Monday, Aug 14, 2006
X-Games Draw Gasps, Cheers in Fearless Battle With Gravity
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Look, Ma, no hands: bikes looping through the air, motorcycles and skateboards alike taking flight 33 feet (10 meters) high, their pilots barely attached. Welcome to the X-Games, where the fight is mostly with gravity.
 A competitor in the Skateboard Big Air event practices
© AFP/File Hector MataAlready 12 years old, the US new-sports tournament launched by the ESPN sports television group is as much about near-orbit stunts sucking the breath from spectators as it is beating the next guy or girl on the field.
But it is also about money, drawing millions of viewers by television and tens of thousands at the tournaments themselves, with the fans a dedicated bunch of mostly teenagers.
"They like it because it's really dangerous," Ryan Tillman, an ESPN employee, told AFP.
"When these guys don't make it, they almost die," he said while watching motorcyclists train for the Moto-X competition, thrusting through the air from take-off ramps, making crazy poses, loops, rolls, crossing their legs in mid-air, all before landing safe and sound -- most of the time.
It is breath-taking. On Friday Travis Pastrana, 22, outshone everyone else when he performed a double backflip on his motorcycle, hitting the dirt comfortably for the best-trick gold medal, according to the X-Games website.
 Jeff Ward
© AFP/Getty Images/File "They're totally crazy," screams Cameron MacLean, 11, cheering with the eye of an expert: he has been practicing X-Games moves on his own motorbike for two years.
"You have to ride to begin to appreciate ... I only jump eight feet (2.4 meters)." The pros, he noted, easily soar as far as 40 feet (12 meters).
X-Games sports demand something more than their more comfortable cousins -- strength, coordination and perseverance of course, but also a good dose of craziness.
In the skateboard "Big Air" showdown, the competitors are at the same time laid-back and staring at death's grimace as they line up.
On their skateboards they plunge down a nearly vertical slope high as a four-story building before thrusting off from a sharply upturned launch lip and over a 70-foot (20-meter) gap, all the while showing off their best mid-air trick.
At the same time athletes and gladiators and the huge cheering audience get to gauge their form as the jumps are replayed in slow-motion on gigantic screens.
"It's incredible, it's extraordinary," said Louise Boyer, a Canadian Los Angeles resident watching her third X-Games, dragged there by her skateboarding-crazy son and nephew, both 11.
"I hope they never do that and it stays just a hobby for them," she confided, watching several contestants miss their landings and slide across the ground on elbow and knee pads.
 A competitor practices the ramp during the Skateboard Vent Men
© AFP/File Hector Mata "That said, my brother in law is an emergency room doctor -- we are ready for anything."
More than 130 athletes dared gravity over the four hours of the X-Games, in categories like the "Big Air" jump; the Moto X freestyle -- all manner of riding and jumping tricks on motorcycles; BMX steep-ramp bicycle trick jumps; and for the first time this year, a tight closed-track rally-car rally endorsed by Scottish world rally champion Colin McCrae.
Barely known to the over-30 crowd, posters of X-Game stars are on kids' bedroom walls across the country. Unsurprisingly they are heavily courted by sponsors, the makers of hip clothing and extreme sports gear.
Far from the tight windsuits and short shorts of Olympics sports competitors, the X-Gamers wear their counter-culture to the games: huge, flouncy T-shirts, jeans, long baggy shorts and hip trainers.
Most of them live their sport, and it reflects their kid culture. They compete not to hushed silence from a crowd but blaring heavy metal rock.
Still, off the course it is life like any sports star: They graciously give autographs to queues of their young fans.
"It's cool to see them try and try again the same trick until they succeed," said Elizabeth Harris, at 17 more a fan of skateboarding than the bone-crushing Moto-X.
"My father likes it a lot, not my mother. She always tells me to be careful," notes MacLean.
So what do the mothers of contestants do, he was asked?
"They pray."
©AFP |
