Travis Rice did not simply win contests — he shifted what a contest run could be. Across the early 2000s he collected X Games gold, US Open and Icer Air titles, landing tricks that forced judges to recalibrate their scales.
A double cork that changed the rulebook
The San Francisco night crackled with cold air as Rice dropped into the Icer Air kicker. He rotated through a Double backside Rodeo 1080 and stomped it clean. The scoreboard lit up with a 95, the highest mark of the evening, and a trick once considered theoretical became competition property.
That same appetite followed him to Aspen in January 2009, for the Winter X Games Big Air final. He brought out a double cork 1080 again, and on the sport's biggest stage the move carried him to the gold medal. He had taken the double cork from experiment to contest staple inside a single season.
Medals across the map
Rice had already established his range. He won X Games Slopestyle gold in 2002, added a Best Trick silver in 2007 where he dueled Andreas Wiig attempting a double cork 1080, and a Slopestyle bronze in 2004. Away from X Games, he seized the US Open Slopestyle title in 2007 and held the TTR World Snowboard Tour Quarterpipe crown for two seasons running.
The list stretched across disciplines: Big Air, Slopestyle, Quarterpipe. It marked him as a rider who could win on any canvas, not merely one speciality. Snowboarder magazine later placed him among the 20 most influential riders of two decades, and the reason lay in those contest results.
From podiums to peaks
By 2005 his focus had already started turning away from the tight format of a contest venue. He joined forces with production house Brain Farm and poured his progression into the backcountry, chasing pillow lines and razor-sharp ridges instead of medals. That path led to The Art of Flight in 2011, Red Bull Supernatural in 2012, and the Natural Selection Tour he co-founded in 2019.
The contest years were not an abandoned chapter. They were the laboratory where the riding — and the ambition — were first forged, before he carried them into the mountains.
