Shaun White you sneaky little bugger. You can’t help yourself can you? You announce that you’re going to be at the Winter X Games Europe in Tignes this year and you go and piss off every other rider in the competition! How did he do it? Well, read on and you’ll find out!

The Winter X Games are pretty much the pinnacle of our winter sports world and when it comes to the Winter X Games Europe in Tignes, then we tend to go a little crazy in the office. It’s so close that you can smell it (in distance and not literally smell it of course) and there’s always a mountain of videos on their way in so we get to feed that lot to you as well. But what would the X Games be without controversy? We’ll get to that in a bit though.

First things first! There’s been a lot of practising in the pipe and on the slopestyle course for all the riders. Videos have been flying in left right and centre but they’ve all been skiing ones so you snowboarders out there will have to wait! Here’s some updates from the Atomic team:

Atomic: Euro X Games Training Day – SS

Atomic: Euro X Games Pipe Training

Seems that the slopestyle course has been trimmed down this year after losing the dog leg that slowed the riders down, and the gap between the jumps is a lot shorter as well. With those factors put in place it should make the course pretty competitive when it comes to the crunch. Halfpipes don’t really change much when you’re at the top events around the world so this isn’t going to be much different to other pipes that the riders have taken on but I’ve heard it’s super steep and super icy so we should have some pretty fast runs going on!

But the halfpipe is where the controversy is being held. I did mention that Shaun White may have pissed off the other riders and this is because of a ‘private training session’. There was meant to be a private training session in the pipe for only one rider between 9.30pm and 10.30pm – this was for Shaun but he decided not to turn up. It was under the guise of shooting for his sponsor, GoPro, but with him not turning up at all, the rest of the riders were pretty pissed off with the outcome. There was talk of him not being turning up to the event at all but that rumour has passed.
Our good friends at Snowboarder MBM and Mpora.de have filmed an exclusive interview with Shaun in his chalet and this will be posted up on Mpora tomorrow morning! But for now keep coming back to Mpora for highlights.