2010 Olympics November 15, 2009

As I said last night, I was going to post a blog covering all the very exciting stuff happening in extreme sports this winter. I’m not going to talk about everything in one post, because I’m sure you don’t want to read all that at once as much as I don’t want to write it all at once. I’ll start with what I would consider the most important.
The Olympics only happen once every four years (as I’m sure you already know), and it’s the one event where you will truly get the most diversity. With all the countries competing, however, America holds it down in the field of action sports (followed closely by Switzerland… Go figure)

This is the snowboarding halfpipe event at the 2006 Winter Games in Torino, Italy. It was hard to find a good video of this, believe it or not. For some reason they only decided to post names for two riders, one of whom didn’t even place in the event (even though we ❤ Mason Aguirre) and, I’m not sure if anyone else has this problem, but I can’t recognize who’s who under those helmets, goggles and bandanas. Anyway, I thought Shaun’s run was worth showing (yes… He’s kind of the best as much as I hate to admit it), and it earned him the gold medal in the halfpipe event, with Danny Kass coming in second and a Finnish rider, Markku Koski, coming in third.
One of my favorite things about snowboarding is the female presence in the sport. It seems to be the extreme sport that most women are attracted to (my theory is, this is because snow doesn’t leave scars all over your knees and elbows like cement does) and they not only participate, they totally kick ass.

The US Female Olympic Snowboard Team includes Hannah Teter, Kelly Clark, Gretchen Bleiler (from the CO 🙂 ) and Lindsay Jacobellis. Kelly won the Gold at the 2002 Winter Olympics, and Hannah and Gretchen took home Gold and Silver (respectively) at the 2006 Winter Olympics.

Since I couldn’t find any footage of my favvvorite Gretchen, here’s some of Hannah (who’s great too) at the Winter Games in Torino.

The 2010 Winter Olympics are coming up in about 3 months, and it should be (as it always is) a spectacular show. It will be held in Vancouver starting in mid-February, so be sure to check it out 😉

That’s enough for now… Coming up, I’ll be posting soon about the Winter X Games (held for the last many years in Aspen *thumbs up* at my favorite ski resort ever *thumbs up x2*) and the Winter Dew Tour. I might even add a little to this post, because I know I left out freestyle skiing… which has a place on here too 🙂

The Greatest November 14, 2009

There’s a lot of stuff coming up for winter extreme sports, like the 2010 Olympics, the X Games, Winter Dew Tour and even a winter Free Flow Tour (new this year.) I’m not going to get into all that quite yet, I’ll probably hold off a week. Right now I want to blog about a serious OG in the world of skateboarding; his name might even sound familiar. He’s Rodney Mullen, a Florida-born pioneer of the sport. He’s been not only doing tricks but inventing them since the 80s. He is credited with creating the ollie, the kickflip, and two of my favorite tricks in skateboarding, the 360 flip and the impossible. On top of those, he has invented at least 35 others. Without this dude, skateboarding as it is today would not exist.
One of my aims with my blog is to get those of you who don’t find extreme sports particularly interesting, to be interested. This guy has such a unique style and viewpoint on the sport it’s impossible not to be entertained by him, even if skateboarding isn’t really “your thing”.

Here’s what I mean.

I’ll probably expand on this post later (there’s plenty of other great footage of Mullen) but right now I’m at work and it’s time to stop slacking. Peace!

Update November 11, 2009

If you want to watch the video of the Free Flow Finals that I mentioned a few days ago, I found the videos to embed. Here they are! For more detailed information on the Free Flow Finals see the post called “Can You Flow to Pro?” from September.

BMX Finals:

www.allisports.com

Skate Vert Finals:

www.allisports.com

More updates: These videos don’t seem to work, I’m not sure if it’s just my computer so I’ll leave them up but here are the links to the pages from which I found them:

Skate Vert Finals

BMX Park Finals

MTV Gets Extreme November 10, 2009

In this blog, I’m going to talk a little bit about extreme sports’ slow infiltration more into the “main stream”. While I consider the most popular sports among the general public to be team sports, like football and baseball, extreme sports are gaining momentum and a bigger following every year. Especially lately, it seems like you can’t get away from them.
MTV in particular has welcomed extreme sports into its regular line up. They’ve been a home to professional skateboarder Rob Dyrdek for almost 4 years now. His first show, Rob & Big, aired on the network for 3 seasons before his partner in crime Christopher “Big Black” Boykins left LA to raise a family. After his departure, Dyrdek started a solo show (featuring his cousin Drama, who appeared in Rob & Big as well) called Fantasy Factory which is more extreme sports oriented.
The premise behind Fantasy Factory is that after Big Black left LA, Dyrdek tuned his energy into creating the ultimate “office” for himself, if you can call it an office.

With that idea, he created the Fantasy Factory, a fully skate-able office. Dyrdek is now able to stay true to his career as a skateboarder but also has a souped up office in which he can take care of business.

On the show, Dyrdek does everything from shoot hoops with Lamar Odom to shooting his very own Carl’s Jr. commercial.

If you haven’t already seen it, I would definitely recommend this show to anyone, even if skateboarding doesn’t interest you. Rob D has plenty of hilarious schemes up his sleeve to keep you entertained. While there are no new episodes airing at this time, you can check out the re-runs most days on MTV2, or go to http://www.mtv.com to watch full episodes.

Another super sick show on MTV2 is Nitro Circus. Featuring motocross legend(/rally car driver) Travis Pastrana, Nitro Circus is like a totally bad ass version of Jackass. Instead of just inflicting pain on themselves, they do it while trying to perform incredible stunts. These include trying to backflip a monster truck, jumping out of a plane without a parachute and backflipping a megaramp on a tricycle. If you’ve never seen a megaramp before, check out the video below to see how nuts that is.

Like Fantasy Factory, Nitro Circus just had its season finale, but it’s also available on mtv.com and plays frequently on MTV2.

The third show I’m going to talk about is The Alli Show, also on MTV2 (I swear they’re not paying me to advertise… even though maybe they should be). On each episode of this show they follow a professional athlete who is making a name for themselves in their chosen sport and is on the road to success. Featuring athletes like Josh Grant (motocross) and Garret Reynolds (BMX), all these guys are young up-and-comers. It’s definitely worth watching if you want to get a sneak peek at who will be dominating these sports soon enough.

Finally, a great show but one you might not have access to is The Adventures of Danny and the Dingo on Fueltv. If you get this channel, you can see my all-time favorite snowboarder Danny Kass and his childhood buddy the Dingo go on some wacky adventures. In the first episode of season two, they get $26,000 in ones and pay a visit to Rob Dyrdek to buy some “street cred” (which apparently comes in the form of Rob D’s murdered out flat black Chevy Tahoe).

Such eccentricities are not uncommon for Danny and the Dingo, so if you find this amusing watch the new season! It’s on Sundays at 8:30 pm, for those of you lucky enough to get Fuel TV at home.

Want to See Some Cool Kids? November 5, 2009

Short announcement really quick: If anyone has OnDemand and wants to watch some footage from Free Flow Finals (the amateur series of the Dew Tour, see entry “Can You Flow to Pro”), go check it out! It’s only 5 minutes and it’s totally action packed 🙂