Have Fun Blog

Shaun White known for his big air moves, has a natural finesse for making his cab 7’s and frontside 900’s look easy. It was his huge amplitude on the powder that not only helped him into the pro ciruit, but also got him sponsored by burton at the age of 13. Despite what many people must think after what happened during this winter’s X game competition, Shaun White is a classic boarder with a style all his own. WX 2005 was his comeback after a painful 5 months of rehab due to a Torn ACL took him out of last season’s superpipe.

Shaun, or The Flying Tomato as he is sometimes called by fans, opened up his runs with a series of 900’s and 720’s but most of his competition threw out 1080’s at the beginning of their run, and in the end, risk is what get’s the points. But Shaun White isn’t discouraged. With the Summer X games coming up next, and several Snowboarding and Skateboarding competitions in between, he’s going to be too busy carving up that snow and street to bother worrying about the past. One of the main reasons Shaun does so well in contests is because he’s calm and doesn’t worry about the pressure, he goes out there and has fun, and that’s his secret to winning! Well that and some grid-iron practicing, he knows how to have a good time, and get the job done without letting the pressure get to him, in fact, I don’t Shaun even knows how to worry!

My bet is by the end of February, he’s going to be top tomato and WX will be a minor blip on his radar. Shaun White is a veteran boarder at the age of 18, a ripping Skater and a pretty good guitarist too. With a unique attitude all his own, you can bet The Flying Tomato will be flying for many more years to come!

Andi Smith, a 17 year old Snowboarder, Skateboarder and Surfer has been participating in extreme sports since she was 4. Having just graduated from high school during the first semester of her senior in Dec. 2004,Andi, the oldest of 5 children, offers monthly articles on Extreme Sports, and Extreme Sports Athletes like Shaun White,Dustin Miller,Antti Autti,Tony hawk and the like.

Tags: extreme, Money, Shaun White., skateboarding, snowboarding, sport, Success, surfing, Xgamesextreme, Money, Shaun White., skateboarding, snowboarding, sport, Success, surfing, Xgames

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Jump Britain…

Dumb boys acting like monkeys jumping around could be one point of view taken from this new outdoor activity ‘Free Running’ recently broadcast by channel four. I prefer to take the opinion of graceful street acrobat, performing incredulous feats of the physical only possible by control of the mental.

In this programme the athletes (the respectable title they deserve) perform acts that can only be described my mind over matter, heart stopping stunts such as jumping over the gap in the roof of the millennium stadium, a 150ft drop, no ropes, no safety, nothing to rest the mind from those ‘what if’s’ we human too often struggle with.

This activity rewinds back to more primitive times, the way in which the free runners leap over objects with very little sense of danger is reminiscent of the way monkeys and tarzan leap from vine to vine through the jungle. It is an instinct not necessarily understood in logical or practical means but it is the same instinct that possesses a child to climb a tree and jump off the highest branch possible or see how many stairs they can jump down to the bottom.

As the programme goes on it becomes almost impossible to blink as the performers take risk after risk, scaling multi-storey car parks, bridges, roof tops, castles and skyscrapers. The adrenaline is palatable even from the safe comfort of the living room. It doesn’t take long to realise this sport could be loved by a lot of people, those people that stand at the train station wondering if they could jump from the platform to the other side of the tracks.

The only negative factor of this programme was the obvious lack of women participating in free running, as in too many extreme sports it’s as if the pursuit of freedom through risk taking is tightly restricted to the Y chromosome.

The truth about free running is that anybody can do it. It isn’t like surfing where it takes months of practice to be able to even stand up on the thing, anyone can jump from one object to another, it just takes a bit of mental practice (and maybe pumping a bit of iron at the gym) when it comes to the more riskier stunts.

There will no doubt be a massive political correctness backlash with tons of stupid kids jumping off buildings with no prior practise or training, but this is true of every extreme sport which has come out of the underground in the past 15 years. Eventually it will make its way into the acceptable mainstream, only in a matter of lawsuits and years.

Channel 4 programme ‘Jump Britain’.

Tags: acrobat, adrenaline, britain, extreme, fad, fashion, free, height, jump, phase, risk, running, sport, takingacrobat, adrenaline, britain, extreme, fad, fashion, free, height, jump, phase, risk, running, sport, taking

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