Well, another problem is that the iconography of those sports, many of which having come from slacker subcultures, doesn't really fit with the whole visual impression of elite sport. It's not that their feats are any less impressive, it's that they don't come across as Olympic competition. The thing I always bring up is the clothing. Most traditional competitions at the Olympics have honed and refined their apparel to meet the demands for performance. Minimising drag, searching for every minuscule benefit that they can, working in wind tunnels, working to keep core temperature down, and so on, selling the story of the quest for eking out that last tiny bit of improvement to be the best.I'm old too, but I grew up jumping motorcycles over barns and snowmobiles off of 100 foot cornices about 20 years before there was an X before everything so I guess I feel some sort of connection (be it very far removed). That being said, I feel like some people discount the amazing skill/ability of these athletes because their main venue is the X-Games ('eh, that's for the younger crowd'). IMO, amazing skill is amazing skill. As I've noted up thread though, I love Nordic skiing and biathlon too (pretty differed to big air events...the big air is in their lungs). I agree that the Olympic model doesn't fit the 'free spirt' of these sports, but does it have to be that way?
Nitro Circus is one of the most entertaining events that I have ever attended in my life of attending a lot of sporting events. I don't really want to compare motorize events to human/gravity powered events, but entertainment = $$.
A lot of these new events by contrast see elite athletes heading out looking like me on my first day on snow, with a competitor bib over a baggy coat and salopettes that any of us could buy at Decathlon, and though it is a minor thing, it is still there. And to use the summer events as an example, in the skateboarding we saw a 13 year old fall over on 2/3 her runs, wearing gear she bought on the high street, and win a medal - which makes it hard to feel like you're genuinely watching elite athletic competition on a par with, say, the athletics or the swimming or so on (even though you could also rightly point out that in some of the field disciplines you could fail 5/6 of your attempts and still win, but obviously there's a much less subjective element to the results in those disciplines). But as she herself said, the great thing about skateboarding was that it afforded total freedom of expression in a way that other sports didn't - and she's right. But the scoring seems way too forgiving to be elite just on the example above - unless they start introducing fixed difficulty points where the athletes have to submit what they're going to do beforehand, along similar lines to more established judging sports like gymnastics, diving and figure skating - but then you're taking the freedom that helps make the sport appealing and removing it, which might help make the sport more established from an Olympic perspective as an elite discipline, but then makes the competition more about fitting through the pigeonholes of what a good routine is rather than being as free or as uninhibited as these sports purport to be, and would run the risk of killing or at least watering down much of their appeal.