On October 22, Travis Rice’s Natural Selection Tour (NST) announced that it would be expanding beyond snowboarding, adding ski and surf events to the calendar for 2025. It will also be morphing its partnership with Proving Grounds, a storied mountain bike event it teamed up with last season to provide mountain biking events as well.
The news made waves. NST is one of the most prestigious snowboarding competition events in the world. It’s only been around for 3 years, but its impact on the sport has been massive. If NST can replicate a fraction of what it’s done for snowboarding across skiing, surfing, and biking, this expansion may reshape the landscape of competitive action sports.
As Rice emphasizes, much of NST’s success in snowboarding has come from letting athletes lead the way. He and his team of athletes and advisors plan to do the same thing with the new events.
“We feel Natural Selection has an opportunity to do something very authentic, something very athlete-driven in these other sports,” NST CE Carter Westfall told GearJunkie. “From a sustainability standpoint [and] from a business standpoint, a rising tide can lift all boats.”
GearJunkie spoke with Westfall and athletes Sammy Carlson, Casey Brown, and Chris Rasman about what this new evolution of Natural Selection could mean for skiing, surfing, and biking — and for the world of action sports at large.
Expanding Natural Selection Tour Events: Snow Bike Ski Surf 2025
If you’re unfamiliar with NST, chances are you’re not a snowboarder. The tour encourages athletes to ride creatively using natural terrain features instead of sculpted takeoffs. Judges use creativity, risk, execution, difficulty, and overall impression to score athletes. It has become a place for Olympic athletes and also film icons to push the sport’s limits in a new competition format.
When NST launched in 2021 with its first three-stop tour, it changed what competitions mean for freeride snowboarders. NST has allowed snowboarders to showcase creative freeride skills in ways that they can’t put forth at the Olympics or X Games.
Sammy Carlson, a Revelstoke-based pro freestyle skier, sees the potential for NST to do something similar for skiing.
“We’ve had similar events take place in the past. K2 Back Nine, Red Bull Cold Rush, and a few other events that were also toeing into this vein of skiing quite early on,” Carlson said, looking back.
Instead of starting something from scratch, though, Carlson believes it makes more sense for skiing to team up and build off the momentum and infrastructure NST already has.
“To have the opportunity to partner with [Rice] has definitely been an exciting opportunity,” says Carlson. “I’m stoked to be a part of it. And for backcountry freeride, it’s been long overdue to have an event like this that’s going to showcase skiing at the highest level. That’s the goal here.”
‘Mission Critical’: The Natural Selection Advisory Councils
Carlson is now part of the Natural Selection Tour “Ski Advisory Council.” The council consists of fellow legends Michelle Parker, Chris Benchetler, Kristi Leskinen, Markus Eder, and Candide Thovex.
There are also advisory councils for MTB (Casey Brown, Emil Johansson, Carson Storch, and Cam Zink), surf (Rob Machado, Nathan Florence, and two yet-to-be-announced female surfers), and snowboarding (Hana Beaman, Chris Rasman, and Robin Van Gyn).
According to Westfall, the advisory councils are mission-critical for the tour to successfully branch out into these new sports.
“For us, it was important to understand [the opportunity] in these other verticals. Who would want to get behind it and help lead the charge?” Westfall said. “[Rice] would never want to be seen as a snowboarder trying to do a ski event or a surf event.”
Carlson affirms that this mentality was present from the beginning. He said it was clear from an early stage that Rice wanted to get the right people involved to represent and oversee each category of the competition.
Athletes ‘Leading the Charge’
Casey Brown, a freeride mountain biker who just came off a podium finish at the first-ever women’s Red Bull Rampage, is an Advisory Council member for NST Bike. She emphasizes that having athletes shape this event is absolutely necessary.
“You have people that are running events, and they run events really well. But they don’t necessarily have the finger on the pulse of the industry, whereas athletes, we’re in it. We understand what’s going on and what the core of mountain biking is,” Brown said.
“I think that is one of the most important things to bring into event spaces,” she emphasized. Otherwise, the event can get overly commercialized, and athletes don’t want to show up anymore because it isn’t “core,” she said.
Whichever mountain bikers are invited to participate in the NST Bike event, they’re lucky to have Brown in a leadership role. She intends to use her position to champion athletes and advocate for their needs.
As an example of how she plans to shape the competition, Brown said she hopes to restructure mountain bike events to have more leniency for weather. Pressuring athletes to ride in the wind or in subpar conditions isn’t good for them and is less fun for viewers. She points out they do it for surfing, so it should be possible for mountain biking as well.
She’s also very keen on meeting all the athletes’ needs around safety and comfort. If they can prioritize athletes so that all they need to think or worry about is riding, Brown knows from experience that they’ll perform at higher levels.
Boarders, Skiers, Riders, Surfers: Stronger Together
Longtime NST fans might worry that the competition’s loyalty to snowboarding could be diluted through this expansion. However, Chris Rasman — a Canadian snowboarder, backcountry freestyle specialist, NST veteran, and another advisory council member — isn’t concerned in the slightest. He said he has faith that it will remain a priority for the NST team no matter what.
“This expansion is exciting,” Rasman assures. “It gives these other sports a new type of competitive platform. But NST Snow will remain run by snowboarders, and NST Surf is going to be run by surfers, NST Bike by bikers, and NST Ski by skiers. There will be entirely different teams for each sport, making sure to keep separation, creativity, and independence for each.”
Westfall also backed that sentiment up. “We’re not taking resources away from snowboarding or looking to cheapen that product,” he said.
He believes that the best way for Natural Selection to grow is to leverage the brand and build a stronger, more sustainable business across parallel sports. These communities have an overlap in audience. He feels that a coalition is stronger than a handful of disjointed events.
Brown also sees the value in banding together. “Having all these sports sort of cross-pollinating each other does wonders,” she says.
Carlson points out that whether you’re participating in these sports or watching them as a fan, there are continuities that translate from the ocean to the mountains and back again.
“This is where the lines blur. We can all relate, whether you’re on a surfboard, bike, snowboard, or skis. When you see someone ride a nice line, or rip a sick turn, or hit a nice air, everyone can relate to that, especially when you step into a big-mountain environment. I’m really excited for skiing to be a part of that. I can guarantee it’s going to be a crazy show, just like the rest of the events.”
