Detroit won’t be hosting the X Games after all.
Organizer ESPN has decided to take the annual action sports festival to Austin, Texas for a four-year stretch starting next year.
That’s despite a spirited, grassroots bid by Detroit bid organizers—the #XG2D (translation: X Games to Detroit) movement—to bring the games to the Motor City. Here's a promotional video the group made:
http://youtu.be/BAkfVh83aXI
But Kevin Krease and Garret Koehler aren’t quite giving up. Instead, they insist the movement sparked by Detroit’s X Games bid is just shifting gears.
“The X Games in Detroit would have been monumental for the brand, for the broader action sports industry, and for our city,” they noted in a press release sent immediately after the ESPN announcement. “As ESPN expands their franchise globally, Detroit offered them the opportunity to inject their brand with a needed authenticity in the North American market.”
But, they add:
“To-date, the X Games have served as a rallying point for us, and we imagined that upon winning the X Games they would be a medium through which we could express and perpetuate the ever-growing vitality of our city in front of a global audience. Over the last few weeks we’ve realized that ultimately it’s probably more fitting that we just create that medium ourselves. So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to create our own “X Games.”
Krease and Koehler admit they’re “not entirely sure what this looks or sounds like yet,” but promise more details in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, they’re switching their (hashtagged) rallying cry—from #XG2D to #notdoneyet.
Not done yet http://t.co/ODhS9PQApJ
— Assemble Sound (@AssembleSound) July 17, 2013
And the X Games Detroit website now has a countdown clock (17 days, 12 hours as of noon Thursday). Counting down to...we'll see.
