Go big. That was the name of the game last week in Aspen as contestants at Winter X Games nine soared out of the Super Pipe, performed sick moves on the big air jumps, and shot down the race courses. But why do people, especially students our age, flock to such events to watch these insane tricks?

Just for that reason alone. They are insane, but make it look so easy.

“It’s the coolest thing ever,” said Serge Wenzel, a freshman who drove to Aspen to take in some of the weekend events. “I’ve been watching it on TV with my brother since it started and we both finally have time to go up.”

“Its an amazing thing to watch,” said Wenzel. “Even my mom went and she found it incredible, none of her friends had even heard of it.”

With contestants having an average age in the early 20s, I can see why this event is attracting so many young people.

The contestants are young, some as young as 17 and do impossible tricks that just seem to keep getting better.

In 1992, Canadian Jean-Luc Bassard won the moguls competition at the Olympics in Albertville, France, with a iron-cross back-scratcher into a kosak off one of the airs. It was a never before seen jump, one that caused my jaw to drop. At that time it was amazing. So I set out to duplicate that jump. Done.

But you will never see a jump like that by amateurs in a terrain park today.

Competitors at the X Games are pulling corked 1080s (that is three full rotations done off axis) and laying out iron-cross backflips with some sort of rotation. Now these are not your average mogul jumps from over a decade ago, these jumps are getting bigger and consequently so are the tricks. Each year the people go and are amazed with what new tricks have been invented.

“I’m surprised they could do a backflip with a 540,” said Wenzel. “That was sick.”

And if the new and improved tricks aren’t enough, you have the added bonus of trying to duplicate the tricks and keep up with some of the skiing greats such as Tanner Hall or Simon Dumont.

Dumont won the SuperPipe competition by flying 22 feet above the deck of the SuperPipe. For those of you counting, because the walls to the SuperPipe are 18 feet, Dumont was 40 feet from the trough or in layman’s terms, freaking high.

The skiers’ SuperPipe, which was last Tuesday, capped off four days of extreme events in snowboarding and ski-dooing as well as skiing.

Wenzel, while not being able to see Dumont fly out of the SuperPipe, witnessed him on the slope-style course, which combines rails and big airs for a plethora of awesome tricks.

“I saw him [Dumont] go off the big air and that was pretty cool,” said Wenzel. “That big air stuff is scary…the landings look so hard, I don’t know how they decide to do that.”

If watching people go big isn’t enough of a reason, we at DU have the added advantage that the Winter X Games take place a mere three hours away in Aspen.

“Maybe it is a local thing because we are all into skiing,” said Wenzel.

Maybe one does have to be into skiing or snowboarding to get excited about such an event, but as one announcer put it during one of the final events, “This is the NBA finals, the world series and the superbowl all rolled into one for these athletes.”

It is the biggest competition of its kind during the year.

It is the place where these athletes are going to go as big as possible and often even showcase new tricks all in hopes of X Games gold.

Who knows what will happen next year, but I can’t wait to find out.