Written by Matt Saraceno
Last weekend, Buttermilk Mountain at Aspen played host to the 20th annual Winter X Games. Featuring hundreds of athletes from dozens of countries of origin, the Winter X Games is the premiere event for several disciplines of winter sports, including freestyle skiing, snowboarding, and snowmobiling. This year, ESPN (who broadcasts the event) decided to partner up with Xbox to bring Halo 5: Guardians, a stop on the Halo World Championship Tour, to X Games 20. The decision left many members of the winter sports communities peeved, as ESPN chose to air live action of the Halo tournament instead of several high-profile events in both snowboarding and skiing disciplines.
Logan Imlach, a non-competing professional skier, quipped via Facebook, “So happy Jossi walked away with the win. Not sure how everybody was watching it, but on TSN (Canadian ESPN), I was pretty pissed to be missing [slopestyle] runs just to see people play video games.” In an interview for Gamespot.com, however, Halo development boss Kiki Wolfkill praised the decision, claiming “ESPN’s embrace of esports will go a long way to legitimizing competitive gaming as an athletic endeavor,” and that the position of esports is “not that different from where ‘extreme sports’ was in the ‘90s—basically earning its place in mainstream culture and amassing viewership over time.”
While this is certainly true to a degree, only the top handful of riders in the world in any freestyle-oriented winter sports discipline make enough money to live comfortably. The majority of professionals would be very keen to amass greater viewership and hopefully bring some financial support to the smaller, more niche side of the winter sports industry that often goes ignored by major media outlets in the first place. They feel they are still in a precarious position.
When it comes down to it, the criticism is aimed at ESPN, not the gaming community. High-level competitive winter sports athletes make their money via endorsements and contest winnings; if airtime is taken away from a certain athlete’s event one year, their sponsors may be inclined to reduce that athlete’s financial support the next year. Since the company won’t get as much exposure via airtime, there’s no reason for them to pay as highly.
If allowed to degenerate further, the current competition paradigm will become an increasingly high-risk, low-reward situation. In my estimation, that may not be a bad thing.
Getting rich is not why any athlete starts competition skiing and snowboarding. The draw is the activation of flow state, where an athlete’s learned experience in the discipline combines with complete immersion in the task at hand to elevate the athlete’s creativity and ultimately achieve a unique and organic approach to their field.
In high-profile competition riding, the events are curated and judged in specific ways. Tricks are ranked by difficulty, which usually places importance on high degrees of spins and flips. In order to stay current, top-level athletes have to keep up with the new tricks that their competitors learn throughout the year. Instead of reaching within themselves to create something new and organic, these riders are required to be technically proficient at performing the current canon of tricks in their discipline.
If this type of competition riding really is on the decline, then perhaps a new paradigm can take its place. Competition is inherent to humans, but it should be based on the betterment of self rather than the decimation of the competition. If smaller, more freestyle-oriented companies take the reins in organizing these types of events, the judging criteria can be critically evaluated and changed in order to foster progressive and creative riding, rather than spin-to-win huckfests that monetarily reward those willing to separate themselves from the passionate, creative base of community members that piqued these athletes’ interest in riding.
These high-stakes competitions are destructive to the cohesiveness of the communities that their elite participants originally cut their teeth in. They corrupt the individual’s goal of self-progression and development of creativity to something more narrowly focused on competition results, checklists of tricks, and cash money. This corruption is detrimental to the art form of freestyle winter sports.