Sports Reporter
jameyer@mavs.coloradomesa.edu
Last Thursday, Caleb Moore’s funeral took place.
It caused the winter sports world to take pause. Moore came up short jumping his snowmobile. The front skis dug into the ramp and sent him flying forward. The snowmobile hit him on the way down. After walking off under his own power, Moore was airlifted to Grand Junction, where he died of brain and heart complications. It was easily the highest profile death at a winter sporting event and the first at the Winter X-Games.
The easy question to ask is, “What can be done?” The short answer is, “Not much.”
Extreme sports, named correctly, are inherently dangerous. Who wants to see a snowboarder jump a five-foot gap? And you’ve never heard anyone say: “Man, that innertuber was gnarly.”
It’s the high-fliers and big spills that draw crowds, a lot of them from CMU, to Aspen and the X-Games. Half the reason the athletes get into the extreme sports at all is the rush. I’m by no means Shaun White, but even I like riding trees more than cruising the bunny hill.
Snowmobiling takes the big air that people love and throws in a motorized vehicle. These world-class athletes flip acrobatically with quarter-ton sleds whirling around them. It’s honestly a miracle that no one had died before Moore.
Some have suggested, especially after a riderless snowmobile sped into a crowd of spectators, that the X-Games ban the snowmobiling events all together.
Not only would that anger a large portion of the X-Games fan base, but also is exactly the half-hearted reactionary garbage that costs sports money.
X-Games is particularly vulnerable because of the way it’s funded. Unlike other pro sports, who can rely on ticket revenue and obscene amounts of merchandise, X-Games is funded almost exclusively through its TV deal with ESPN and a solidly reliable group of advertisers. It’s free to get in the door.
Eliminating a single sport could kill a large stream of revenue.
Anyone who has been to X-Games, or even sees them on TV, knows that ESPN does large panning shots above the crowd. An advertiser sees this and thinks: “I’m so glad all these college kids can see my gigantic Navy ad by the scoreboard.”
That mean’s money for X-Games and continued success.
On a less relatable, but probably more important note, I doubt a person like Moore would want his sport banned because of his death. It’s hard for anyone to imagine what it’s like to be 40 feet in the air with a 500-pound machine, and very few people actually get to experience it.
Anyone who is crazy enough to essentially fly on a snowmobile is crazy enough to know that other people love to do it too. I mean crazy in the best sense. These people wow crowds and stretch the imagination. They make what seems impossible, possible, and it would be a shame to lose that for the sake of safety in a sport where safety is a luxury.
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