Steamboat SpringsSteamboat Springs — Gina Gmeiner gets a little choked up just thinking about the Winter X Games. — Gina Gmeiner gets a little choked up just thinking about the Winter X Games.

Steamboat Springs — Gina Gmeiner gets a little choked up just thinking about the Winter X Games.

Her sport – women’s halfpipe skiing – has no competition like it.

“It’s incredible, standing in the gate, under the lights and with the perfect pipe ahead of you,” Gmeiner said. “I wish I could bottle that emotion.”

Gmeiner, who grew up in Steamboat Springs and graduated from the Lowell Whiteman School in 2002, will get to uncork a bottle of the real thing when Winter X Games 12 opens Thursday in Aspen.

Gmeiner got the “best Christmas present ever” when she was e-mailed her invitation to this year’s games on Christmas Eve. Last year, Gmeiner was invited as an alternate, but after another competitor didn’t show, she was unexpectedly tapped to head to the starting gate and into the spotlight.

“I hadn’t trained for a run, so I just jumped in and made it up,” Gmeiner said. “The second run went better, but I got swept up in the moment and didn’t look up at the scoreboard.”

So Gmeiner headed into town to pick up some souvenirs not realizing she had finished sixth. The 23-year-old carried the momentum to a pair of freeskiing open competition podiums to help punch her ticket back to her third consecutive Winter X appearance.

“I don’t look at it like a competition at all,” Gmeiner said Thursday after a practice session spent working on spin combinations in Park City, Utah, where she lives. “It’s more about going and being part of progression in women’s freeskiing and breaking barriers to push to get us on TV.”

This also is the source of Gmeiner’s greatest frustration with Winter X.

Although she feels honored to be selected as one of the top 12 female halfpipe freeskiers in the world, she finds the broadcast coverage disheartening. The Ski SuperPipe Women’s Final (which has no qualifier and consists of two judged runs) is scheduled for 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Friday. ESPN’s Friday night broadcast schedule (7:30 to 9:30 p.m.), however, does not even include the event.

“They’ll maybe show one or two clips from the top winners,” Gmeiner said.

Chris Burandt has a much different predicament.

Since Burandt won the inaugural snowmobile freestyle event at Winter X Games 11 – wowing primetime Sunday night viewers with sprawling backflips over the course’s 100-foot step-down jump – his competition clips have become the promotional fodder for this year’s games.

Now, Burandt has gotten the call for Hollywood stunt work (for 20th Century Fox’s “Babylon A.D.” starring Vin Diesel) and stepped down from his Arctic Cat district sales manager post to open a backcountry snowmobile adventure outfit outside Kremmling.

Although Burandt claims Kremmling as his residence, he can most often be found freeriding off Rabbit Ears Pass.

He was training all week outside of Steamboat at the private ranch where Chris Brown and Clayton Stassart base their film production company Compound Films. On Friday, Burandt and two fellow Winter X Games riders – Sam Rogers (Billings, Mont.) and Paul Thacker (Anchorage, Alaska) – spent the afternoon calibrating engines for altitude and methodically launching and re-launching off a 10-foot steel ramp to make sure everything was feeling right before departing for Aspen on Tuesday.

Burandt and Rogers are on the freestyle ticket, and all three riders are invited to be self-proclaimed guinea pigs in the new Snowmobile Speed & Style event – a judged and timed head-to-head dual course event modeled after the Summer X Games 13 Rally Car Racing Super Special.

Burandt feels as if he has a target on his back returning to the freestyle gauntlet, so putting together a contending run comes down to three factors – time, practice and getting used to the snowmobile.

Like Gmeiner, Burandt also anticipated the tricks getting bigger leading up the final runs prior to the main event.

“By Monday, that’ll probably be about 10 times bigger,” Burandt said after trying his first holy man trick on his new competition sled.

But it will be in one week, when the cameras are rolling at the Snowmobile Freestyle Final to close the games, that Burandt said the magic will happen.

“You add X Games plus freestyle and you get progression – a lot of trick combos, the course should be the same, but you should be seeing bigger, gnarlier stuff,” Burandt said. “(Winter X) is what you work toward. Everything else, it’s not child’s play, but there’s no bigger stage in the world.”