ASPEN — Bobby Brown broke onto the X Games scene in 2010 when he shocked the field and won two gold medals as a teenager from Cherry Creek High School.
Thursday, he qualified for another slopestyle final and has a busy Saturday lined up. Back for his seventh year in the Roaring Fork Valley, the 25-year-old Brown owns a half-dozen X Games medals.
With the 2018 Winter Olympics just 13 months down the road, the Breckenridge skier’s focus remains squarely on the X Games. Slopestyle made its Olympic debut in 2014 (when he sat out the X Games to heal for the Winter Games), but after fighting through an ankle injury heading into the trip to Sochi.
Slopestyle again will be an Olympic sport, but ski big air, which is Brown’s other forte, did not make the cut for the 2018 Games (however, snowboard big air will debut in Pyeongchang).
“X Games is really where the roots are, and that’s honestly what I care about more than next year and that really isn’t in my mind at all,” Brown said earlier this week in Aspen. “I just want to come out here and be present and focus on what we got going on right now and see what we can do.”
He spent last season working on his backcountry ski film, “Be Water,” which debuted online in October.
Brown, who pulled off the as an 18-year-old winning slopestyle and big air, will have Friday to relax but gets back to work Saturday with the slopestyle finals in the morning and the big air finals, where he has won two golds and three silvers, late Saturday under the lights.
Brown was the first of nine Colorado athletes expected to compete this week in Aspen. Telluride skier Gus Kenworthy did not have to run in the qualifier because he finished second last year, and will be in Saturday’s 12-man finals. He is also in Friday nightap halfpipe final.
Brit James Woods, who has not won a medal in three Aspen X Games appearances, was the top qualifier out of Thursday’s slopestyle with a 94-point run.
End of the Run
Tucker Hibbertap dominance in X Games snocross ended Thursday afternoon when he finished fourth, ending his nine-year winning streak. He had won every year since 2007 (the event wasn’t held in 2012; he also won in 2000).
The 32-year-old Hibbert lost to Swedish racer Petter Narsa, who won in his third trip to Aspen. Fellow Swede Adam Renheim defend his silver, and 23-year-old Lincoln Lemieux of Vermont, who finished 11th last year as a rookie, won his first X Games medal, edging out Hibbert by nearly two seconds.
Tough Start
Making its debut in Aspen in preparation for the 2018 Winter Olympics, the women’s snowboard big air event was owned by a teenager but was rough on a veteran rider.
Hailey Langland, a 16-year-old from San Clemente, Calif., won with a 49-point final run (50 points is max). She landed a near perfect cab, double-cork 1080. The format scoring was set by taking the riders’ top two scores; she claimed gold with a combined 66 points (out of a possible 100).
Jamie Anderson, competing in her 13th X Games Aspen, had a nasty fall trying to stick a frontside 1080 and smashed her face before sliding down the landing area on her back. She was able to walk off, and event organizers said she was being checked by medical staff for a lower back injury.
Anderson is scheduled to compete Saturday in the slopestyle, an event which she won gold at the 2014 Sochi Olympics and also four times in Aspen.