But of course the bread and butter was skateboarding and BMX and that hasn't changed. Arguably skateboarding has never been bigger. You'd be hard-pressed to go to any city in America, much less any major city in the world, without finding the local kids skating. The beauty of it is it's a sport anybody can do anywhere there's a hard surface and even if you're of different levels you can do it together. It's not like traditional sports where people are segregated by age and ability and so on; you can have a 5 year-old kid just barely olleying skating a park with a 10-year-old busting 360 flips on the coping. That sets it up for progression and surely that's why these sports are evolving so fast. And so with evolution being the name of the game, it makes sense that the games on the macro scale are constantly evolving and the newest explosion in Summer X has got to be the additional motor-driven events.
Above you see a Hot Wheels loop, that orange toy every boy at some point played with in his youth. You'd get two cars and launch them down a runway and their speed and correspondent centripetal forces would power the cars through the loop. Even more, with two cars they'd go side by side. And then finally they'd launch through the air.
Yeah. They're going there.
Admittedly this is a spectacle but that's a bit of the difference between X Games and, say, the Olympics or the Super Bowl. It's a spectacle. A full-blown event, a party rocking the whole time (X Fest is what it's called) with one death-defying moment after another, a circus where even the clowns at one point or another have to go into the lion's ring.
So I could give you a rundown of the athletes but not only is this something Kyle's much better at but also it's hard to say who'll win. There are some repeats, a few threepeats but it's hard to say really how to gauge who's gonna win. The growth from year to year can be exponential and yet every now and then you'll get a veteran stepping in to at least get a bronze. In skateboarding, for example, the age ranges from Bucky Lasek, at 38, to Curren Caples who, at 16, is the first X athlete to have been born after the X Games began in 1995. Though the record for youngsters belongs to 19-year-old Nyjah Huston who competed in his first X-Games 8 years ago, when he was 11.
Instead, and since let's be honest, the key to getting people to appreciate these sports is to actually explain what the fuck we're looking at (the difficulty of a re-direct on the hip of a bowl is much harder to explain than, say, the simple act of getting a ball between two posts. Also, these sports are more visual and visceral than static and statistical and as such, you gotta learn to enjoy the ride. And maybe I will drop a few riders to watch, just for shits and giggles.
So here's a rundown of the events and a little tasty sampling:
MOTO X FREESTYLE
It kicks off with Moto X Freestyle Final on Thursday night @ 6:30 PST.Essentially this consists of crazy men from rural areas and deserts launching hundreds of feet in the air over and over but, while Evil Kneivel made a whole career of simply jumping big, these guys are backflipping, off-axis spinning, letting go of the handles, front-flipping, going insane over and over again. A few years ago I lived with a Naval Engineer who said a 360 was impossible on a motorcycle because it'd be two conflicting gyroscopes. Yet this year the big trick that's gonna win is a 720, two full rotations only possible because they've figured out how to spin it on a axle that works with said gyroscopic laws of physics. I respect the shit outta these burly guys, even if I'll probably never go Moto X jumping myself.
BMX STREET
Have you ever tried to jump on your bike? Now imagine trying to jump and land on a rail on those small pegs the BMWers screw into their tires. Then follow that up by doing a backflip tailwhip. It's mindblowing. Street is my favorite event in all disciplines because it's the whole package and brings into play the global training ground that are city streets. Garrett Reynolds will probably dominate this like he does at every contest - he's undefeated at X Games Street. Friday @ 3
SKATEBOARD BIG AIR
This event, airing the final on Friday @ 6 was invented by Danny Way, a crazy old school skater who answered the growing popularity of street skating by setting up ramps that launched him nearly a hundred feet at speeds around 50 or 60 MPH with nothing between him and death/disability/dismemberment but a small piece of wood with 4 wheels held on to your body by sandpaper. He used one of these ramps to jump the Great Wall of China, in fact. But as if the big air part wasn't difficult enough, essentially doing what snowboarders do but without your feet strapped in and with much less give, there's a massive quarter pipe after. The all-too-real danger of this is best exemplified by Jake Brown's epic wipeout in '07. Just to give you an idea, Big Air medal hopeful (he's 1 of only 2 who can do a 720 on that burly quarterpipe) and high school Freshman Mitchie Brusco strapped on a GoPro during his training for skating the X-Games. Watch the dizzying footage about halfway through with a vomit bag nearby. This is anybody's event, from Brusco to Brown to Bob Burnquist who owns his own megaramp in his backyard and has been skating longer than half these folks have been alive.
