Jacob Wester

Last night, as you may know from staying up late to watch various internet streams, was the night of the Winter X Games Big Air competition. 10 athletes, one jump, more rotations than you could imagine, and people pushing eachother to the limits of what the human body will tolerate.

During practice I was taking it pretty easy, setting my bar low since I wasn’t very comfortable with the jump. For the biggest competition of the season, you’d think that we could get a little bigger size kicker to do our tricks on, but for some reason that didn’t happen this year, not much you can do but try do make the best of it.

But, 5 runs into practice I had just landed a dub cork 1260 that felt really good which gave me the confidence to try and go for the 14. Stomped two dub 14s that felt amazing, by far the most fun trick I’ve done in a while. Went back up and somewhere on the inrun of the next jump I decided to wrap it around to 1620, which I landed first try too. As you can imagine I was walking on clouds by now, since I knew I had a shot at making it into finals.

And then…it was go time. Got my first two runs in the first qualifying heat, dub cork 12 and dub cork 14, which felt awesome since I knew I now had two different tricks in the bag and that I could try to go for something big. For some reason i couldn’t really get the 1620 to work, gave i three tries but crashed on two and reverted on the last one, but I was still stoked on my performance and could have gone home happy right there. I somehow made it into finals, and that’s when things got ugly. After the second qualifiers the organizers decided they were going to broadcast 45 minutes of women’s snowboarding, which meant we would have to wait for our turn. While waiting I got cold and uninspired and started skiing really bad in finals, messing up my rotations and took some bad hits, and after my third crash and a hard impact to the head I decided I was going to watch the rest since I was obviously not safe out there. Kind of a bummer, but I am super happy to be in an X Games finals, landing new tricks, and just putting on a good show in general.

Sofia filmed most of the comp but unfortunately the battery died for my dub 14 that I landed, we will make sure to get that online as soon as we locate a clip of it. Here’s (almost) all of the action from last night;

Woke up pretty much broken in half this morning, but I am alive and it’s time to pack the bags and leave Aspen. First, I’m going to watch snowboard slope finals (go Halldor!), and the pipe (the Shaun White festival). Exciting!

Jake the Snake

~ by jacobwester on January 31, 2011.