Founded 27 years ago on April 12th, 1994, The X Games was created to offer a platform similar to that of the Olympics, but for more extreme sports. Snowboarding, Skateboarding, Mountain Biking and Moto X racing are just a few of the events you can expect to see. In recent years though, an effort to modernise the Olympics has seen them including extreme sports to draw in a younger audience.
Still, the X Games remains the pinnacle of the extreme sports world. Anyone involved wants to make it to the events and compete against the best in their field to take home the silverware. But after being cancelled last year due to the Coronavirus pandemic, fans have been left wondering what will happen with the 2021 Summer X Games events.
Well, to be honest. Nobody knows what is going on. As there has been no official word as to whether they will go ahead. But promising signs are that the Winter X Games events did take place, albeit behind closed doors with no fans in attendance, and there have been some other X Games events this year, with the likes of the Real MTB series still taking place.
What we do know though is that if it is held, it could move from its home in Minneapolis where it has been since 2017, since their contract with ESPN ran out at the end of last year. Although with the event cancelled, it could still be the case they’ll be granted an extension to fulfil the contract as they missed out on that final event, and it was out of anyone’s control really.
Other potential locations for the event to take place though could be in Austin, Texas where the games took place for three years prior to Minneapolis, or even in Los Angeles where the X Games were held for 11 years prior to that.
It is worth mentioning as well, that an event like this takes a lot of planning, and time to set up. Which does suggest that Minneapolis could be the main choice since they will have had plans in place from last year anyway. And if it does move to one of the other locations above, or even a new location altogether, the Summer events may get pushed back further than the usual time they take place in the Summer, because preparations will need to be made.
There were rumours that gambling sites in Pennsylvania had listed schedules for the events, suggesting it could take place soon, and giving fans hope an official announcement was coming. But anything that was on the web was quickly taken down before anyone could get evidence for it, and no official announcement has been made since. But if they were correct, it could suggest an official announcement on the Summer X Games event is imminent.
And in terms of the media, the virtual media hub that used Zoom for interviewing athletes on the podiums and in between events also worked well. So both of these innovations could return to help keep numbers of the attendances low, whilst still giving fans great coverage of the event as it takes place. Although, with many other sports starting to allow fans back into stadiums and arenas, it would be hoped even if numbers are restricted, any iteration of the Summer X Games this year would follow suit.
Still, there will definitely be changes going forward, which was confirmed by Tim Reed, Senior Director, Events & Content for X Games. He stated: “A lot of these advancements from a production perspective are going to be carried forward.That’s the thing we realized, is when you get down to the core of things and you’re doing things really tightly, you have this need to evolve and produce a little bit differently. The innovation side is something that is cool to see, and will be carried forward regardless of Covid.”
So it shows how X Games are looking at going forward, and they have had several changes over the course of their history from past to present, so more changes going forward is no surprise really.
All we can hope for in the end is that an announcement comes soon, and with good news. We already had to miss all the summer X Games action last year, and it’d be a shame to miss it again. But the priority at the end of the day is the health and safety of the competitors and those who will hopefully be in attendance.
