunday, July 16. Those contests will be closed to spectators, livestreamed and packaged for the television broadcast. The event will then move to a yet-to-be-announced location in Los Angeles for skate contests and a live, prime-time television special on ESPN, before finishing in Ventura.
Last October, ESPN sold its majority stake in the X Games, which it founded in 1995, to MSP Sports Capital, a New York-based private equity firm with investments in McLaren Racing Limited and four European soccer teams. MSP assumed day-to-day business operations and produced its first X Games event in Aspen, Colorado, in January.
ESPN retained a minority interest in the franchise and continues to air the events domestically on television. Skateboard icon Tony Hawk joined the investment group as a brand steward and advisory board member.
"I am looking forward to seeing X Games return to a big fan experience," Hawk said in a statement. The 10-time X Games gold medalist, who spent last year recovering from a broken femur, is planning a return to X Games competition in skateboard vert best trick at X Games Japan in Chiba on May 13, a day after his 55th birthday, and hinted at a possible return to X Games California. "I hope I can come up with some new tricks by then," he said.
A month before the summer Games, Hawk will host his annual Tony Hawk Vert Alert, June 22-23, in Salt Lake City. For the first time, the contest will serve as an open qualifier into X Games California. The top three men and women finishers who haven't already been invited to X Games California will qualify into the skateboard vert contest. Winners of X Games Japan also qualify into X Games California.
"We want more athletes to be involved and have a path into the X Games, hold qualifiers and open events and expand the selection process for athletes," Flisler said. "We also want to create more opportunities in the weeks and months prior to summer X."
X Games ticket sales begin May 10, at 11 a.m. ET, the company said. A waitlist opened today.