X Games Athletes Who Died Too Young

In 1995, ESPN announced the birth of a new type of televised sports competition: The Extreme Games, which were held at four locations in Rhode Island and Vermont. Contestants would compete in 27 categories, across nine disciplines: Biking, Bungee Jumping, Eco-Challenge, In-Line Skating (commonly known as Rollerblading), Skateboarding, Skysurfing (a jaw-dropping combination of skydiving and snowboarding), Sport Climbing, Street Luge, and Water Sports. It was further announced that the plan was for this new competition to take place every two years — but those plans quickly changed. Due to a rabidly positive response from the extreme sports community and its viewers, the network quickly upgraded the event to a yearly one, and in only its second year, it was given a name change as well, becoming known as the X Games.

The 1996 event drew a whopping 200,000 spectators, and in the years since, iconic competitors like skateboarding great Tony Hawk, BMX rider Mat Hoffman, and snowboarding legend Mark McMorris have kept fans on the edge of their seats with their near-superhuman feats of athleticism. But by definition, extreme athletes are folks who are prone to engaging in extremely risky behavior — and in the nearly three decades since the X Games came into existence, more than a few of its most beloved participants have departed for the great halfpipe in the sky far too soon.

29-year-old Sarah Burke was, by just about any metric, the best women's freestyle skier on the planet. She pioneered the superpipe event, which is as hardcore as it sounds: a halfpipe up to 22 feet tall and 64 feet wide, with a length of at least 400 feet. The superpipe can dominate the most talented of extreme skiers, but Burke dominated it instead.

Not only did she take home four gold medals at the X Games, she was the owner of five World Cups and multiple world championships; the year before her 2012 death, her gold medal in the Euro X Games came when she stuck a virtually unheard-of 540. Shockingly, her death came during a simple practice run in Utah, after a comparatively routine crash of the sort that she'd likely endured countless times before — but this time, the awkward landing resulted in catastrophic injury.

Specifically, Burke tore her vertebral artery on the landing, causing severe bleeding, depriving her brain of oxygen, and causing her to go into cardiac arrest. She was airlifted to a Salt Lake City Hospital, where she held on for nine days before succumbing to her injury. Over a decade later, she is still remembered as one of the best to ever put on a pair of skis. Said Jeremy Forster, program director for U.S. Freeskiing,"[Burke]  constantly inspired [her peers] to do greater things ... She was a leader in her sport, and it's a huge loss for the freeskiing community" (via CBS News).

South Lake Tahoe's Kyle Smaine was seemingly born in a halfpipe, and whether on skis or a snowboard, he attacked them fearlessly. An X Games regular during his career, Smaine was the owner of a gold medal, which he took home after winning the halfpipe event at the FIS Freestyle Ski and Snowboarding World Championships in 2015. 

In 2023, 31-year-old Smaine was in Japan, taking action shots for a tourism campaign, when disaster struck in the form of every skier's worst nightmare: an avalanche. During a free ski with fellow pro skier Adam Ü after the day's shooting had concluded, an Austrian skier who had hooked up with the pair triggered the slide.

Speaking with Mountain Gazette, Ü said, "We had no camera gear with us. We were going out for fun ... We heard the crack. We realized it [was] a big one. We started running and then we got hit." Ü was buried several feet deep for about 25 minutes before rescuers responded, and somehow walked away unscathed; Smaine was not so lucky. He, along with the skier who had triggered the avalanche, died at the scene. 

Ken Block entered the world of sports as a marketing executive, helping to found DC Shoes in 1994. But after a decade or so of that grind, he decided he'd had enough of sitting on the sidelines, and took up rally driving — which, it turned out, he was rather good at. 

In 2005, he was named Rookie of the Year on the U.S. rally circuit, and over the next eight years he would pile up the accomplishments: three second-place U.S. finishes, five X Games medals, and a spot in the World Rally Championship, where he was the first American to ever compete. His YouTube series "Gymkhana," which saw him performing rally stunts of the heart-stopping, jaw-dropping variety, racked up over a billion views, and his page on the X Games website aptly described him as a driver who never quits.

Unfortunately, Block passed away at 55 after a mishap involving a completely different variety of motor vehicle. While snowmobiling near his home in Park City, Utah, he was navigating a steep downhill slope when the vehicle upended and landed on top of him; he died at the scene. Hoonigan Racing Division, the rally company he co-founded, memorialized him in a statement: "Ken was a visionary, a pioneer and an icon, and most importantly, a father and husband," it read. "He will be incredibly missed."

Shane McConkey was a skiing legend, but even pushing the boundaries of that sport was not enough to quench his thirst for adrenaline. He was also a fearless rock climber and BASE jumper (a sport that is considered to be extreme even among extreme athletes), and he was known to sometimes combine these pursuits in ways that would buckle the knees of the most fear-challenged athletes. He was a freeskiing pioneer, an international skiing champion and X Games gold medalist, and the star of 26 skiing films that exposed the sport to an audience of millions — and it was during the filming of his last movie that it all came to an end.

During the 2009 filming of a ski BASE jump, which is precisely as dangerous as it sounds, McConkey's skis became entangled and failed to detach. This would have caused them to become entangled with his parachute, and Tahoe Quarterly reported that McConkey did not panic; while airborne, he managed to resolve the ski issue, but did not have time after getting free of them to pull his chute. The unfortunate equipment failure ended the life of a man revered for his dedication to his sport; he was 39 years old.

If Colin McRae was a rally car legend before 2006, it was at a rally event at that year's X Games that he became a rally car deity. Driving a Subaru WRX STI, McRae was coming around the track's final turn when he miscalculated while hitting a jump, and the vehicle rolled — then rolled some more, then kept rolling, until it somehow landed right back on its tires, and McRae cruised to a second-place finish without breaking a sweat. That finish came a scant half-second after the winner, Travis Pastrana, who was simply gobsmacked. "Dude, Colin McRae is straight up a god," he said after the race. "He rolls the car and I didn't even know if he lost time. That guy's amazing!" (via Road and Track)

Unfortunately, it was McRae's penchant for pushing vehicles to their absolute limits that proved to be his undoing. In 2007, McRae was piloting a helicopter that was also carrying his five-year-old son, the child's six-year-old friend, and 37-year-old friend Graeme Duncan. McRae was flying too low when the helicopter crashed, killing all aboard; a later inquiry would find his flying to be "imprudent," per the BBC. McRae's family maintained that it was impossible to know what caused the crash — but it appears that the driver's hunger for daredevilry likely resulted in the tragedy.

Hundreds of athletes have risked their lives in pursuit of X Games glory, but only one has given his: Caleb Moore, who was capable of performing feats of snowmobiling that few would even have the courage to attempt. 

Just before his fateful run at the 2013 Winter X Games, he spoke to the press about the first time he ever stuck a backflip on an ATV, at the age of 19: "It was the most exciting moment of my life," he remembered, "and the most stressful, heart-pounding moment of my life, too" (via The New York Times). During the televised event following the interview, Moore crash-landed while attempting just such a flip on a snowmobile; he was rushed to the hospital, but died the following morning due to blunt force chest trauma; he was only 25.

As a result of the incident, ESPN canceled all Snowmobile Freestyle events at X Games Tignes the following month, and the Best Trick competitions were also nixed that year. Caleb's brother, Colten, continued on in his memory, winning the gold in Snowmobile Freestyle in 2014  — but in 2017, he suffered a spinal cord injury trying to become the first to land a double snowmobile flip in competition at the X Games. Colten Moore reflected on his love of the sport, and his brother's, in his 2016 memoir "Catching the Sky."