Park City • When Shaun White began pondering retiring from competitive snowboarding, he created a competition called the Snow League and a snowboard brand called White Space.

Next January, he’ll be leveraging those to fill in a couple of blank spaces for Park City.

White announced Tuesday that he will bring his halfpipe-centric Snow League to Park City Mountain starting Jan. 22-24, 2027. In doing so, he’ll be helping fill a weekend that previously would have been dominated by the Sundance Film Festival, which will move to Boulder, Colorado, next year. He also will be adding an Olympic-sized halfpipe to a landscape increasingly bereft of them.

“The timing is pretty perfect, I think,” said Ian Warda, Snow League’s chief operating officer. “With Sundance moving on, this is an opportunity to reimagine a moment for Park City. And with the Olympics coming in 2034, it allows us to build something that lasts.

“This isn’t just about one weekend or even one season. This is about the future of winter sports.”

White said Park City Mountain was one of two ski areas that he immediately thought of when he was pulling together plans for the Snow League. The other was Aspen Snowmass, which hosted two of the four stops this winter in the Snow League’s inaugural season.

“It just happened to hit with Aspen,” he said. “But the whole time I was like, ‘We’ve got to get to Park City. We’ve got to get to Park City.’ And I’m just so thrilled it’s manifested itself.”

White trained at Park City Mountain while preparing to win his Olympic gold medals in men’s halfpipe in 2006, 2010 and 2018. He retired from competition after the 2022 Beijing Winter Games. Afterward, he founded the Snow League as a way to stay connected to the sport and to fix some of the issues that had annoyed him when he was competing.

The Snow League pits athletes, most of them Olympians, against one another in a head-to-head, bracket-style format. This season, the winner of each event earned $50,000 with payouts down to eighth place ($2,500). Each athlete also gets $5,000 just for showing up. It offers equal pay to men and women, skiers and snowboarders. And, it has consistent television coverage.

Eileen Gu won the first women’s Snow League ski halfpipe title, while New Zealand’s Luke Harrold won the men’s. Japanese riders Sena Tomita and Yuto Totsuka swept the women’s and men’s snowboard titles, respectively. Gu and Totsuka both won gold at the Milan-Cortina Olympics.

Deirdra Walsh, Park City Mountain’s vice president and chief operating officer, said the resort will benefit from having athletes of that caliber on its slopes especially as it prepares for the 2034 Olympics. The resort has been tapped to host halfpipe as well as the slopestyle ski and snowboard events.

“It means a lot, I think, for Park City Mountain and our legacy about being a world class venue where people come to really push the limits when it comes to action sports and snow sports,” she said.

Walsh said the resort inked a “multi-year agreement” with the league.

Park City Mountain hosted the halfpipe events during the 2002 Olympics, which saw Team USA sweep the men’s event and the country’s first gold medalist in the women’s competition. That was on an 18-foot halfpipe. Since then, the sport has supersized to a 22-foot halfpipe, which has become increasingly difficult for athletes to find.

Park City Mountain offered one when it hosted the 2019 World Championships but reverted back to the 18-foot build. Woodward Park City, meanwhile, offers a 22-foot pipe but it’s not regulation length. That has left Utah athletes traveling out of state for the bulk of their halfpipe training and all of their competitions.

Hunter Hess, a Salt Lake City athlete who competed in the 2026 Olympics, said he sees that changing with the arrival of the Snow League.

“Hopefully it continues to push them to make halfpipes here,” said Hess, who finished third in the Snow League freeski standings, “and hopefully that lets us kind of stay around here, the U.S. team can do more camps here, and hopefully we can just start training out of here.”

Snowboarder Maddie Mastro, also a 2026 Olympian, said having the pipe nearby will help aspiring Park City Olympians. She noted that most of Team USA’s women’s snowboard team is or has been based at Mammoth Mountain in California, which boasts a 22-foot pipe.

“That alone,” she said, “I think it speaks to how important it is having it in your backyard.”

One thing Parkites won’t have in their backyard anymore is the Sundance Film Festival, which said goodbye to Utah earlier this year. White said he doesn’t expect the Snow League to replace the world-renowned festival, which has been estimated to generate $130 million in spending and $13.8 million in tax revenue. It will, however, be an international event with big-name stars.

“I definitely felt like it was opportunity for us to come in and fill a void,” White told The Salt Lake Tribune on Tuesday while watching several Snow League athletes soar over a pair of short halfpipes the Park City Mountain team built in a matter of days near the top of the resort, “and maybe bring some excitement that is different than the festival — bring that sporting crowd.”