The X Games are the equivalent of The Olympic games for Extreme sports, it’s a highly popular event (103 600 people attended), made for TV and thus highly broadcasted worldwide (430 journalists on site, 2000 hours of TV broadcast over 198 countries). From the 12th to the 16th of March i was shooting the European Winter X Games in Tignes (for the 3rd year in a row).

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This year we were the official photographers for Tignes and ESPN, and thus had top level access to all sites and backstage. It requires a big team effort to cover this event, and they were teams in the team. i was working with my assistant Maxime Mouchet, and my friend and colleague Andy Parant was assisted by Greg Mistral, the four of us covering the event for Tignes. And with the addition of Christian Van Hanja and Vianney Tisseau, we were the ESPN Photohog Squad !

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Covering this event is definitely not an easy task? The briefs differs a little between Tignes and ESPN, we had to cover absolutely everything that goes on  – and there?s a lot going on, from the competitions, the Snow Mobile show, the life and animations in the X Fest (the X Games village), the behind the scene life at The Diva (the main hotel were all journalists and athletes are based) we were constantly running. Very long days from 8am to 12pm, with sandwiches (no time to stop, there?s always something happening or a card to download), stress, we all ended so exhausted, it took us a good 2 days of sleep to recharge the batteries at the end of the event.

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Despite all this stress, its a highly enjoyable event to cover, the perfect organization, the fantastic show and the performances from the world best athletes sure fueled our excitation. This year we’ve been blessed with a perfect weather and snow conditions, all the riders loving it and throwing down massive runs. Shaun White won the gold medal in snowboard slopestyle and halfpipe and had this cool sentence at the end of his runs « This is so much better than Aspen here !!! ».

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It was a new experience as well to work with a backstage staff, people helping with the keywording, the caption and getting our shots across the world asap. Because when you?re covering an event for ESPN, no matter how good your photos are, they?re worth nothing if you dont download them as soon as possible after each event, sort them, develop them, tag them with the right keywords, captions and metadatas and finally deliver them on time. The photos then live their lives,  are used online and on prints by medias worldwide, its a funny feeling because we’re loosing track and grip of this second life…

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I?m looking forward for next year event !

I’ll post here a link to Andy’s and Greg’s Best Of Gallery once they finish their editing…