X Gamers push the fun meter, grab medals
Athletes shining in extreme sports carrying load for USA
Extreme athletes “putting on a good show” while carrying the load for Team USA.
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea – The X Games have been around long enough now for an entire generation to grow up in a world where snowboarding or slopestyle skiing or halfpipe isn’t considered new, different or artificial. They’re just sports that have existed on television their entire lives, as real and aspirational for them as any other athletic endeavor they saw and wanted to try.
But at the Winter Olympics, where the traditional behemoths such as figure skating, ice hockey and downhill skiing are placed on a pedestal, there’s always this sense that the so-called extreme sports that have been incorporated this millennium are still secondclass citizens. A ratings grab by the IOC. Not real sports such as, well, curling.
But any Americans who are slow to get aboard the extreme sports bandwagon might want to look around at what’s happening in Pyeongchang. While the USA has become increasingly irrelevant in speedskating, struggled on the Alpine runs and unable to break through in cross country skiing, our Millennials have gravitated toward fancy tricks and dangerous flips, and they’re bringing home plenty of medals to show for it again.
“I think the reality is we’re winning the fun meter and we’re winning some of the contests,” said David Wise, who earned the first-ever Olympic gold medal four years ago for men’s ski halfpipe.
You probably won’t find an official fun meter in Pyeongchang, but everyone here knows the medal count. It tells us the Americans have not only performed well in the more progressive sports, but frankly they’re also pretty much propping up the entire Team USA effort.
Of the first 12 medals for the USA, seven have been won in the non-traditional sports, including four of the five American golds. That count could become even more lopsided Thursday when Wise and three of his teammates in the halfpipe will go into the finals. Given that Americans qualified 1-2-3 on Tuesday while Wise took a safer route on his second run and came in eighth, there’s even talk of sweeping the podium, which would be a nice change given the under-performance thus far from Team USA.
“I think it’s maybe been a possibility in a lot of people’s heads, but more or less we just want to go ski,” said Aaron Blunck, who put down the best qualifying run with a 94.40 score out of 100. “We enjoy skiing for what it is, and win or lose we’re just out here to have a good time, put on a good show for the people.”
Putting on a good show is often at the root of the antipathy between those who grew up in the X Games culture and the Olympic purists. And it’s certainly gone both ways since snowboarding was added in 1998 with just two events for both men and women, growing bit by bit with the additions of snowboard cross, slopestyle and big air events and more progressive freeskiing events such as slopestyle and halfpipe, which made their debut in Sochi.
But make no mistake, it’s basically an arranged marriage. The extreme events draw in the younger viewers that NBC craves. The athletes get a massive platform to take their sports mainstream and potentially earn big sponsorship dollars, but there are always complaints about selling out to the IOC and International Ski Federation and, often, substandard conditions for competition such as the much-criticized halfpipe in Sochi or holding the women’s snowboard slopestyle here in ridiculous, windy conditions.
“I think we definitely get some re- spect, but I think we deserve more, honestly,” Blunck said. “It’s pretty hard sometimes, especially within certain divisions because we’re considered the daredevils, the rebels. But really it’s not like we’re doing anything wrong. We’re just out here chucking ourselves to the moon, and that’s just how we are. We’re adrenaline junkies, and you have to respect that about us.”
They don’t merely deserve more respect, they deserve to be embraced. Particularly from their fellow Americans because, let’s face it, this is probably the future of where our top Winter Olympic athletes are going to come from. Everything at these Games signals that reality, from the crowd chasing Shaun White that is just now transitioning out of its teens to the emergence of a potential star such as Chloe Kim to the potential U.S. sweep in ski halfpipe, it’s time to get over the fear of counterculture and make no apologies for winning big in the new events.
“It’s exciting. It’s different from the usual,” said 22-year-old Torin YaterWallace of Aspen, Colo., who qualified second. “It’s always exhilarating, there’s always new stuff to do and that’s why I got into it. That’s why most of us got into it. I was bored with turns and wanted to jump off stuff, I guess, like any little scrambling kid just running around. Millennials are that way, I guess.”
Over time, of course, the Americans’ dominance in extreme sports will be challenged as we’re starting to see here. In Sochi, athletes in snowboarding and freeskiing won 12 of the 28 U.S. medals.
We have a head start in the culture of it and the facilities, but as they grow more popular thanks to the Olympics, that will change, too. For now, though, we should just enjoy all the additional medals and appreciate what these athletes have done rather than nitpick their sports. If you want to scream, “U-S-A, U-S-A” one last time at these Olympics, Yater-Wallace, Blunck, Wise and Alex Ferreira probably provide the best opportunity.
At this point, we have to take our wins where we can get them.
“The reality is, we live in a world today that should be able to embrace whatever path you want to take and how you want to ski down the run,” Wise said. “It’s all snow, right? The snowboarder/skier beef is over. The Alpine/freeskier beef is over. We’re all out here doing what we love to do at the highest level we possibly can. Nobody needs to hate on anybody.”