EXPN caught up with Jamie Bestick as he watched the Bike Stunt Vert Prelims on Tuesday. Bestwick, who won last year's Vert gold medal, had to sit and watch the action because of a broken right ankle suffered at Woodward Camp just before X got underway. Here's what he had to say about his injury:

EXPN: Tell us about your ankle injury at Woodward
JB: I was just practicing Wednesday night (Aug. 15), and I was with my wife having a mellow riding session and I just missed my bars on a double-bar spin. The bike came away from me and my foot got in the way and it just rolled it one way, rolled it the other. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do about it and that's why I'm sitting down here today. It's not the fact that I broke my ankle that bums me out for not riding in (the X Games), it's just that fact that I got so much stuff planned for this contest and now people are going to have to wait. But it's cool, because it'll come.

Bestwick's got the boot for a couple of weeks.

EXPN: Did you realize the extent of the injury when it happened?
JB: Straight away. Yeah, I knew it. It's just one of those crashes where you knew, like the minute my foot hit the floor I knew I broke it -- instantaneous pain. I have been around for a while and I am no stranger to falling off like the rest of the people on the ramp and I knew I had done something bad. ... My wife drove me to hospital; I was in emergency that night. I sort of knew straight away that the chances of me riding in this year's X Games were over. ... People down at the contest already knew that I had broken my ankle before I even knew I broke my ankle. I didn't know until Thursday (Aug. 16) that ... that's when the doctors told me I had broken my ankle.

EXPN: The diagnosis?
JB: I've got a fractured (right) fibula. And then I strained the tendons on the inside of my ankle.

EXPN: And the prognosis?
JB: Another three weeks and I'll be good to go. I'm not in a cast, I'm in like a safety harness type thing. It's doing good.

EXPN: Doing any physical therapy?
JB: I've been doing it all week, just to get the swelling out of my feet. You know yesterday I even got the doctors to strap my feet up just to see if I could ride. I would have put up with the pain if I could have pumped around, but, unfortunately, I just can't do it. So I just sit down this year at the X Games but, you know, my foot's not dropped off, my bike's still in one piece and my head is still intact so I'm not going nowhere.

Just wait till Jamie gets back on his feet.

EXPN: If you were healthy, what kind of tricks would you be doing at X this year?
JB: Ahhh, well, unfortunately that's just something you'll have to wait for. If I can't do it, I'm not going to tell anybody. But I've been working hard the past couple weeks since I broke my elbow, in fact. You know that chance to take time off my bike gave me a lot of time to think of new stuff. Definitely, I had some big tricks planned and I'll just put them in the next contest I go to.

EXPN: How hard is to watch the X Games after winning gold last year?
JB: It's hard because of the stuff that I've been working on and the fact is that it's not the end of world, you know.

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