Willie Elam stops Turcotte’s X Games sweep with Snowmobile Speed & Style win

It’s been a cold weekend with winter storms ravaging parts of the United States, especially in Colorado as snow covered the state on Sunday. As the Broncos battled the Patriots for a ticket to Super Bowl LX in a Denver blizzard, Willie Elam and his fellow riders were gearing up 200 miles away in windy Aspen for the Winter X Games’ Snowmobile Speed & Style.

“Snowmobile Speed” would probably be a more accurate event name.

Due to heavy winds, the freestyle jumps had to be removed from the course. The original plan was for riders to hit the ramp once per lap, earning style points via tricks. Whether one advanced to the next round would depend on how many style points they earned from the judges in addition to the margin of victory between them and the other rider.

With the “Style” part no longer in the picture, the event’s premise became much simpler: beat your opponent in a head-to-head race.

Brett Turcotte had dominated the weekend, winning gold in Snowmobile Freestyle on Friday night before topping Speed & Style qualifying on Saturday. As the top seed, he earned a first-round bye and got to relax as Elam and five others battled it out in the quarterfinal.

Elam, a snocross veteran who won bronze at the 2018 Speed & Style and bronze in Friday’s Freestyle, made quick work of Daniel Shaffer to advance. Shaffer had skipped the seeding on Saturday.

In his semifinal against Cody Matechuk, Elam faced a challenge for the holeshot before the latter briefly went into the berm while trying to pass in the turn. This gave Elam enough juice to pull away on Lap 2 onward.

Meanwhile, Turcotte went up against Chris Coosemans in his semi. It wasn’t close as Turcotte took the holeshot and led the rest of the way to set up a duel with Elam for gold.

The gold medal race began with Elam on the left lane. Turcotte was quicker to the draw at the green flag but Elam immediately ducked to the inside as they turned right, and the two ran side by side over the ramp. Turcotte then got trapped in the berm, which Elam capitalized on by passing him for the lead. The former tried multiple times to pass Elam on the inside to no success, such as going far deep along the apex in the hairpins.

On the final lap, Turcotte tried one last move by riding along the curb of a lefthand hairpin, only to clip an advertising marker and slow him down even more. Elam rode off to score his first career X Games gold medal.

“He got the jump on me (at the start) so I just had to cut it in a little bit,” Elam said. “It was a fun race. He was coming the whole time. I was expecting [contact] or waiting for it.

“Me and Brad grew up racing together, same team. It’s kind of what we used to do a long time ago. It’s fun.”

Matechuk, a three-time gold medalist in the somewhat similar Snow Bikecross, cruised to the bronze ahead of Coosemans. The margin had been so wide that Matechuk was granted a large margin for error, able to slow down for corners and go wide.

With how thrilling Elam vs. Turcotte turned out to be, it was a nice culmination after what was frankly a lopsided quarterfinals. Coosemans won the first race of the opening round over Rasmus Johansson after the two collided in a hairpin, causing Johansson to get stuck on the berm; Coosemans slowed down to check on him before continuing and easily pulling away. Matechuk beat Kyle Saxton on a very aggressive strategy as he claimed the holeshot and never looked back.