I'm definitely late to this conversation, but I did want to post my thoughts. This is essentially the same thing I said on SFPK:
It would be really nice if everyone could reserve judgment until the episode airs. As goes with all things, we can't please everyone all the time, but I believe this has been the best organized and planned event to date.
The experience itself was an amazing one and I can safely say it's given a lot of direction to my thoughts (I'll post more about that on my blog soon). Having been there and experienced first-hand what went down, I'm very proud to have been a part of it! Apart from the funding and some general guiding outlines, traceurs pretty much ran the show from start to finish and had final say in just about everything. As goes with any televised production there were hiccups that slowed things down and we were upset about a couple sticking points, but we were never required to do anything against our will, none of our dialogue was scripted at all, the course was designed and modified/improved by traceurs, and I believe that the people there (both on the production side and talent side) were the right people with the right attitudes to put this whole thing together. This isn't some event that was slapped together over the course of a couple months... it's been in development for going on 3 years now. I can promise you, without a shadow of a doubt, that this will be nothing like the Barclaycard or Red Bull Art of Motion events. Obviously now the show is in post production and in MTV's hands, but that said, I'm very pleased with the content we provided them. Everyone on this project has been very open-minded and respectful to us and our sport.
Daniel explained it well. What he meant when he said this wasn't a competition was that it's not the classic American perception of what is often portrayed on TV. In other words, it wasn't like we got there and they pitted us against each other. We all have a great amount of respect for each other. We made it very clear right from the get-go that we were essentially just one family there to have fun. One or off the set, we all love each other. Obviously in the end there was one "winner", but as far as we were concerned it was no more of a competition than any of our jams is a competition. None of us cared who they considered to be the "winner" (as you will see when the show airs). This is clearly a sensitive subject, so at every turn we tried our hardest to make it abundantly clear that we were there to collaborate, and compete, not against each other, but as a collective team against the upper limits of our abilities in order to keep expanding what our bodies can do.
