Forty-mile-per-hour winds and heavy snowfall blurred the line between land and sky during the men's snowboard Halfpipe competition, an event that started an hour late due to poor conditions.

	Eight-year halfpipe veteran Jimi Scott won his first X Games event Sunday.

Survival of the fittest was the route some new faces took to land atop the podium, after such top athletes as Terje Haakonsen and Todd Richards chose to skip the event.

Halfpipe specialist Jimi Scott, 30, took home his first X Games gold medal after stringing together a pair of 720s in his final run.

He was one of the few riders to consistently get above the lip during each of his three runs. Mike Michalchuk won the silver medal and Luke Wynen the bronze.

So how did Scott manage to survive the conditions?

"I tried changing my run the second run, and I kind of bobbled, so I went back to my first run," he said. "The whole strategy was just go as fast as you can and cross your fingers when you did the tricks."

Scott calls himself "a technical person" who usually doesn't go big, so he thought the judges rewarded him for getting above the lip.

The Californian is an eight-year veteran of halfpipe competitions who grew up skating with Tony Hawk. He says the X Games is all about having fun.

"As long as we all have a good time and the cameraderie's high, I want to keep doing it," Scott said. "It doesn't matter who wins; it matters how much fun you have."

Several times during the competition wind-tossed snow filled the pipe so thickly that it was impossible to see the rider coming through the chute. One rider, Bjorn Leines, had to stop midway through his run because of whiteout conditions. He later re-did the run.

Silver medalist Mike Michaelchuk said the conditions made riding tough.

"For a halfpipe, it wasn't very good at all," he said. "It made it a little difficult to do good tricks, but with a little bit of speed you can still pull something out."

Head judge Greg Johnson said the poor conditions required the riders to use a different strategy.

"Some people can ride bad pipe, some people can ride good pipe. It's a mixed bag," he said. "It really is a ripple effect. The pipe is a foundation of the event. If it's not perfect, it ripples down through everything.

"With a pipe of this nature, and with the wind, and the snow in the bottom, if you made any mistakes it was very hard to recover."