THE X FILES
They’re Canada’s best Olympic medal hopes, in part because they refuse to play it safe — which competing at the sport’s marquee event surely isn’t
Cassie Sharpe leads the fearless Canadian team of freestyle skiers and snowboarders in pursuit of something even bigger (for them) than Olympic gold.
BUTTERMILK MOUNTAIN, COLO.— Cassie Sharpe has stood at the top of a halfpipe — that’s 22-foot-high walls of hard-packed snow — and quite happily launched herself over the lip, throwing a series of tricks with a broken back.
And she was only mildly offended when people told her that her first big international result, a silver medal at the 2015 world championships, didn’t count.
None of that got to her. She’s tough and deeply competitive in a way that can only be honed from a young age growing up with — and trying to outdo — two brothers. What did bring her to tears, though, was an invitation to her first X Games in 2016.
That’s how big a deal this annual action-sports extravaganza — with a hefty side of concerts and parties — is for freestyle skiers and snowboarders.
“It’s one of those events that everyone is going for, everybody wants it, and I remember getting a full invite and not just an alternate spot. I looked for the word alternate and it wasn’t there: ‘You have a spot.’ I was so overjoyed,” the 25-year-old from Vancouver Island said.
She’s back in Aspen this week with a dozen of Canada’s best freestyle skiers and snowboarders. They are the country’s best medal hopes for the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, which start just two weeks from now, and that’s not without some controversy:
Canada’s Mark McMorris, the hands-down favourite for gold heading into the 2014 Olympic debut of slopestyle snowboarding, fell on a rail at the X Games that year and broke a rib. He still rallied for bronze at the Olympics.
Halfpipe skier Megan Gunning wasn’t so lucky, and didn’t make it to the Olympic debut of her sport after blowing out her knee in X Games training.
In 2015, Canada’s Alex Beaulieu-Marchand tore the ACL in his left knee while slopestyle skiing at the X Games.
In 2016, halfpipe skier Mike Riddle tore his hip adductor and broke a cartilage joint in his pelvis at the European X Games.
And in 2017, snowboarder Spencer O’Brien pulled out with a sprained ankle after a fluke accident involving a course worker.
That’s not to say this is a more dangerous event than any other. It’s that these athletes are pushing the limits of how many times the human body can flip and spin and still land safely on snow, so it doesn’t take much for things to go wrong.
Most of the Canadians competing here from Thursday to Sunday have worked for the past two years to qualify for the Olympics in South Korea, so it says a lot about the pull of this event that there are few second thoughts about arriving ready to go big for the chance at some X Games glory first.
“X Games is an awesome event, and as an athlete being invited is such an honour that never would I not compete at X Games if I got invited,” Beaulieu-Marchand said earlier in the season.
He got that invite, and though he’s skipped other recent events while nursing an injured knee, he’s here to compete in slopestyle skiing before he packs his bags for South Korea.
For generations of athletes in alpine and cross-country skiing to bobsledders and figure skaters, the Winter Olympics have been the pinnacle of sport. But for freestyle athletes, it’s the X Games, where stars were made long before the Olympics opened its doors to freestyle events.
“These kids, when they were young, they weren’t watching the Olympics. They were watching the X Games,” said J.F. Cusson, Canada’s slopestyle ski coach. “Usually what you do when you’re young is what you admire and dream of, so for that generation the X Games means a lot.”
National ski and snowboard teams struggled with the timing of this event before the 2014 Sochi Games, but they have more or less made peace with athletes wanting to be here. Now, they focus on the opportunity it provides.
The X Games usually offer the best setup of the year, allowing athletes to practise and showcase their biggest and best tricks and see how judges score any new ones.
Riddle, at 31, is a veteran of halfpipe skiing — with an Olympic silver from Sochi — but he can still vividly recall his very first X Games.
“I was 19. I was really excited, and I crashed and didn’t make finals and was bummed,” he said. “That’s kind of been the story of my whole X Games career, unfortunately.”
His best finish is fourth, something he’s achieved no fewer than four times. That, along with his other finishes, has left him with an unenviable statistic.
“I have the most X Games starts without a medal, which is not cool. I saw it on my bio that they put up for me. Thanks guys,” he said laughing. “I’m really hoping to change that.”
Sharpe’s X Games career is far shorter, but she wants the medal that proves she’s the best in the world at her sport: “Third time’s a charm, so here we go.”
The fact that the X Games pull in the best in the world is what undermined her first big international result at the 2015 world championships, held at the same time as the X Games.
“I got told a lot of times that result didn’t count, you didn’t get second for real because it wasn’t against the best,” Sharpe said.
She didn’t necessarily disagree, but she shut down her critics two months later by winning a World Cup event in Tignes, France: “Everyone was there and I won the event so, for me, that event meant more than the world champs.”
She narrowly missed the podium at her X Games debut in 2016, fourth while competing with a back injury.
“I knew something was really wrong. I competed and went home for an MRI,” she said.
That revealed a stress fracture in her back — but that didn’t stop her from going to the European X Games a month later.
“They tried to tell me I couldn’t go . . . I said: I’ve been living through it for two months, I’m going to Oslo, you can’t stop me,” she said, laughing at her stubbornness.
“It was definitely on my mind, but when I’m in the pipe I’m not thinking about anything else, I’m so zoned in. I thought about it at the top and I thought about it at the bottom.”
That pipe run was called the best in the history of women’s skiing. It’s quite the accolade, but in a sport that moves as fast as freestyle skiing does that’s already a long way in her rearview mirror.
“I’ve tried to land a better run every single time,” she said.
Earlier this month at Snowmass, just one mountain over from where she’ll compete Thursday, she won the event on her first run. That’s usually an occasion for athletes to take their last run as an easy victory lap — to thank the crowd without doing anything risky — but Sharpe didn’t do that. She threw a series of difficult tricks, including a massive 1080 (three full spins, a first for her in competition), to raise her final score even higher.
Moves like that make her a favourite for gold in South Korea. With each run, Sharpe says she’s nearing the vision of what she thinks is possible in the pipe.
“I want to go out there and push myself to push my own limits, but I want to push the sport. If I can push the limits and take them down and keep going, that fires me up. That makes me excited to be part of the sport.”
“I have the most X Games starts without a medal, which is not cool.” CANADIAN HALFPIPE SKIER MIKE RIDDLE