Aspen – Rules are for dweebs.
The playground monitor at your neighborhood elementary school would hate the Winter X Games.
Nobody plays nice.
Which explains why these games speak to the untamed heart of America, land of the free and home of the bodacious.
The glory of barely controlled chaos is shouted loudest in an event called snowboarder X, which combines the best of medieval jousting and 21st-century road rage.
Competitors wear more armor than gladiators. Six begin the race; one survives. The goal is to hit the finish line before everybody else crashes and burns. It is sport imitating life, a snowriding accident waiting to happen, eerily reminiscent of an intermediate run on Presidents Day weekend. So this is what happens to winter fun when the video generation grows up.
“There’s some definite carnage in this sport,” American racer Jayson Hale said Saturday. “There’s a whole lot of bumping and grinding going on.”
At the starting line, it is not unusual to hear noises that could scare a banshee.
“In the gate, one girl might be screaming at the top of her lungs, and another might be saying, ‘Oh, good luck.’ It is strange. It can blow your mind. And you’re shaking,” Californian Joanie Anderson said.
When sizing up five fellow racers, who rudely must be cut off like dawdlers in rush-hour traffic, what goes through the brain of a competitor bent on victory? Thoughts your dear mother would not approve.
“I’m thinking my own little thoughts that I don’t dare tell anybody about. But they aren’t nice,” admitted Hale, who finished third in the men’s final. “You must have total confidence you can whup everybody’s butt.”
You like your sports raw? Then here’s Rule No. 1. Less is more.
The fewer rules that encumber a game, the more chance that the final results will be left to the skill of competitors.
The X Games have found an audience in a nation bored with the trivial nuances of the double-switch, three-second violations and illegal use of hands. The same kids who refused to color within the lines during kindergarten grow up and leave Colorado with gold, silver and bronze dangling from their necks.
There is no judging in snowboarder X. Style points are not awarded. Which is good.
The competition is based solely on survival of the fittest across 2,000 feet of bad winter road, booby-trapped with banked turns, jumps and gaps. The downhill course is snow-sculpting with a wicked sense of humor.
Anybody who believes in the illusion of an orderly world has never seen the raw chaos of snowboarder X.
“I don’t like messing around with the pack,” Canadian Maelle Ricker said. She has her reasons. Three of them. After shredding knee ligaments in 1999, 2000 and 2001, Ricker has recovered to become the surprise female champion in this event at Winter X Games X.
Nothing against World Cup champion skier Bode Miller, but racing gates seems like a polite artifice by comparison to the demolition derby of snowboarder X.
On a winter afternoon, when the sun grows weak and the clock strikes beer-thirty, when you dare a buddy to beat you to the lodge, you never consider carving fancy turns around poles planted in the snow. You just put the pedal to the metal and go faster than the ski patrol can yell warnings. Maybe that’s why skiers also have their own version of this race at the X Games.
The problem with the Winter Olympics is the proceedings have grown so touchy-feely that your box of hankies is empty before Team USA is done marching at the opening ceremony.
Snowboarder X is more raw. More uninhibited. More outrageous.
“There are rules as far as keeping you from punching a competitor in the face. But as far as cutting people off? It’s part of the game. That’s what you’ve got to do, and it gets pretty violent,” said Hale, wearing his chutzpah on his sleeve. “Would I do this race without my body armor? I don’t know. How much you paying me?”
The X Games are all about attitude. And money. And pushing your way to the front of the pack. And big, loud fun.
Where else but America could the X Games have been invented?
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-820-5438 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
