X-games

Any idea why wakeboarding is not included?

this little thing called money

I've been curious-- are they going to televise the rail jam thing they are gonna have?

If you're talking a wakeboarding rail jam- there isn't one.....

did they cancel that?

I'm over the whole decision to cut wake this year, so not beating that dead horse....BUT I was there last year, and I remember the finals going "live" around mid-day Saturday, which was 3-4PM East coast time, so I called my son to make sure he was watching. I was curious to see what replaced it this year. Do you know what is in that time slot for this Saturday????

"The Brat Eating Championship"!!!!! Check for yourselves...no way I can make that up!

If this is what ESPN calls an "athletic event"....I wonder where "Fly Mating" would fall?

DC

From the x games portion of ESPN's website for this year....here is the only mention of wakeboarding:

Be here now for the X Games debut of Rally Car Racing. Forget rollerblades and wakeboards, we've upgraded to demo VW GTIs, Subaru WRXs, Neons, Mitsubishis and Mazdas, all racing around real-life roads for the first ever Rally Car X event.

Link here: http://expn.go.com/expn/story?pageName=sx12xgamesbegin

I watched a little last night. Did you hear them talking about part of the games being on Pay-per-view?
The xgames are nice but I would not pay to watch it.
First they compare us to rollerbladers then they say that watching racing neons is an improvement. Wow, we suck

Rally car racing is gay! I was so pissed when I heard they booted wakeboarding. I bet they end up bringing it back.

Wow, that's a pretty harsh dig on wakeboarding. Based on that, it doesn't sound like they're going to be bending over backwards to get wakeboarding back in the X Games for next year.

You know whats really hard to understand about this?

I have seen so many NEW wakeboarders, and wakeboard boats, on the water this year......in many different states.

For a sport that is quite obviosly EXPLODING in popularity espn needs to get with it.

Or maybe televise some more poker, either way.

Are you saying that brat eating isn't absolutely exploding these days? You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a brat chewer!! It's huge!

I saw a glimpse of the rail jam setup last night on X center. They are having a rail jam session.

Hust out of curiosity why does everyone care that they dumped it out of the X Games. Unless you go to the X games in person what are we missing out on?

How much air time did boarding have last year, maybe a half hour? It was always lame anyway...

I dont think its a "AirTime issue". Its just the point that there dumpin wakeboarding and basicly saying its not good enough for the X Games any more, so lets do Rally Racing instead. Id rather watch a half hour of boarding than a hour of wall climbing.

who cares the x games is getting really retarded. i watched skateboarding last night and even tony hawk didnt get excited when anybody rode it was like "wow he just did a backflip to rollout cool......" the announcers were all monotoned and it was pretty gay. now they want to charge u to watch it hah not me

I think the riders are the ones partly to blame. Why give ESPN anything for free. They took wakeboarding out of being a medaling event but if you want to do a rail jam for free that would be great. Hey where do you get signed up? I know it is a little more complicated than that but when your boss fires you, you don't ask can I work another day for free cause I like the job. A rail jam doesn't sell boats for Mastercraft or anyone else. 99% of people that wakeboard have never even hit a rail nor will they have the opportunity. We need something that helps promote our sport.

Are you kidding David? I live in WI (half of the year, norcal other half) where we hold "Bratfest" and set the world record for eating brats in two days.......something like 150 thousand.

But is it xtreme? I guess it depends on how you top it.

Ouch! Rollerblades and wakeboards, that hurts! I think they should replace us with those "healie" shoes. I have seen a few 4 year olds in the mall going O F F!

It will need something huge to make it happen again. As of right now, Wake is right there with street luge to the X Games execs. MX got big when it hit stadiums in the 70's and Supercross is still growing in popularity. 50,000 strong captive audience to advertise and sell to! There are tons of people that may not even realize the Superstars of SX race outside during the summer!
It seems a little cost prohibitive to line a stadium floor in plastic, fill it with enough water to run an X Star and crash in, add some rails and have a contest for maybe 300 spectators. BUT.....how frikin cool would that be???
To bring in 50,000 fans you'd need rock star status wake riders, and that lies on the shoulders of the riders agents to give them that status by getting huge endorsements, appearances on Leno and Letterman, SNL, Regis and Kellie Lee. That or Brad Pitt will have to take it up and be able to kick Harf's ass, thus landing wake on ET and Inside Edition every night.

OK....photo shop challenge! Take a shot of Anaheim stadium filled with fans and put water and an X Games wake course in it!

And please...someone make a note that this was MY IDEA so when it happens in 10 years, I can get paid.

