It’s no big secret that the X Games are just as much party as they are competition. Fans corralled into Aspen last week for the four day ESPN production, to the tune of 49,300 people on Saturday alone according to the Associated Press. That set a single day attendance record for the games, with ESPN reporting the X Games attracted 102,600 spectators over its extended weekend run. All this for a mountain town with a population of less than 7,000 as of the 2010 census.
One would expect with all the commotion and traffic in such a short span those numbers might translate to a massive spike in Police activity, a-la Huntington Beach’s US Open of Surfing. According to the Aspen Times the “party” was actually pretty mellow as far as drug and alcohol related arrests were concerned.
Local law enforcement cited just 11 underage attendants for minor in possession of alcohol or marijuana while the Colorado Department of Revenue cited another 20 kids for minor in possession. As for adults, law enforcement transported a little more than a dozen “overly-intoxicated” adults to a nearby detox facility according to the local newspaper. The report also pointed out that just one major arrest was made, involving a 27-year old woman from Boulder who was cited for cocaine distribution. The woman was stopped going through security with a cloth bag containing 21 individual, 1-gram baggies of cocaine.
In contrast to the massive black eye the action sports community wears after the streets of Huntington Beach turned into a riot scene at the 2013 US Open of Surfing, the Winter X crowd certainly threw a much more well behaved party.
“The crowd was very well behaved,” said Pitkin County Deputy Alex Burchetta.
