CON GAMES: I Hate The X Games

January 23rd, 2008 at 06:10am Michael Conniff 2

Aspen is so cool and hip that it would be outrageously uncool and bodaciously unhip to admit that I really hate the X Games. To say so makes me feel like a traitor to my home base—and worse—because I find myself (again) in the position of insisting Aspen is not nearly so cool as it thinks.

Now I realize the made-for-television games on ESPN are an economic godsend and public relations home run for the town. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. The plain truth: for the people who live here, the X Games are a nightmare from which we are trying to awake—if we could just get to sleep.

You can’t miss X if you drive down Highway 82, and you can’t go anywhere in the Roaring Fork Valley without driving down Highway 82. The X Games at Buttermilk form a near-perfect bottleneck for anyone who wants to go into or out of Aspen, a journey that is a sluggish, high-season nightmare to begin with. For one week, with the riders jamming to their chosen music, the X Games takes a traffic jam and jams it down our throats until we want to gag.

Then there’s the klieg lights to contend with. In case you haven’t noticed, the X Games turn Buttermilk into a day-for-night television set where the lights are always on. My guess is that turning the lights on and off throughout the week is a bad idea for some heretofore unexplained reason. But the upshot is a glaring, blaring, global-warming eyesore that won’t go away.

I admit the first time you see it, the lit-up set is kind of cool, but after five minutes of that it’s like teenagers who don’t know when to turn off their iPods. Leni Riefenstahl, who understood a few things about spectacle, would feel right at home on Highway 82 this week.

The only thing worse than driving by the X Games is actually going to them. Because they are made-for-TV, the experience of attending the Games will make you hate them forever. You stand around freezing, with sight lines that render you all but blind in those moments when you are not besieged by sponsors giving away worthless crap. And trying to find a bus to get out of there is enough to make you claustrophobic for life.

Which is not to say all things X are not wonderful beyond description. The athletes themselves are too cool for school to say the least—just ask them—and some of the things they do on snow are flat-out unbelievable. That’s a given, though better taken in small doses on television. But after ten years of sag fashion, is it heretical to say the way-cool look of oversized insouciance is getting a tad long in the tooth? Some of these athletes aren’t kids any more, and yet they dress as if they’re still fourteen.

Let’s face it: the X Games slacker snowboarder look is beginning to look plain stupid—a fashion update is long overdue. And the attitude that goes with it? I look at the X Games as a convention of putatively non-conformist kids who all dress and talk exactly alike. Talk about the man in the gray flannel suit: X Gamers are drones locked onto a trend like a tractor beam and hence no different than their parents.

The only reason I can personally think of to like the X Games is Aspen’s own home-grown star Gretchen Bleiler. I could make that argument in great detail, but anyone who has seen Ms. Bleiler on the slopes or off requires no further explanation.

To further make my case let me simply say Gretchen Bleiler.

By the way, I get it that people like me are not supposed to get the X Games. I’m above the age of 24 so I’m way too old to realize how cool and unforgettable it must be to be so cool and unforgettable in a made-for-television unreality show. I get that I’m not supposed to get it. What I don’t get is why anyone in their right mind would watch the X Games anywhere but on TV.

Entry Filed under: Fashion, Snowboarding, Media, Aspen, Colorado, Con Games, Stars, Pitkin County, Television, Resorts, The West, United Post