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BY BRIAN GOMEZ, THE GAZETTE

ASPEN – Gretchen Bleiler tried to stay composed Wednesday during a news conference, but tears began streaming down her face. Minutes later, she looked OK. Then more tears.

Regardless of how hard she efforts, Bleiler can’t stop grieving over her late friend, Sarah Burke. “She threw it down harder than anyone,” Bleiler said, “and she walked the line.”

The death of the decorated Canadian freestyle skier has renewed the debate surrounding the safety of the halfpipe, with the Winter X Games running Thursday through Sunday on Buttermilk Mountain for more than 200 snowboarders, skiers and snowmobilers.

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A four-time Winter X winner and the 2005 halfpipe world champion, Burke, 29, died last week from injuries in a Jan. 10 practice crash in Park City, Utah. She sustained bleeding on her brain after she tore a vertebral artery in her neck, and even though her surgery was successful, a lack of oxygen and blood from a heart attack she suffered in the pipe caused irreversible damage to her brain. A tribute is planned for Thursday’s broadcast on ESPN, and $294,200 has been raised (the goal is $550,000) to cover Burke’s medical expenses.

Snowboarder Kevin Pearce almost was killed in Park City in 2009, suffering a traumatic brain injury in a halfpipe accident that forced him to miss the 2010 Olympics, then led to his 2011 retirement. And Burke had been seriously injured before, breaking a vertebra in her back at Winter X in 2009 in slopestyle, a judged run across features on a mountain.

In a 2010 interview with The Associated Press, Burke said she had “been very lucky with the injuries I’ve had. It’s part of the game. Everybody gets hurt. Looking back on it, I’d probably do the exact same thing again.” That same year, in a separate interview with the AP, snowboarding pioneer Jake Burton conceded that “if the sport got to the point where halfpipe riding became really dangerous, I think riders would do something about it.”

Burke was performing only a 540 – a basic jump with 1 ½ rotations – when she landed at the wrong angle in the pipe that stretches 22 feet tall. She never had been bashful about going bigger, going higher – becoming the first female halfpipe skier to perform a 720, a 900 and a 1,080 in an event. It was fast-paced progression that resulted in halfpipe skiing being included in the 2014 Sochi Games, where Burke would have been favored to win.

There are “always risks attached to (any winter) sport,” International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge said Friday at the Winter Youth Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria. He added, “Thorough research has shown that freestyle skiing is no more dangerous than many of the other winter sports.” Riders typically fine-tune new maneuvers in foam pits, and helmets are mandatory and airbags are common on the sides of pipes during training.

Snowboarder Kelly Clark, a two-time Olympic halfpipe medalist, noted that experienced athletes don’t break their wrists as often as novices since they’re “well-trained at falling,” she said. “You know how to fall well. You know how to fall safely. … There are actually more tools, and it is safer than it has ever been to learn tricks and progress your riding.”

“If you’re coming up short, you definitely want to try to tense up your muscles and keep it together,” said Canadian Kaya Turski, a back-to-back champion in skiing slopestyle at Winter X who donated a high of $4,000 to Burke’s cause. “If you lose your air sense, you want to be compact. You learn to kind of be like a cat and try to land on your feet.”

An Aspen snowboarder who won a 2006 Olympic silver in the halfpipe, Bleiler disputed the notion competitors will take an edge off maneuvers on Buttermilk because of Burke’s death. “She would be here today giving it,” Bleiler said. “So that’s how you honor her – to keep going and to keep pushing. That’s exactly what she would want.”

READ WHAT TO EXPECT THIS WEEK AT THE WINTER X GAMES ON BUTTERMILK MOUNTAIN AND VIEW A SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

WINTER X GAMES ON THE TUBE

Thursday: 7-9 p.m., ESPN

Friday: 8:30-10:30 p.m., ESPN

Saturday: 12-2 p.m., ESPN2; 2-4 p.m., ABC; 7-9 p.m., ESPN

Sunday: 12-4 p.m., ESPN; 7-9 p.m., ESPN

SIDELINED FOR WINTER X

Olympic snowboard cross competitor Lindsey Jacobellis suffered a season-ending injury Wednesday on Buttermilk Mountain, tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee during a practice accident. Also in snowboard cross, two-time defending Olympic gold medalist Seth Wescott will miss the remainder of the season because of a torn pectoral muscle that he sustained last Thursday at a World Cup in Veysonnaz, Switzerland, and he underwent successful surgery Monday in Vail to reattach the muscle to his humerus bone.

Among other notable injuries, 2011 ski cross world champion Kelsey Serwa of Canada is out for the rest of the season with tears to ligaments in a knee, meniscus damage and bone bruising from an accident at a World Cup event last week in Alpe d’Huez, France. Plus, freestyle snowmobilers Levi LaVallee and Daniel Bodin are both sidelined for the season – LaVallee broke the tibia in his left leg Jan. 12 while practicing in Longville, Minn., and Bodin endured fractured vertebrae in his neck Jan. 14, also during training in Longville.

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