X GAMES
CARSON – Travis Pastrana returned to the gold medal podium at the X Games yesterday after an off-year, winning the Rally Car Racing Super Special, the final event of the action sports showcase.
“I'm really excited to be here and to have a chance to come back,” Pastrana said after jumping down from a top-of-the-car celebration. “This feels really good.”
One of the X Games' most dominant and dynamic athletes, Pastrana handily beat defending gold medalist and movie stunt driver Tanner Foust in the head-to-head final run over dirt, pavement and jumps.
The single-elimination, one-on-one event, as opposed to the timed stages usually used for rally, encourages an all-or-nothing style that Pastrana embraced.
“You have to push,” Pastrana said. “If I'm a little bit behind, I have to make up that time, and the only way to make up that time is full video game style. You just start bouncing off stuff.”
Pastrana, though, bounced off far less stuff than his opponents.
In the final, Foust cleanly cleared the giant jump in the middle of The Home Depot Center but hit the wall as he was leaving the arena for the street course and never quite recovered.
And Pastrana got a gift when the car of his semifinal opponent Ken Block stalled at the start and never left.
Block shared the bronze with Dave Mirra, a BMX biker making his rally debut who gave the crowd huge thrills with his wild style. Mirra had already bent his wheels in a wall crash during the quarterfinal when his opponent Andrew Comrie-Picard drew gasps with an end-over-end flip on the course's giant jump. Mirra's twisted tires forced him to do a series of awkward three-point turns to limp home for the win.
Also yesterday, veteran skater Rune Glifberg finally broke through in the X Games' new showpiece Skateboard SuperPark.
“It's my first X Games gold medal, 14 years in the making,” Glifberg said.
The 33-year-old from Copenhagan, Denmark, won despite a shoulder injury incurred in practice earlier in the week that kept him out of Saturday's Skateboard Vert competition.
“I'm not sure of the exact diagnosis, but it was about a 10-foot air straight down onto my shoulder, so that's never good,” Glifberg said.
Andy MacDonald of San Diego won silver and San Francisco's Tony Trujillo won bronze.
The event, which organizers had hoped would inspire a competition between usually separate street and vert skaters, was more notable for who was missing.
TV promos had advertised a competition between the biggest star in street skating, Ryan Sheckler, and the biggest star in vert, Shaun White, but both bowed out of Saturday qualifying.
