Recently bought by UFC’s Lorenzo Fertitta, Street League Skateboarding (SLS) is now being streamed for free on Rumble, an online video platform best known for its popularity with its right-wing audience.
For narrative, the opening of the 2023 SLS Championship Tour in Chicago couldn’t have been scripted better. In the women’s, 15-year-old Rayssa Leal took her fifth successive win since July 2022, adding to the silver she claimed at the Tokyo Olympics. The prodigy is now the clear standard-bearer in women’s street skateboarding.
In the Men’s, Leal’s fellow Brazilian and Olympic silver medallist Kelvin Hoefler’s win was one for the veterans. He claimed a dramatic victory with his last trick, a perfect cab back tail down the long hubba. It was his first SLS Gold Medal since 2015, neatly also won in the Windy City. Nyjah Huston also scored a bronze, marking his return to competition after a year out with an ACL injury.
The stop was the first since the SLS was taken over by Thrill One Sports & Entertainment group. The company is co-owned by former UFC CEO and Chairman Lorenzo Fertitta and current UFC president Dana White. Fertita, best known for helping transform the UFC into a multibillion-dollar industry, spent a reported $300 million with his co-investors (including SLS founder Rob Dyrdek) to buy Thrill One in July 2022. He is on record as saying that he wants to use the “UFC playbook” to do to skateboarding what he did for the sport that Senator John McCain once called “human cockfighting.”
So far, so good, right? Skaters could expect that Thrill One, which also owns Nitro Circus, Nitro Rallycross (NRX), and the controversial Power Slap, could bring back the SLS glory days. Not long after Dyrdek started the league in 2010 intending to create a professional tour that bridged the gap between true street skateboarding and contest skating, it went massive. First prize purses topped out at around $200K in 2013 as skaters like Huston and Ryan Sheckler took the slick new edition and made it mainstream.
But a decade later, with this injection of new money into the eyeballs of skating, is there a catch? “We are excited to partner with a growing platform like Rumble to create one truly global destination for action sports fans,” Thrill One CEO Joe Carr said in a March press release. “Our athletes have over 100 million social followers worldwide and that community will finally have the opportunity to watch every NRX and SLS event, live and free, for the first time.” Previously the SLS had been shown on ESPN, with event replays on YouTube.
And this might be the catch. Rumble is an online video platform most known for its popularity with the American right and far-right users. It hosts Donald Trump’s Truth Social, right-wing news channels Newsmax, One America News Network, and the Russian state-owned television network RT. Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, and Andrew Tate have all found a home on Rumble. It has promoted itself as a YouTube alternative that is immune to cancel culture.
Rumble has said that it, along with Thrill One’s clout, can guarantee increased revenue (Carr is promising up to 40 percent higher income in 2023) and viewer numbers. And true to their word, the Chicago event drew nearly one million views on Rumble. The issue is that of those million, how many of the mainly Gen Z audience will get exposed to the other content on Rumble? It is known for its toxic messaging and misinformation and has been labeled a haven for conspiracy theories such as QAnon.
“Whether Street League’s brass understands it or not, this is the morass it’s inviting its viewers to get stuck in,” wrote Cole Nowicki in his always-excellent Simple Magic blog on Substack. “Is that what Rumble, a platform best known for hosting conspiracy cranks and racist demagogues, wants with SLS? Peanut butter for the mousetrap?
Less politically charged has been an overhaul of the format. The event has been condensed from two days to one, meaning fewer skaters, with the women’s division having room for just six athletes. The SLS described this move as, “all killer, no filler.” It is a similar strategic maneuver deployed by the World Surf League, with its mid-year cut, and move to one-day Finals.
And while WSL financier Dirk Ziff and CEO Erik Logan have many detractors, they haven’t decided to move to a broadcaster with obvious far-right leanings.
“One of the things that I really tried to do through this whole thing is stay out of politics,” Dana White once said on Fox News back in 2021. “When people tune in to watch sports, they don’t want to hear that crap.”
However, Karim Zidan, who writes a regular newsletter on the intersection of sports and authoritarian politics, disagreed in an article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper.
“White’s claim that the UFC is an apolitical entity could not be further from the truth. In his capacity as UFC president, White has campaigned for Trump during the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, defended the indicted former president’s policies, and even produced a documentary showcasing the league’s history with Trump and his role in promoting mixed martial arts on a national stage.”
Now it’s a stretch to see him using the SLS to argue his political views, but the sport’s close association now with UFC, and more problematically with Rumble, must be a concern to all those skaters who simply love the sport and are either apolitical or have opposing views to many espoused on Rumble. Are the athletes, and the fans, now just a pawn in the ever-escalating culture wars?
It’s early days, but with the next events due in Tokyo and then Sydney, we may be able to get a better read on where Thrill One and Rumble are planning to take SLS. Is it a path for a brighter future, or a Faustian pact that will forever stick sand in the bearings? Time will tell.
