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Entry Three: Snowboarding's Brushes With Greatness
and Other Stories |
Entry Two: Corporate America Meets Snowboarding (1-27-96) Entry One: Winter X - A Slave To The Games (1-27-96) Back To The Winter X Games Index |
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Tonight in a talent meeting, Winter X Games main man Jed Drake gave a rousing little sermon about how great these games are because of their diversity. The meeting was called so he could have one last shot at instilling in the talent how important our jobs at the games really are. "Snowboarders have their own culture," he said. "The Ice Climbers have their own culture. The mountain bikers have their own. And the super modified shovel racers, well, they don't have any culture (laughter). But what we have is a celebration. A festival. It is about enjoying the festival with people from disparate cultures competing. And you have to make sure that the people at home understand what is happening and why. "As he was saying this I was looking at the faces around the table and it blew me away. Sitting to my right was Bob Beattie. I grew up watching him call World Cup and Olympic ski races for ABC and ABC's Wide World of Sports. Across the table from him was Bill Nye the Science guy, and to my left was Olympic Gold Medalist Bart Conner (who has been and will be pretty close to my left until Sunday afternoon). I just kept thinking, what are all these people doing at a snowboard contest? How far has snowboarding come (or gone)? And what kind of monster is ESPN creating? Over the next few days I guess we'll all find out. More importantly however, is that we'll finally see how America will respond to seeing snowboarding done right. Snowboarding 1, Organization 0 After two days of ESPN's organizational machine it was fun to see some snowboarding style chaos sneak back into the X Games. At 9 AM this morning Bart and I were supposed to go through a two-hour rehearsal for the Big Air along with the producer, director, cameramen, and the rest of the crew. When we got to the scaffolding our headsets were laid out nicely, the jump was buffed, and the cameras were already in place and rolling.
Sport Organizer Don Bostick had rounded up some riders who would practice jump for us so we could practice calling the action, watching the replays, and basically figure out how the whole production was going to work. I'm not used to having a producer talk in my ear while I'm talking so I need the practice. Unfortunately, when pro riders April Lawyer and Brandon McAlister rolled up to the jump to check it out they said, "No way. We're not jumping this. It's too dangerous."
Our producer got on the headsets and said that since the snowboarders weren't going to jump and that the cats would have to rebuild the jump we might as well hit the road for a while. Bart and I went out and checked out the other venues and looked around for snowboarders.
The pipe was just being cut by the pipe dragon and it looked perfect. The BoarderX course is going to be one of the best so far. It features a bunch of berms, kickers, spines, and a death gap at the bottom of the course. When we first got there it was about a 45 foot gap to vertical landing ramp. Coming up short would mean splattering on the wall. So far everything looks good on the moutain. Rider registration started today and rumor continue to fly about whether Terje is going to show. Burton says he's coming but the word from the riders is the he and his girlfriend just flew to Hawaiis for a few days. Daniel Franck is also AWOL as of today. No one knows. Jamie Lynn should also be showing up in the next day or two. Jeff Burshie and Neal Drake signed up but I didn't see anyone else. The one bummer is that Max Plotzeneder and Fabian Rohrer have to catch a flight back to Europe on Sunday and they're going to miss some of the competition. Damn. Betrand Denervaud was scheduled to do the BoarderX, however, he's told organizers that he's not coming to do the BoarderX unless they also include him in the halfpipe. We've yet to get a ruling on that. So far so good. More later.
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