Shelby Mustain

Take a second and close your eyes. Imagine this: you are an extreme sports athlete and you’ve reached your ultimate goal for the third consecutive year, the “world series of extreme sports” if you will: the Winter X Games. The event is Snowmobile Freestyle and the trick is one you’ve mastered: the back flip. All eyes are on you. Fans are cheering your name as you fly seventy feet into the air and nail it. You are on top of the world, so you get a little daring and go for something a little riskier in an attempt to secure the gold medal. This time you try the back flip to back flip combination: two flips over thirty foot jumps in a ten second span.

And this time something goes wrong.

This is what happened to 25 year old Texas native, Caleb Moore on January 24, 2013. He landed the first of the two back flips cleanly but under-rotated the second one, sending him over the handlebars of the snowmobile and crashing onto the ground.. The snowmobile itself flipped into the air before landing on top of him. Moore got up on his own free will but died a week later after doctors found substantial bleeding near his heart, leading to a complication in his brain, a result of the crash.

That begs the question; does a sport that leaves you with the choice between crashing hard into the snow and falling forty feet through mid air have a place in professional sports?

Some would say that these athletes know the risks when they sign up for such events, but no one expects to sign their life away in hopes of winning a prestigious gold medal. Some would say all events are dangerous. But there is an obvious added danger when a 450 pound snowmobile is factored in. The risk is a little more than falling face first into the snow off of a something a lot smaller, like a snowboard.

ESPN, the network that shows the X Games, has since conducted a full review of the safety of the snowmobile freestyle event in hopes of preventing another tragedy from occurring again. This may be the first death of its kind in the X Games but the only way the Disney-owned company can prevent this from happening again is complete elimination of the event.

Snowmobiles do not belong in the X Games. The sooner ESPN realizes that, the better. It could save someone’s life.

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