“I’ve spent the last few weeks snowboarding at Whistler, Vail and Blackcomb and now I’m back at my home in Los Angeles and when you try to operate at sea level, there’s a whole different shift.”

Masekela is enjoying a career shift as well. This year marks the tenth anniversary for the Winter X Games and most of the time he has been on the slopes as a commentator.

This year, he will be doing what he calls “the Jim McKay role” and jokes that he plans to see Munich before the games just in case an international incident occurs in Breckenridge, Colorado.

Still, he doubts the X Games will ever get a political as the Olympics because it’s just not as nationalistic. “The athletes all compete to beat each other to the core but they want to beat themselves first. You’re not going to see a guy at the end of a run yelling, ‘USA! USA!’”

There are other differences between the X Games and the Olympics. Masekela says the controversy surrounding Olympic skier Bode Miller’s recent comments on 60 Minutes, that he has skied while drunk, aren’t really a big deal.

“It’s hard for the media to get [Miller] but we’ve all gone to the lodge in the middle of the day and had a beer and came out doing better than before. I can’t speak for another athlete’s training regimen but I find a Heinekin gets the blood flowing and loosens up the joints.”

In fact, Masekela makes an analogy that the X Games are to the Olympics what jazz is to classical music. As he explains it, Olympic athletes, like classical musicians, have to interpret their craft in a very specific manner and “are limited to certain moves” while an X Games athlete is allowed to improvise and embellish because “no one knows how to hold back.”

Masekela says he learned the lesson from his Dad, who, at his first competition, insisted on being in the pit with the other athletes rather then in a warm control booth. “He could feel them dropping and flowing and the constant one-upping and it reminded him of a jazz cutting contest.”

It’s a lesson Masekela has taken to heart. Although he’s the main guy on camera during the Winter X Games, he refuses to be confined to a studio.

“I have to get on a hill everyday. If I didn’t, I feel like I’m not really delivering what it’s like to be there.”

David Moye is a fifth generation resident of San Diego county and has the same birthday as Reggie Bush--but none of the athletic ability.