The Future of Athletics is X-Rated, part 2: Innovation and Revolution

(Continued from Part 1: X-Games Recap)

Good. That’s done. Now let’s get to the fun part. The future.

Because extreme sports are still evolving, they have the greatest ability to adapt to the changing whims of society and culture as culture and hipness is vaunted to such high levels of all-consuming importance. Even more, with humanity’s attention span at an all-time low, you need to be able to keep it interesting. And finally, these sports are all about pushing forth what the individual man (or woman) can do.

Baseball hasn’t much changed since it was invented. The field’s still the same. Still hit a ball with a bat and run in a diamond. Still have 9 people in the field and one at bat, runners notwithstanding. Yes the bats have changed, strategies have changed, but the only innovations that can occur is doing more of something in less time. More home runs, more steals, so on, zzzzzzzzzz. Hell, MONEYBALL proves you can boil the sport down to statistics, math, and people become chess pieces.

In general most of the innovations in mainstream team sports are little more than an increase in size and speed of the players. Football field’s still 100 yards long. Football’s still a foot. A basketball court’s a wood rectangle with a 10-foot hoop on each end, arcs on each line and a circle in the middle. In fact, most mainstream team sports are confined by neat little rectangles, square. A baseball diamond is a distorted square. Hard corners. Like the walls of a jail cell.

As for getting creative? That’s reserved for the coach, coming up with new formations and whatnot but in the end, as for the individual it’s just about doing the same things but trying to do them much moreso. Some people are enamored with the idea that you can get creative with the rearrangement of people. But America was founded on the progression and push of a brilliant few leading the conforming many. Individual exploration, reaching to new heights as far as what a human can do, that's the ticket.

Let’s look at other solo sports, ones perhaps more similar to extreme sports. Figure skating comes to mind simply because it's judged, its a blend of artistic expression and athleticism (and cold ice) and it's somewhat marginalized. When was the last time a new move was invented in Olympic figure Skating? Can’t remember? That’s because it isn’t about trying to push the sport forward. Maybe adding an extra spin to a lutz or sowcow but it’s more about perfecting what already exists than inventing something new. Maybe this is because ice skating, centuries old, has already hit its terminal velocity and there’s no further to go. Or maybe it’s because the industry of ice skating is so geared to taking an elite few and training them vigorously and, during this process, they get limited by what their instructors think is good (versus extreme sports, in which any kid with a board and a dream is responsible for teaching himself up to a point – look at somebody like John Jackson, who’s become arguably one of the best riders on the planet by doing nothing but smoking mad dank and riding back-country pow – plenty of pro snowboarders do this, inventing moves and techniques that would be eschewed by an earlier generation). Or maybe it’s because, as said before, this is about doing a perfect performance of what already exists instead of trying to explore what else you can do.

Either way, this leads me to the 2 things that have gotten me most excited about this X Games.

1. Real Snow

No, I’m not talking about the fact that there was some real snow falling in Aspen while the rest of us suffer through a drought of monumental proportions. No, I’m talking about Real Snow, a new contest format invented to keep up with not only what’s happening in culture but also with a large part of the snowboarding world. See, in most professional sports you can’t be a pro athlete unless you play in some sort of organized, structured league. That is where action or “Extreme” sports differ. For every Shaun White, who spends his life within perfectly-groomed halfpipes and terrain parks, there is a Travis Rice, a man who lives in the uncharted backcountry, turning cliff hucks and random tree jibs into his playground and filming it to inspire all us regular riders to get out there and do something unique and life-affirming (note: Snowboarder magazine named Travis its rider of the year while Shaun didn’t even make the top 10).

Along those lines, Real Snow doesn’t take place in a contest zone. It takes place on video. This first round, Real Snow rails, was a bracket of video parts. People voted on whose were the best, allowing these people to showcase their innovation in everything from camera angles to the uniqueness and difficulty of their features (parks have begun putting staircases next to their rails to replicate this) to the 30-foot-drop wallrides, all mixed in with the heaviest cringe-inducing falls and some of the most frighteningly surreal visuals a fan could imagine. even more, in accessing the new phenomenon of the everyday man having an impact on his favorite sports, they crowned a fan favorite based on votes too. This would be like a contest in which they take highlight reels of the best football players and, a la the Face Smash program at the beginning of SOCIAL NETWORK, set them 1 against the other in several rounds of elimination. Pretty innovative in that it combines literally everything cutting edge in entertainment, sports, and snowboarding. By the way, the big jib trick is the re-direct, watch these videos and you’ll see what I mean.

