The X Games: An Adrenaline Rush Like No Other
The X Games is the most fantastic amalgamation of the most action packed sports from around the world. It is the most adrenaline powered event to take place on planet earth. The best skaters, BMX and Moto X bikers, surfers, rally car racers and others, come together and compete for gold medals and a lot of money. The X games are ranked as the most watched action sporting event on the planet.
There was a time when all kids into sports, were into baseball, football or basketball. But the kids of today’s generation were raised in a faster time frame. They were brought up watching MTV and exposed to the world over the internet, which of course resulting in a lack of patience. They wanted speed, they wanted something extreme and dangerous.
Gen X and Y’ers had started tuning into out of the box sports. They started turning their attention to skate boarders and those on the ski slopes instead. A programming executive by the name of Ron Semiao at ESPN took notice of this change in the trend and by 1993 he envisioned a new television event which would be a modified version of the Olympics but on speed. He wanted it to feature sports such as inline skating, street luge and skateboarding. Athletes would jump, spin, flip and sometimes crash. They’d try to outdo each other with faster and more risky tricks.
The outrageous sporting event first took place on June 24th 1995 but during its first run was called ‘Extreme Sports’. Nearly 200,000 spectators showed up in middle town, R.I. The festival went on for four days and featured 27 events in nine categories, including bungee jumping, mountain biking and sky surfing. Initially though, people did not take the idea so seriously, and some journalists shunned out the sport, saying that nowadays anything crazy could just be named a sport.
But it was Semiao who would have the last laugh as his X games moved swiftly to the main stream and generated interest from many million dollar sponsors such as Mountain Dew, Saturn and Taco Bell. The extreme sporting event became very popular and ESPN ended up launching a Winter X games so that sports such as snowboarding and snowmobiling could be introduced. By around 2002 the X games had grabbed a TV audience of over 63 million viewers.
The X Games were originally supposed to be a biennial event, but they became so immensely popular that they are now held every year with the Winter X Games in late January and the Summer X Games in August. The locations do change, but till 2012 the Winter X Games will be held at Aspen and the Summer X Games were held at Los Angeles through 2009.
If you do decide to tune into the X games and become a fan of the sports you’ll be exposed to amazing games ranging from the likes of Snowboarding Super Pipe, which is a sport in which riders ride from one side of a U shaped pipe to another. When they are in the air they do spins and jumps and various tricks of their own creation to impress the judges. Snowmobile SnoCross, in which Snowmobilers race each other around a track full of jumps and obstacles, and then there’s the popular Slopstyle which is a type of freestyle skiing in which the skier has to navigate around an obstacle course. Other games include Skier X which is a competition in which skier’s go head to head and compete to be the first while perfectly executing tricks. And Big Air, which is a sport in which skiers gain momentum on a big ramp and then leap off it to perform amazing tricks while in mid air.
The above were just the Winter X games sports, the Summer X games has a range of its own games including Supermoto which is a sport in which motorbike racers compete around a combination dirt and paved track covered in jumps, and Bicycle Dirt Jumping where BMX bikers try to outdo each other while performing tricks on huge dirt hills. Skateboarding Vert which is probably one of the most popular of the X sports, it involves the riding up and down of skateboarders on a U shaped ramp. The boarders perform mind boggling tricks while in the air in between runs. Wakeboarding is another one of the X sports, which is sort of part surfboarding and part waterskiing, in which competitors use the boats wake to gain air and then do a variety of tricks while elevated.
The X game events may be a huge variation from tradition sports but that is actually where their appeal lies. The prizes are just like those awarded in the Olympics. And yes, the prize money for the X games wasn’t much in the beginning and athletes started complaining about being under paid but over time the X games has increased in popularity and thus funding as well.
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