Now...I'm off to grill some Brats.....gotta see what this is all about!!!!

(Message edited by foxrepdc on August 04, 2006)

I live a few miles from Long Beach Marine Stadium and looked forward to X games wakebaording every year. I couldnt belive they took it away, the area was always packed with people ... I dont get it. Sad day.

Weird that they dissed wakeboarding on their website. What about this?
http://www.wakeboardingmag.com/article.jsp?ID=43488
At least they'll have wakeskating too! But, I do believe that this type of contest in the X Games will do better then running a boat, as a pool/winch format allows more people to see what's going on in a way. You know, get a little more up close to the EXTREME action!

lets all boycot ESPN!!!

forget surfing i'd rather be wakeboarding

did any one see the double backflip on the moto??

I just watched the Brat eating contest and I'd say there were a lot of people there.
New record was shattered with 58 (previous 35 by Sonja Thomas) by Kobayashi. The next closest was Joey Chestnut with 45.
Don't think I could ever be apart of MLE ( Major league eating)

I would like to see Kobayashi wakeboard right after eating 58 hotdogs!!!

Coming from southern Louisiana, wakeboarding is small. But since I started riding on our fishing boat 6 years ago, the number of wakeboarders and people getting serious into wakeboarding has increased greatly. There are a few ski boats floating around and a lot of I/Os with monster towers all due to our local shop.

I dont know if anyone read the bio on Matt Hoffman, but in his book he talks about how he got kicked out of the first x-games for saying how fake it was. A few years later they beg him to come back because he and bmx was getting big. I dont know if they will do the same with wakeboarding, but the x-games is really becoming a joke. I hope fuel becomes the leader in action sports, because espn doesn't have a clue.

Yes, the double backflip is amazing, but everyone knew he could do it because they have shown him doing them for the past year on fuel tv in his foam pit.

The whole reason wakeboarding was dropped was money. They had to get another venue, completly separate from Home Depot Center and Staples, get the tv rigs out there, plus security and everything else that has to do with putting on an event. In the end, they were losing money with wakeboarding. Yeah, it sucks, but that's how corporations work. They gotta look at the bottom line.

http://forums.espn.go.com/espn/expn/forum?start=0&forumID=383

just got done watching them, i figure if wakeboarding is going to come back we should get travis pastrana too request it...im sure thats how that stupid ralley car crap started...

im going to call them the p games....for pastrana...its like a weekend made for him to boost his ego

You wanna tell me wake was dropped for money reasons. What about the Surf event that was held somewhere else entirely. That was not socal waves, water or nice off shore breeze. Looked like tahiti or somewhere in the french poly. But I could be wrong. But it was sure not at the home depot center, or huntington peir like last year. Just my thoughts.
P.S. just give it time they will get rid of street skating soon so they (espn) can spend more time with skate big air and vert.

I think it is crazy how much they love pastrana but he is amazing.
I would say wake is gone forever. Not enough big names. I watched the Moto race and they spent more time covering McGrath and Pastrana than the guys who won the race.
The Xgames are all about Dirt bikes and Skateboards. That must be what sells tickets.

pete i think the surf event was in mexico and your right whats the espn excuse on this?

this is a seperate event in another countrys site and surfing is no more a spectator sport then wakeboarding...

how gay is that that they dumped wakeboarding and picked up rally car racing with the motox drivers, that is so stupid you dont need to have reall buts to drive a car but you need real talent to wakeboard that is proabably the stupdest thing ive ever seen just when wakeboarding is tring to step it up and make it huge in the action sports world we get craped on by the bigest event in the histor of action sports, the is pretty queer its okay thought the xagames is gay anyway the way it is set up like the surfing make it in to teams get real let surfing be the sport it is dontt try to make it in to one, the x games suck

Brat eating is awesome!!! Grilled up a big batch Saturday, and did three Nuclear Indy Tantrums on my toilet Sunday!

I will also give my 2 cents on the Rally Car deal.....YES, very gay! Being born and raised in NASCAR and dirt track country and knowing many people in the industry, Rally Cars take about as much talent to drive as amusement park go karts!

If the trend continues.....the sport will at best, be right over on OLN at 2:30 AM, following "Buck Masters" and "PBR Bull Riding". Which in reality, for those of us that look for the glass every week.....less growth means more of it!

Why should I care about not seeing an hour or so of poorly shot/edited tournament wakeboarding on the X-Games when I have a full season of PULL to look forward to?

I talked with one of the riders by phone on Saturday who was there for the rail event and said that it was going bad. First, the location was behind the Home Depot center so it was hard to even know there was a rail jam going on so the spectatorship was small. And second, the rails were really mellow so it didn't look extreme at all.

