“When it comes to retail sales, you have so many factors working for and against you,” said Nick Sargent, SnowSports Industries’ president, who cited Sports Authority’s announcement last week that it would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and close more than 100 stores. “That’s going to have a huge effect on our business.”

Variable snowfall totals have not helped, either. Twenty-five percent of snowboarders live on the West Coast, and California had been in a historic four-year drought until this El Niño season. Snow has also been scarce in the Northeast for much of this winter.

“The original challenge is the weather dependency,” said John Lacy, the president of Burton Snowboards, an industry pioneer. “To not have snow across the East Coast for this current winter really has an impact on getting people’s mind-set on getting up to the mountain.”

As snowboarding expanded from an outlaw sport banned at most ski resorts to a popular addition to the Olympics, it did so at the expense of Alpine skiing. Participation in that sport has been in free fall, with two million fewer participants than 20 years ago. With the old antagonism between skiers and snowboarders a thing of the past, skiing has co-opted much of the equipment technology, style and attitude of snowboarding. Freeskiing features many of the same tricks, on the same terrain, as snowboarding and grew by nearly a million participants from 2010-11 to 2014-15.

Snowboarding and freeskiing are now in the Olympics, the venue in 2014 for Podladtchikov’s upset of Shaun White, which was a ratings leader for NBC at the Sochi Games. Another snowboarding discipline, big air, in which riders soar 40 feet while performing tricks for judges, will be added to the program at the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

Yet television is no longer as dominant a medium for live events like snowboarding. Options for live streaming have affected ratings and advertising revenue and have made the cost of staging events prohibitive, said Chris Stiepock, a vice president for NBC Sports Ventures who, for two decades, worked in a production and marketing role for ESPN’s X Games.