Winter X Games

The Winter X Games have been held in Aspen for the past ten years, and since I can remember my family has made a habit of sitting around the TV and watching them. When we moved to Aspen, this was made a lot easier, and I finally began to understand the excitement.

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The X Games begin on Thursday, and carry on until late Sunday night. Over the weekend, Aspen is packed. Tons of people fly in for the event, and none are disappointed. Especially the students in the Aspen School system.

It used to be a school holiday, and it might as well should be because of the amount of students that actually turn up. When we heard the contract for Aspen had been renewed, it was all anyone could talk about for days. Some of the classes make a field trip of walking over to the base of Buttermilk, where it is held, and watching. At night, you can see the lights, and hear the music, announcers, and roar of the crowd from the other side of town. It’s mayhem, but the locals love it.

When I first came to school here last year, my dad called me and told me the X Games were gonna be in town. I immediately went to my computer to see if there was a way for me to watch them live, but I couldn’t figure it out. I resigned myself to the TV in the girls’ lounge. I pretty much camped out there all weekend, and my classmates thought I was crazy.

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To me though, it was perfectly normal. I mean come on, it’s the Winter X Games. In Aspen.

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X Games 15: Git Some.

Today I found out that the winter X Games just happened. Starting on January 27th and ending the 30th, 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.