Despite the small coverage wake has gotten over the past few years, it was still better then nothing. Maybe this could have been the year that some one landed a 1080 off the DU?????? We'll never know now. Why didn't wakeboarding ever get a additional event like most other sports at X, like a best trick event?

Jed...

I agree wholeheartedly. I was excited when I found out that they broadcasted wakeboarding on INHD, but then realized that not even I liked watching it on TV...

no slowmo (which for non-wakeboarding spectators is a HUGE bonus), terrible color (shot midday), choppy water, only one angle, nothing even slightly interesting about it.

It's just so much harder to make wakeboarding look equally as good as the other sports to people... It requires a lot of extra work and extra money.

Unfortunately, in it's current state, wakeboarding is just lame to watch on TV. I love wakeboarding videos, but broadcast material doesn't even come close to touching it... Target audience not excited + broad audience doesn't understand + it's expensive = trade for another more popular "sport". Like stock car racing.

I mean, I guess it's actually a compliment to us... there are less wakeboarders that spend their time sitting inside watching TV than all the other sports on EXPN.

In addition, this just means the sponsors have more freedom and where they place their money in the industry... another benefit!

Bottom line: We'll be fine without wakeboarding on TV.

as far as the surf event goes, not only was it in mexico but it was filmed around the fourth of july. hey if they need to film wakeboarding a month in advance to get it there maybe they should. remember the good ol days when x games was on for a week and it was on almost all day. now it is like six hours of moto and a half hour of everything else. i would love to watch bikes and skating as well as wakeboarding.

maybe they should bring back wake and have a d up contest along with the standard wake contest to step the riding up a notch, that would be sweet

X-Games is an exibition in danger, not a competition for sports. Wakeboarding in and of itself is not dangerous. The spills do not put the body in danger like these other sports. Wakeboarding athletes arent "laying it on the line" like these other guys. The riders werent there to progress at the risk of harm. They were there to do a tournament run and take home a medal. Therefore nobody in the mainstream cares to watch it. It never got good ratings.

Didnt really belong with what they are going for. They are going for the double backflip audience who want to see someone succeed or die.

I think it depends on where the revenue source comes from: television or spectators on site? If its television there are so many ways to make it more exciting, like using a tube camera while the riders are competing, more angles and more cameras in the water, better editing etc. Even if there was a 2 or 3 hour delay but the editing was done better it could be a really interesting program for ESPN.

Jason, I think wakeboarding is as dangerous as surfing, skateboarding, or ralley racing.

Unfortunately it isnt based on what we think or know, but rather by what it looks like to the average Joe. A pro rider falling on a tournament run trick doesnt look bad at all, even if it is. There is no difference to the masses between Danny sticking a 9 or attempting a 10. Wakeboarding is great, but I still dont see it as a spectators sport. Its something kids do to pass a boring summer day.

Now the opposite, look at BMX dirt jumping, even the slightest spills LOOK catostrphic. But those guys just get up, dust of and try again.

Ive seen alot of rally spills, and rolling rally cars look crazy whether the driver gets hurt or not. rally is just the new fad with the MotoX guy driving for Subaru. If it is conservative, it wont last long either. But, if they start getting crazy in those cars, it will be around a while.

Besides, the more I see people like Travis P. on the X-Games, the more I think of the movie Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle:
"On a scale of 1-10, 1 being not so extreme and 10 being extremely extreme, that was an 8."

I don't mind not having our sport portrayed like that.

I just watched my first taste of summer X today on 'X Center' and honestly, they should just change the 'Summer X Games' to the 'Extreme Travis Pastrana Summer Challenge'. It is so annoying how all they talk about is him, and so much time is devoted to his multi-motorsport greatness.

Also, Winter X should be renamed 'The Shaun White Glory Week'.

UpNorth you must have missed Shaun White in the skateboarding in summer X. (not taking anything away from White or Pastrana, both amazing at what they do)
The Xgames truly love the crossover athletes.

I would say surfing will be gone soon.

True that. Surfing isn't even exciting to watch. How many different ways can you cut up and down a wave??

I know, surfing is boring to watch. Especially if you know nothing about it.

I'm over x-Games they're lame. I'm looking forward to the new season of PULL.

hmmm, i rekon they should build a bigger pool...run two pwcs and have a kicker comp? an stick a couple of sliders in.

double up contest would be good, i rekon lots of people would find that good to watch.

anyway just an idea. would be sick if it did come back though and get the coverage we need