ASPEN — Pioneering slednecks Colten Moore and Heath Frisby plan Sunday to unleash the biggest trick ever thrown on a snowmobile: the implausible double backflip.
Since freestyle snowmobiling’s debut at Aspen’s Winter X Games in 2007 — with Kremmling rider Chris Burandtap soaring a 92-foot backflip — a small army of thumb-throttling gladiators has pushed the sport to new heights. That progression will surge Sunday, when and Idaho’s Frisby will try the feat in the best trick finals, which has not been contested in Aspen since 2013.
“It’s gonna go down,” said Frisby, who was the first to front flip a snowmobile, earning best trick gold in the 2012 X Games. “It’s going to be awesome.”
Frisby and Moore have spent the past year focused on the double backflip. Moore last spring traveled to , where the action sports icon has spent years perfecting the precisely angled ramp needed to throw athletes high enough to whip their 500-pound machines through two full rotations. Moore double-backed his quad ATV there.
“That’s what got me started on the idea,” Moore said.
Since then, Moore estimates he’s throttled his snowmobile through more than 100 double backflips, plummeting into the foam pit in the backyard of his Krum, Texas, home. Each attempt was painful.
“Itap not a normal trick that you can do hundreds and hundreds of times into the pit because you are just smashing yourself every time,” said the 27-year-old Moore, who harvested his seventh X Games medal Saturday in the high-flying freestyle competition. He won silver behind Joe Parsons only four years after his brother,
Frisby said his double-back training “really physically beat me up pretty good.”
“Falling 60 feet into a foam pit, at 33 years old, I guess I don’t have a 26-year-old’s back any more. There definitely were some days when I was lying around doing nothing just because physically I was beaten up,” Frisby said last week. “And even doing it successfully and going that high into the pit … the foam stops you so fast. It can really put a kink in your training schedule.
“My main focus is that double-flip. I came here to crush it, and I think I’m ready.”
It won’t be the first time the double-back flip has been attempted at the X Games, just perhaps the first time it’s landed in a competition. The legendary Levi LaVallee, who won his 11th X Games medal Saturday in the freestyle contest, . His landing was not pretty.
He will not attempt it again Sunday.
“My double-back days are long past,” LaVallee said. “I’m so excited to see it go down though.”
He said there’s a lot more to a double-back then simply pinning the throttle and pulling hard.
“There’s so many mental things that can beat you up,” he said, adding that the consequences of failing to finish the second rotation has kept the trick buried since his attempt eight years ago. “Itap just gnarly. You are going so high with this 500-pound machine. If I paved the way for those guys, I didn’t pave a very good path. But at least they saw it was possible.”
Confidence is key, said Moore, who took a long break from double-back practice to simulate the delay he would have spinning the trick during his trip from Texas to Aspen for the four-day Winter X Games. He stomped his first attempt after the week-and-a-half break, giving him the confidence to throw it in Aspen.
“Itap a mental game. As long as you can get your body to do what it needs to do, itap your head thatap going to screw you up,” Moore said. “I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get my head straight. I feel good. Get ready.”