Today I found out that the winter X Games just happened. Starting on January 27^th and ending the 30^th, they went down almost exactly as expected. Shaun White won the gold in men’s half pipe competition, with his worst run in the elimination round scoring five points higher than the second place Scotty Lago’s best run and being the only person to have any runs in that round that scored in the 90’s (both of his were in that range with run 1 scoring a 90.33 and run 2 scoring a 92.00). His second finals run scored him a 97.33, which tied the previous X Games record, also held by White, making this his fourth consecutive X Games gold.

The rest of the events were relatively similar, with an American winning a medal in almost every event and many athletes winning what they were predicted to win. The biggest surprise of the Games was when Norway’s Torstein Horgmo, with multiple broken ribs from an earlier crash, landed the first triple cork in X Games history. “It’s probably the stupidest thing I’ve done in my whole life,” he told ESPN after the jump. After landing the triple cork, he unstrapped from his board and removed his helmet, which he then punted into the crowd. With a score of 80 for the run, he won the gold, the only one this year for Norway.

The X Games remained a fun and exciting showcase of extreme winter sports, with Shaun White recently being rated the second most marketable athlete in the world after Peyton Manning, and Torstein Horgmo landing a trick never before done in the X Games. This was the kind of X Games you didn’t need to watch a lot of, but in the end, still had some parts that made the featured sports, well, extreme.