MOTO X BEST TRICK, TAIL WHIP, AND STEP-UP
Still great to watch but here's the problem with Moto X - Freestyle is a combo of all the other Moto X events, making them redundant. A lot of times the Freestyle winners use their best trick to clinch that win. Step-up is a high-jump and you can really only watch so much of that, even if they're going a few stories up. And tail whips also are a huge part of Freestyle Moto X.
BMX PARK
Growing up in Baltimore the only skate park I ever got to go to was the Lansdowne Bowl. This was basically a hilly little park covered with concrete into the shape of a few bowls, a long entrance, and a big banked section. It was free, covered in graffiti and broken glass and open to skaters and bikers in a somewhat tenuous but real nonetheless truce. Thus the park distinction. It's tough to say who's best here 'cuz you got Garrett Reynolds, the unquestionable king of street but that doesn't necessarily mean he knows how to flow through a park which is lacking in all the technical features that allow a Street master to pull away from the crowd. Then there's Daniel Dhers who's always up for medals, and has in fact won 4 golds in BMX park (including below). And Gary Young who was a lock for gold in '10 before he tore his ACL and the old guy Ryan Nyquist whose been in the X-Games forever and - ahh fuck it, just watch the damn video.
HOT WHEELS DOUBLE LOOP goes down at 11. Gonna be nuts, Evil Kneivel eat your heart out. Nobody's done anything like this in X Games history, for sure.
SKATEBOARD PARK
Like BMX park but on skateboards. Reaching back to the old school Z Boys carving up pools, park flow that seems to defy laws of gravity and physics. The other great thing is that it's an event where the older guys like Andy MacDonald, Bucky Lasek, and Rune Glifberg can compete with the younger guys because what they lack in newer technical tricks is balanced by their well-fermented style. Though these young Brazilians, led by Pedro Barros, seem to be dominating everything in competitive boardsports today. Saturday @ 2
BMX VERT
Bikes on a halfpipe. They get bigger air. Certainly risk more shit with a wipeout, especially if said bar jams itself up your dingus. Look for Jamie Bestwick to dominate but maybe - as I say, there's always a chance for anybody to show up, even if the big men in vert (Kagy, Tabron, so on) have been killing it forever.
Shaun White won't be in this X Games even after winning Gold in last year's skateboard vert. A huge loss considering the fact that he's the biggest name in the world in extreme sports. Apparently 3 winter x golds is enough for him. Pussy. But with such current champs as Barros, future legends as Brusco, old legends like Burnquist, and last year's just-barely-lost-to-Shaun-White champ PLG (Pierre Luc-Gagnon), there's sure to be a lot of hair flying this Saturday @ 7:30.
RALLY CARS
I don't watch NASCAR, nor have I seen any of the FAST AND FURIOUS movies but the first. This event probably wouldn't be in the X Games if Travis Pastrana and Brian Deegan (two of the most legendary Moto Xers of all times, Pastrana all but a household name) hadn't picked up and mastered the hobby of driving souped up race cars through gnarly dirt trails. I mean, I just went four-wheeling in Hawaii, it was cool, fun, challenging, certainly more interesting that running laps around a big smooth circle. And if car racing's your bag, there's certainly none more exciting, runnin' Sunday at noon and 12:30. I'm just not gonna watch it.
SKATE STREET
This, on the other hand, is my favorite X event, running Sunday @ 2:45. Maybe because I've skated on streets. I've even been known to occasionally do small spins and flips (or used to be) and olley down concrete steps (though straight-airing it). And I've spent a few days going to modern parks with rails and transitions and obstacles (occasionally my wife would drop me off at the Vans skatepark with the other little kids while she and their moms went shopping at the Block at Orange). This is the only event Sheckler's competing in and he holds the record for youngest to ever win it, though his results recently have been less than stellar. No, the good money would be on Nyjah Huston, even though he did just cut off his sick dreads.
And then there's REAL STREET, like the REAL SNOW I told y'all about, where it ranks video parts and such. Click here to run them down and even place your own votes.
BMX BIG AIR
This is the last event I care about. MOTO X ENDURO and RALLY FINALS, as I said, it's racing, motor vehicles, ehh, not my bag. But BMX BIG AIR -these bastards can go bigger than skaters and do crazier shit which can fuck them up in the worst way. They're all champs in my mind, possibly a bit mad but that's the nature of the beast, the nature of the X Games. Especially in the summer, when the one thing they all have in common are wheels, speed, and madness. Look for the hype to be about Kevin Robinson.
Still, BMX Big Air will be sick. And coming from a skater who used to rag on the BMXers gettin' in my way, that's saying a lot. Check it.
So get those DVR's ready for extreme madness and mayhem. Check out some summer X. An adrenaline rush sure to carry you through the monotonous baseball mid-season until football pre finally fuckin' starts.
- Ryan
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