And here's Louif (Louis-Felix) Paradis

In the Tignes European XGames next month, they’re gonna launch Real Snow Backcountry, starring the likes of luminaries like John Jackson and Gigi Ruf, among others.  This changes the rules, changes the field, changes everything. No innovation or new idea in mainstream sports even comes close.

2. Red Bull Supernatural

Speaking of Travis Rice, I’m gonna leave you with his Red Bull Supernatural Contest, set to drop some time between today and next Thursday, February 9^th. This shit promises to be the future of snowboarding contests and, well, T.Rice always delivers his promises.

Travis is the current king of the snowboard world. Anybody and everybody in it stares at him in awe as he  launches 150 foot triple corks off monster cliffs into deep pow and lands without even a stutter. He also slays it in the pipe, when he wants to ride it (though he prefers stylish, though not competition-worthy, handplants to Big Macs). And he's even won a few Big Air and Slopestyle contests. Oh yeah, and remember that double cork that was all the fad last Olympics? Rice threw the first one, back in '04. Now he's making his own contests and these just may be the future, bringing together every aspect of modern snowboarding into one unfathomable format.

A few years ago he threw together his first such contest, the Quiksilver Natural Selection shootout, a pow/kicker run through Jackson Hole's legendary banked Dick's Ditch. It was basically little more than a few big mountain guys hitting mini-booters in a somewhat flat run with a few steeps and a ditch at the bottom, though it caught a lot of attention. He was trying to do something different and in this world that's all that matters - or at leats doing something different and looking good doing it (one way it's similar to basketball - they're all about the steez).

Now he's taking it to the next level with the Red Bull Supernatural Contest. What does this have to do with the XGames? Sage Kotsenburg and Mark McMorris, by winning gold and silver in slopestyle, are the final two riders to be invited. Shaun White was invited but for some reason I didn't see his name on the roster of riders (maybe it's because the runs aren't groomed to his specifications - or at all).

Included in the riders is Terje Haakonsen. If Travis is the top knight in the realm, slaying mountains with strength and grace, Terje is the king. He was the man Travis grew up admiring and he still rips. Even more, to see him compete is nothing less than a rarity in today's increasingly corporate contest environment. Terje was one of the most vocal opponents to snowboard halfpipe being included in the Olympics. In fact, there are a lot of heads in the Snowboard world who don't want to see it in the once-every-4-year hoopla alongside Downhill and the Long Jump.

His reason was pretty basic - the IOC snowsports are governed by the FIS or the International Ski Federation. This includes snowboarding. So essentially snowboarders in the Olympics are being ruled over and regulated by a bunch of old skiers. The Tea Party would have a fit over this.

Then there's the other reason, part of why snowboarding is so cool, so hip, so strong with the kids. As one up-and-coming shredder said in his recent session of Fresh and Tracked (a segment in which Snowboarder has riders list what's "Fresh", or "Cool", and what's "Tracked" or played out) about Olympic Snowboarding (he put it in the Tracked Section): "Great, just what I want to do, talk about snowboarding with my friend's mom." Call it juvenile, people still complain when they find their parents on Facebook. They're youth sports, youth culture, leave it to the people who know it and live it, right? It's all about rebellion. And given the fact that this year was the year of the protester, sports should adjust accordingly.


So anyway, what's the Supernatural? A big mountain run filled with movie-part kickers and tree jibs dug into a 45-degree mountainside in Baldface Lodge, BC, a backcountry spot with its own dedicated snowcat team to take you to the steep and deep. Just like a  surf contest, it has a window when it can occur based on best conditions since it's all natural snow, not the fake stuff like in the XGames park. These riders will have open reign to design their own runs with near-limitless lines, features, and options to express themselves via their individual specialties and preferences. Essentially, it's a contest without limits. In a way riding with your friends is always a contest - when you session a run or a kicker, it always ends up with everybody trying to one-up the other. But now Rice has figured out a way to blend that fun, innovative progression within some parameters of what makes up a modern contest where, like, people can win money and stuff.

Here, just watch the damn trailer for it:

So in a few days, the craziest motherfuckers on earth will be launching themselves off a snow-covered Ewok village and pushing the envelope as far as what's possible when we talk about "professional, organized competition".


That's what I'm talking about. Here's another take on it:

Seriously, this is the most amazing thing I've ever seen. This is innovation, progression. The hell with Occupy, this is true Revolution, the liberation of athletics from the boundaries, restrictions, limits and rules we've been so obsessed with placing upon them.

This is the future. As culture and art and entertainment and sports blend more and more, the old ballgames won't do. As today's youth tires of the establishment, they're going to tire of the establishment's atavistic approach to sporting events as well.

The future will be X-Rated, my friends. You can either join these freaks or get left behind with grampa and his Ted Williams stories.

- Ryan