I am trying to watch the x-games over the last few days but I just can’t really bring myself to do so. Now granted the Winter X has always suffered compared to the Summer X, but the competition is so irrelevant these days, I really have no idea what is wrong with them.
Honestly a number of years ago when they took out the really weird sports that were hard to put in competition format in the first place, I didn’t mind. I mean extreme sledding? Bungee Jumping? WTF!?!? But some of the sports they’ve taken out of the years have just been a shame. I mean I sort of get ridding themselves of sky-surfing, it was cool but after a few years it became notably repetitive. But why oh why have they got rid of winter mountain biking? Or the street luge (a sport that was one to really define not only what an extreme sport was, but also was one of the original big sports of the X-Games)? Or flatland bike trick? Hell it seems to me that in general the street tricks of all sports were nearly completely taken out in the last year, as well as inline skating.
In their steed we’ve seen many new additions… ones that don’t belong really in a 10 mile radius of the X-Games… snowmobiling? I think extreme sledding was more in line with what the competition was… when they added the motorbike tricks I thought those were cool, but now they are doing street races with em argh! That’s not extreme at all, that’s nascar… can’t get more conservative than Nascar! Some of them haven’t been too bad, like I said the motorbike trick wasn’t bad, they also added those shorter ski things into the winter and both sides got a big air trick which is pretty kick ass. I am also kind of fond of the high jump motorbike in the summer x that they added a couple years ago.
On top of that, the coverage has gotten extremely bad. ESPN used to send out some of their big dogs to cover the event and because of it we got quality coverage. Now they hired some old VJ throw off to host what essentially seems to be a “best of” clips show… very little is live anymore. ESPN used to send out some of their bigger people to cover X-Games because they believed in the venue, and it was worth believing in. It honestly felt like a competition that filled in the gaps of what the mainstream forgot or didn’t care about given that it was new. But since then, X-Games has forgotten about what the mainstream forgot as well and become part of them, catering more to nascar fan than to extreme sports fan. In so doing, I imagine their viewership numbers have suffered greatly in recent years. Of course the execs likely think this is because people have lost interest in extreme sports, and thus lower budgets and further complicate the issues with the X-Games even more. But for those very few unlikely execs who may somehow stumble upon this blog… get a clue. We are still here, it is you who left us.