Written by: Mael, Reporter in ISFM
Do you like skateboarding and snowboarding?
If you do, then you probably know about the X Games because it is basically the coolest sport event in the entire world.
It actually started a long time ago in 1995 in a place called Rhode Island. Back then it was called the Extreme Games and it was sort of weird because they had sports like bungee jumping and street luge alongside skateboarding and BMX.
A lot of people watched it, though, because it was way different than watching an ordinary sport like golf. In 1996 they shortened the name to the “X Games” because it was shorter and sounded better. The most famous moment in X games history happened a few years later in 1999 when Tony Hawk did a trick called the 900. It was in San Francisco, California, when he spun around two and a half rotations in the air on his skateboard. Everyone went crazy, because nobody had ever done it before.
After the summer games got really popular, ESPN decided they wanted to do the same thing but in the snow, so in 1997 they started the Winter X Games. It started in California at Big Bear Lake, but eventually it moved to Aspen, in Colorado, where it snows a lot. The Winter X Games used to be kind of funny, too, because they actually had a race where people sat on shovels and went down the hill, but they don’t do that anymore because I guess it wasn’t serious enough. Now they mostly do snowboarding and skiing. They also have this event called Big Air where they go off one giant jump and spin around four times in the air. The most famous winter athlete is probably Shaun White who is nicknamed the Flying Tomato because he had long, red hair and he won a ton of gold medals in the pipe, but there are new people winning now too like Jesper Tjader and Matej Svancer who are well known in the X Games skiing community for throwing the craziest tricks known to mankind on this white cheddar.
Another really crazy thing about the X Games is the Moto X, where people ride dirt bikes. In 2006 an athlete named Travis Pastrana did a double backflip on a motorcycle, (which is super dangerous because the bike is heavy) and he landed it perfectly. In the winter they even do flips on snowmobiles which looks impossible because those machines are huge and weigh a lot. I think the X Games are important because it made action sports famous and now some of them are even in the Olympics, but the X Games are still better because the crowd is louder and the medals look way cooler. They even have an award that you wear on your fingers like a knuckle guard which I find awesome. It also helped that there were video games about it so kids could learn the names of the tricks. It has been going on for over 20 years now and the tricks just keep getting harder and scarier every single year.
Thank you for reading!
Written by: Mael, Reporter in ISFM
Leave a Reply