LAAX Open and Snow League

In the winter of 2025/26, LAAX took center stage on the international freestyle scene twice: in January with the eleventh LAAX Open, and in March with the season finale of the new Snow League. The fact that both events are taking place here, of all places, is a perfect fit for LAAX: freestyle has been a part of the resort for over twenty years.

LAAX Open

From January 14 to 18, 2026, approximately 250 athletes competed at the LAAX Open, a FIS World Cup event in snowboarding and freeskiing featuring halfpipe and slopestyle competitions. Since the Olympic Games in Milan-Cortina were set to begin just three weeks later, the event served as an important test and a training opportunity ahead of the medal competitions. The level of competition was high. In the halfpipe night final, Australia’s Scotty James won his fifth LAAX Open title with a switch backside double cork 1440. New Zealander Campbell Melville Ives, who became the first rider to land two triple corks in a single halfpipe run, finished second ahead of Australian Valentino Guseli; the entire men’s podium was thus made up of riders from Australia and New Zealand. In the women’s competition, Gaon Choi from South Korea took the win. In snowboard slopestyle, 19-year-old Frenchman Romain Allemand became the first Frenchman ever to win a World Cup title in this discipline, while Kokomo Murase of Japan took the women’s title. In freeski slopestyle, Eileen Gu celebrated her 20th World Cup victory, making her the most successful female freeskier in World Cup history, while Birk Ruud won the men’s slopestyle event for the third consecutive time. In addition, concerts and rail sessions took place on the mountain and in the valley over several days. The history behind it goes back a long way: The first international contests took place in LAAX as early as the 1980s, and the first halfpipe was built here on the Vorab over 30 years ago. It all began in the 1990s on Crap Sogn Gion with the construction of Europe’s first permanent halfpipe. Through the UBS Snowboard World Tour at the turn of the millennium and the Burton European Open, which was held in LAAX for the first time in the mid-2000s, the event continued to evolve. The Burton European Open was Europe’s largest snowboarding event, where stars like Shaun White, Kelly Clark, and Iouri Podladtchikov claimed victory, and which paid out equal prize money to women and men from the very beginning. When Burton discontinued the event in 2015, LAAX simply continued the format as a LAAX brand: Since 2016, the event has been called the LAAX Open, organized by the same core team and featuring the same mix of freestyle elite, concerts, and community. Since that first edition in 2016, 50 titles have been awarded at the LAAX Open to 35 freestyle pros from 14 countries. Its consistency is remarkable: while freestyle events elsewhere came and went, LAAX has stuck with it for decades and expanded its facilities step by step.

KIDS LAAX Open

The LAAX Open also has a junior offshoot: The KIDS LAAX Open is Switzerland’s largest freestyle competition for young athletes. At the seventh edition in early March 2026, over 350 children and teenagers from 18 countries competed in slopestyle and halfpipe—for many, their first competition in front of a large audience. This gives young talents an early opportunity to shine on the same courses where the freestyle elite compete.

The Snow League: Finals in LAAX

The Snow League is the first professional league for snowboarding and freeskiing, founded in 2024 by three-time Olympic champion Shaun White. The format is a first in winter sports: At four events across three continents—from Aspen to China to LAAX—the best halfpipe athletes competed in head-to-head matches for points and a total prize purse of $2.2 million. With this, White is bringing a long-standing idea to life: a championship that spans the entire season and the globe. Competition follows a single-elimination format: two riders face off, and the one with the better performance over multiple runs advances. The stop in China took the league to the site of the 2022 Winter Olympics, which was developed with assistance from LAAX: The Weisse Arena Group has been a partner of the Chinese resort Secret Garden since 2013 and helped there, among other things, with the construction of the halfpipe and a freestyle academy modeled after LAAX. In this way, LAAX’s expertise helped ensure that China could host the freestyle and snowboard competitions of these Winter Games on its own facilities. The Snow League’s season finale took place in LAAX, marking its European debut. The halfpipe at Crap Sogn Gion is considered by many to be the best in the world and is groomed daily; Shaun White qualified here in 2022 for his fifth Olympic Games. From March 19 to 21, 2026, the first Snow League champions were crowned in LAAX. In snowboarding, the two Japanese athletes Yuto Totsuka—who had recently become an Olympic champion—and Sena Tomita won the first titles; in freeskiing, Eileen Gu and the 17-year-old New Zealander Luke Harrold came out on top. The freeskiing elite thus returned to the LAAX halfpipe after about 15 years. Men and women received equal prize money, and Shaun White personally presented the trophies designed by Tiffany & Co. Kaishu Hirano set the new benchmark for the weekend with a 7.72-meter jump out of the halfpipe—the highest in the league. As at the LAAX Open, admission was free with a valid lift ticket; anyone who wanted to could watch. The finals took place in the evening under floodlights and were broadcast to over 175 countries, accompanied by concerts. To wrap things up, Shaun White himself took to the mini-pipe and rode through it with children and other athletes.

More Than Just a Park and a Pipe: Freestyle as a Way of Life

Both events are also meant to show that freestyle in LAAX is more than just what happens in the park: it’s a mindset—doing things differently; being able to be whoever you want to be, and everyone is welcome. This applies just as much to the child in the beginner’s park as it does to the world-class athlete in the halfpipe, to winter sports enthusiasts on and off the slopes as well as to everyone who simply wants to enjoy a wonderful day in LAAX. Whether on a snowboard or skis, in the park, on or off the slopes, or on the sun terrace: LAAX is a home for everyone—open and respectful toward both people and nature. LAAX has five snow parks, including one of the largest in the Alps, as well as the world’s largest permanently operated halfpipe since 2015—200 meters long and about seven meters high—which is open even outside of contests. It also features the Freestyle Academy, Europe’s first indoor freestyle hall, complete with trampolines and airbags; it was expanded and reopened in 2024. Not least for this reason, LAAX serves as a freestyle training base for Swiss-Ski. For WAG, these two events are more than just freestyle competitions: they showcase what the LAAX brand stands for. The established LAAX Open and the new Snow League reinforce LAAX’s reputation as a leading freestyle destination. For the region, they mean international attention and visitors from many countries; at the same time, they demonstrate that freestyle in LAAX is not just a discipline among the pros, but a way of life.