Mad Skills

First I want to say that Shaun White is ridiculous. He had a great run last night to take home the gold medal, but I thought that he could have pulled out more if he needed to. I wonder how you do that? He simply invents tricks on his own private half pipe in the middle of nowhere. Just for the record, Wikipedia gives the latitude and longitude of the half pipe, but when I tried to find on Google Earth there was nothing there, so maybe I should question the legitimacy of Wikipedia or maybe it wasn't all decorated with Red Bull. Wherever it is, it is a sweet half pipe that allows White the freedom to create. Also, it gives him a crazy endorsement opportunity because it is a basically a billboard for Red Bull. According to the TV announcers last night, White is the second-most marketable athlete in the world behind only Peyton Manning. For a guy only in his early 20s, that is pretty impressive. It seems like it's been around forever, but really a lot of that is because he started very young and has been in both the snowboarding and skateboarding worlds. I think that it is amazing how dominant he has been in the super pipe so far in his career.

Photo by bfishadow on Flickr

Youth Specialization

Think back to what you were doing when you were 15 years old. My guess is that you were somewhere in the midst of high school, waiting one more year to get a driver's license, and probably not even thinking about college much less your future career. What if your career was already in progress? How would that change your life? For 15-year-old Maddy Schaffrick, the career of her dreams has been underway for the past eight years. This year she is the youngest competitor in the X Games, but the story gets even crazier in the fact that these are her second X Games. Even though she failed to qualify for the SuperPipe finals, the fact that she is competing at this level with only eight years of experience is amazing. When I first found this story on the Aspen Daily News website, I was amazed by the dedication this girl must have for her sport. Most people, myself included, had no concrete idea what they wanted to do for a career when they are 15. However, is this wrong? I can imagine many people arguing that when children are so involved in just one activity, their development suffers. This argument has been developed as a means to oppose AAU teams because the extreme specialization leads to more cutthroat competition. However, in this snowboarding sample as well as with AAU teams, I feel that specialization, if it is chosen by the child, can be extremely beneficial. What I mean by this is that the parent should not force the child to specialize in just one activity to make them a "superstar." If the child truly wants to commit a large portion of his or her time to one activity, then he or she should be able to. In this case, Maddy's interest is also a career. If she truly enjoys snowboarding, I think it is awesome that she is so involved in it. Any opportunity you get to use the talents that you have is great; engaging in a variety of activities is also fine, but why force children to stop doing what they enjoy most just to say they did? Specialization is not necessarily a bad thing for a child; if people have found their passion, any efforts to have them try something else will be in vain. The child will simply gravitate back towards what he or she loves to do.

Bad Timing

Don't get me wrong, I love the X Games and the Winter Olympics. However, what I don't like is when these two events are two weeks apart. I almost had a heart attack when I was watching Shaun White compete in the SuperPipe the other night. Here is a guy who will almost surely bring home Olympic gold for the United States of America in two weeks vaulting almost 25 feet into the air during another competition. Again, it's not that I don't like the X Games, but I do feel as though the Olympic Games are just as important if not more so. I would also wonder how many people decided not to compete in the X Games because they wanted to save themselves to compete in the Olympics. As we saw the other day, athletes can fall down, and what if they got hurt? How would you explain Shaun White not being able to compete in the Olympics because he wiped down on the SuperPipe? This might have been enough reason for many competitors to skip the first competition. Therefore, I do not believe that this was a smart business move for the X Games. If they truly believed that there was no threat of injury to the athletes in these games, they would have been afraid to allow the athletes to compete in the Olympics first. Then, they could have had the full slate of competitors and also set themselves up to be the reason some country does not win an Olympic medal.