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Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Dragon hits the X-Games

Dragon HQ headed to the Tignes in the heart of the French Alps for X-Games. Getting to the X-Games isn't the most straight forward trip whichever direction you come from, but after a ten hour drive from IBK we were there and straight into the Monster party at the dive... er... I mean venue called Jacks Club. Monster's got a pretty fail safe formula to parties; Free drink, good DJ's and most importantly, hot girls with nothing on. Ollie, our competition winner, dropped in after an epic 8 hour drive from Geneva. So wrist bands on, and open bar, things got blurrrrrrred.

Bottom left, that's all we're saying
Getting lose at about 5am
Next morning and off to the X-Games from some epicness, right? Well things didn't really go to plan, not because we were hung over, but because the weather at 2100m doesn't always play ball. So the union called 'We Are Snowboarding' (check it out on Facebook, and join!), rounded up the troops and in true French style, formed a protest. No jumping if you can't see sh!t! Good call guys. However, the pipe eliminations did go down due to the flood lit perfection pipe. Norwegian Dragon rider, Roger Kleivdal was killing it with doubles and back-2-back 9's. Check out his run below;

Roger (in red) and his lady Betty watching from the riders tent
How the pipe looks from the top. 20,000 people staring at you! 
Battle Face
Drop In!



More Snowboarding Videos

After Rodger Qualified 4th we all over to a traditional Savoie style restaurant for our official Dragon dinner.
We did have more photos than this. But the phone that Jane
is holding (with all the photos on) got lost about an hour later!
Luka Jeromel on the right.



The next day Zeus looked kindly on Tignes and decided to send the weather elsewhere so we could get on with a hectic schedule.

Tignes bluebird
First up was the Women slope finals. I was still in bed as I had to drive Luka to Geneva airport and got back to Tignes at around 8am. When I finally made it down to the course, I heard from a bunch of people that Spencer O'Brien had been a little under judged and should have made it to the podium. Having said that, 4th place at the X-Games is nothing to be ashamed of. I can't find her run for myself, but on the judges sheets I saw that she'd been throwing FS7's off the toes and BS5's. Here Spencer's story of the X-Games here;



On the final day, Gerome Mathieu turned up to take wild card place in the finals of the slope style. He wasn't really prepped for it and was super tired from a long season of traveling and stomping into powder. He did his thing and then made a bunch of kids happy with some signatures.


Gerome stokes out the Kids

Luke Mitrani had been keeping a low profile for the X-Games as he was feeling a bit under the weather and... Well, I'll just let Luke explain;



Luke filming Jake
Rodger couldn't quite get his run of back-2-back doubles together so missed out on getting to the podium... Better to go all in than not at all.

X-Games, you were fun, see you next year!

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