Pinoys vie for honors in X Games

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – Brace for a weekend of explosive, nail-biting stunts as the Asian X Games Qualifier IV fires off today with a brave bunch of Filipino action athletes competing against the region’s best here.

Francis Carlo Zandueta, one of the winners in the recent Manila qualifier held at Glorietta, heads the 32-man Philippine contingent to the event serving as the qualifier for the Summer X-Games, long regarded as the Olympics of extreme sports, slated in August in Philadelphia.

Zandueta, the 14-year-old talent who once sawed the chain of his bike after his mother padlocked it and flushed the key down the toilet, hopes to hurdle the preliminaries in bicycle stunt in the junior division which starts at 1 p.m today. The final is set at 5 p.m. on the same day.

Other Pinoys expected to figure in the hunt for berths in the senior division of the four-day event presented by Toyota are Joselito Sanchez and Rodrigo Nagrampa. Other events on tap are the in-line skating, skateboarding, sport climbing and wakeboarding. Practice rounds will start at 10 a.m.

"The Asian X Games Qualifier is the ultimate challenge in action sports because this is the only competition which will qualify the athletes to the ESPN’s X Games in the USA," said Mark Reilly, vice president of Global X Games.

The Summer Games offers a total cash prize of $100,000 and will be held Aug. 12-25 in Philadelphia.

First staged in 1995, the X Games features the world’s leading action athletes and it has since earned the reputation as the ultimate action sports competitions.

The Asian edition debuted in 1998 and has remained the region’s premier action sports competition.

ESPN, the worldwide leader in sports, will telecast the event to more than 140 countries around the globe.