Winter sports have always inspired a particular kind of devotion — fierce, tribal, rooted in geography and family ritual. But in the mainstream sports economy they’ve long lived off to the side: too seasonal, too weather-dependent, too “niche” to sit at the same table with sports that dominate the mainstream.

That’s changing — fast. The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan showcased star power that rivaled any event on the sports calendar — from skier Mikaela Shiffrin chasing history on the slopes; to snowboarder Chloe Kim electrifying the halfpipe; to figure skater Ilia Malinin completing jaw-dropping jumps no skater has ever landed.

But the boom extends well beyond the Olympic cycle. While NHL franchise values have doubled since 2022, women's hockey is quickly scaling: the Professional Women's Hockey League, launched in 2024, has already surpassed a million fans and is expanding across North America. The infrastructure is catching up — from the Snow League, snowboarding's first true professional circuit, to indoor training facilities eliminating barriers that once kept the sport confined to mountain towns. Youth registration is hitting record highs.

 Audiences are growing, participation is rising — and the capital is following. Private equity firms are deploying billions across the winter sports ecosystem. Media rights are commanding premiums that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. From franchise valuations to sponsorship deals to the buildout of year-round training structures, money is flowing into winter sports at a pace and scale the sector has never seen.

What was once dismissed as a niche seasonal business is going primetime, year-round, and global.

From Chamonix to the Prime Time

In January 1924, some 250 athletes from 16 nations arrived by train in Chamonix, a resort town in the French Alps, hauling wooden skis and leather boots. The athletes arrived to compete in an event the International Olympic Committee wasn't even sure would work. The first Winter Olympics — then modestly billed as "International Winter Sports Week" — drew curious spectators but little global attention.

The experiment worked: the Winter Games became a recurring global stage, producing moments that crossed over into popular culture — from Team U.S.A.’s Miracle on Ice upset of the Soviet Union in 1980 to the gold-medal performances that turned figure skaters like Kristi Yamaguchi, Michelle Kwan, and Katarina Witt into household names. Alpine skiing produced its own legends — from Bode Miller to Lindsey Vonn, the first American woman to win women’s downhill. The commercial trajectory followed. NBC paid $545 million for Salt Lake City in 2002. Today, the Olympics sit inside multi-billion-dollar packages — most recently a $3 billion extension through 2036.

For two weeks every four years, winter sports commanded premium broadcast attention for decades, featuring marquee properties, like hockey, alpine skiing, snowboarding, and figure skating. The rest of the calendar, however, was a different story. Outside the Olympics — and outside the NHL — winter sports largely remained regional, cyclical, and easy for the mainstream sports economy to ignore.

That began to change in the 1990s, with ESPN’s launch of the X Games. Snowboarding went from rebellious subculture to prime-time spectacle. As Shaun White became a household name, the X Games proved that winter sports could draw a crowd year-round. They could be packaged, broadcast, and sold outside the Olympic cycle.

The NHL has become further proof at scale. Franchise values have doubled since 2022 — every team is now worth at least $1 billion. The league's Canadian broadcast deal with Rogers, signed last year, was worth $7.8 billion over twelve years — more than double the previous agreement. U.S. rights are expected to follow the same trajectory.

The media landscape is accelerating the trend. A decade ago, winter sports had to fight for airtime on a handful of broadcast and cable networks. But today, U.S. sports media rights payments are projected to reach $37 billion by 2030, up from roughly $15 billion in 2015. Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and YouTube are all bidding aggressively for live content — and for sports that once settled for a brief Olympic spotlight, the proliferation of platforms is offering something new: a year-round stage.

The Expanding Ecosystem

The star power in winter sports has never been stronger — and women are front and center.

Mikaela Shiffrin has surpassed 100 World Cup victories — more than any alpine skier in history, male or female. In figure skating, Alysa Liu retired at 16, came back, and won the 2025 World Championship. Olympic champion Chloe Kim is one of winter sports' biggest crossover stars, with a commercial profile that rivals athletes in any sport, any season. And women's hockey is at the center of a dramatic growth story: the PWHL, after surpassing a million fans and expanding to eight teams, saw average attendance jump 27% in its second season.

The professional infrastructure is finally catching up to the boom — from the PWHL's rapid expansion to the Snow League, which launched its inaugural season in 2025 as snowboarding and freeskiing's first professional circuit — a four-stop global competition with a $2.2 million purse and equal pay for men and women. USA Hockey recorded an all-time high number of members in 2025, the third consecutive year of record youth registration, with growth no longer confined to traditional hockey markets: Florida and Texas are among the fastest-growing states.

Indoor training centers are eliminating the geographic barriers that once limited skiing and snowboarding. SNÖBAHN, a Colorado-based chain with revolving slopes, trampoline freestyle areas, and year-round camps, trains 14,000 skiers and snowboarders annually — with plans to expand into non-mountain markets nationwide. A kid with Olympic dreams in a Sun Belt suburb can now build technical skills twelve months a year without chasing snow.

The growth extends well beyond traditional markets, with China offering the clearest proof of untapped global demand. Before Beijing won the 2022 Winter Olympics bid in 2015, the country had virtually no skiing culture. The government set an ambitious target: 300 million winter sports participants by the time the Games arrived. They exceeded it. By January 2022, over 346 million Chinese had participated in winter sports, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Beijing's Olympic venues now host World Cup events, and the pipeline of young skiers and skaters trained in that buildup is just beginning to enter competitive ranks.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is building a ski resort in the desert — Trojena, a $500 billion NEOM project, is scheduled to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games. What was once a regional business is now a global one.

The Compounding Case

The knock on winter sports was always structural: a business dependent on weather, geography, and a narrow window of consumer attention.

What's emerging is a year-round sports economy with multiple revenue streams: media rights, live events, equipment, training, and hospitality. The participation base is younger and more global than it's ever been. The infrastructure to monetize that base — professional leagues, broadcast deals, training pipelines — is finally being built.

For investors, the question isn't whether winter sports can sustain mainstream attention. NBC's record-setting Olympic ad sales and the bidding wars among streaming platforms for live sports rights have answered that. The question is which assets are best positioned to capture the value as the ecosystem matures.

The fundamentals of winter sports are compounding. The opportunity is in recognizing just how much the game is changing.