CARSON, Calif. (AP) – Travis Pastrana returned to the gold medal podium at the X Games on Sunday after an off-year, winning the Rally Car Racing Super Special, the final event of the action sports showcase.

“I’m really excited to be here and to have a chance to come back,” Pastrana said after jumping down from a top-of-the car celebration. “This feels really good.”

One of the X Games most dominant and dynamic athletes, Pastrana handily beat defending gold medalist and movie stunt driver Tanner Foust in the head-to-head final run over dirt, pavement and jumps.

The single-elimination, one-on-one event, as opposed to the timed stages usually used for rally, encourages an all-or-nothing style that Pastrana embraced.

“You have to push,” Pastrana said. “If I’m a little bit behind, I have to make up that time, and the only way to make up that time is full video game style. You just start bouncing off stuff.”

Pastrana, though, bounced off far less stuff than his opponents.

In the final, Foust cleanly cleared the giant jump in the middle of the Home Depot Center but hit the wall as he was leaving the arena for the street course and never quite recovered.

“I kind of went for the brake and went a little bit wide and hit the wall there, and bent the right rear corner of the car,” Foust said.

And Pastrana got a gift when the car of his semifinal opponent Ken Block stalled at the start and never left.

Block shared the bronze with Dave Mirra, a BMX biker making his rally debut who gave the crowd huge thrills with his wild style. Mirra had already bent his wheels in a wall crash during the quarterfinal when his opponent Andrew Comrie-Picard drew gasps with an end-over-end flip on the course’s giant jump. Mirra’s twisted tires forced him to do a series of awkward three-point turns to limp home for the win.

Pastrana churned up a huge dust cloud with his Subaru and took out a pair of advertising placards in his victory celebration.

For years Pastrana, originally a motocross rider, dominated Moto X Freestyle at the X Games, taking six golds in eight years.

His action-sports stardom and X-Games darling status peaked in 2006 with a double-backflip in Moto X Best Trick, one of the games’ great “did-he-really-do-that?” moments.

He won two other golds that year, including a dramatic win in the inaugural rally car when rally racing legend Colin McCrae rolled his car in the final and continued on, narrowly losing to Pastrana.

McCrae was killed in a helicopter crash last September.

Last year Pastrana came into the games a celebrity but left with only a rally bronze.

Also Sunday, veteran skater Rune Glifberg finally broke through in the X Games new showpiece Skateboard SuperPark.

“It’s my first X Games gold medal, 14 years in the making,” Glifberg said.

The 33-year-old from Copenhagan, Denmark, won despite a shoulder injury incurred in practice earlier in the week that kept him out of Saturday’s Skateboard Vert competition.

“I’m not sure of the exact diagnosis, but it was about a 10-foot air straight down onto my shoulder, so that’s never good,” Glifberg said.

Andy MacDonald of San Diego won silver and San Francisco’s Tony Trujillo won bronze.

The event, which organizers had hoped would inspire a competition between usually separate street and vert skaters, was more notable for who was missing.

TV promos had advertised a competition between the biggest star in street skating Ryan Sheckler and the biggest star in vert Shaun White, but both bowed out of Saturday qualifying, and they weren’t alone in skipping the competition.

SuperPark – whose venue is a tricked-out version of a neighborhood skatepark – was designed to replace Skateboard Vert, which despite years as the games’ signature event has grown stagnant in the ratings and does not jibe with the experience of most skaters.

“The viewer in our demographic can connect with park skating way more than they will connect with vert,” X Games general manager Chris Stiepock said. “It’s what the kids are doing.”

Skaters signed on to the idea in its infancy, but many expressed disappointment at the eventual design, citing its modest size. Both events were held this year.

“It was going to be just like a vert ramp but bigger and cooler,” said Saturday’s vert gold medalist Pierre Luc Gagnon, who did not take part in SuperPark. “It’s definitely way too small. We thought there would be lips 10 or 12 feet high.

“It’s like minipark,” Gagnon said.

Even Glifberg, who was very comfortable on the course in his winning runs, said he wasn’t quite satisfied with the setup.

“I’d like to see some bigger, gnarlier sections on there, not so compact,” Glifberg said. “I think they should get the skaters involved.”

Stiepock said organizers plan to do just that.

“When this is all over, we’ll sit down with them and we’ll say, ‘OK guys, let us have it. What do you want? What do you like?’ In skateboarding, if I sit 10 guys down I’m going to get nine different opinions.

The X Games lacked a lasting singular image this year like Pastrana’s double-backflip or skater Jake Brown’s horrendous plunge last year.

Most of the drama came on opening night, which began with the successful, fall-free return of Brown on the Big Air mega ramp, followed by an amazing and brutal duel between the event’s only two previous gold medalists, Danny Way and Bob Burnquist.

Way, designer of the event’s mega ramp, twice took nasty spills and lay still for several minutes, bringing gruesome reminders of Brown’s tumble.

He added to his already unmatched reputation for toughness when he fought his way out of the medical room and returned to the huge ramp both times despite what he later learned was ligament damage in his legs.

“What do you expect? The guy jumped over the Great Wall of China with a broken ankle,” said Burnquist, who stole the gold from Way with his final run, just as he had with Brown a year earlier.

Way was named Athlete of the Games by ESPN despite going without a gold.

AP-ES-08-03-08 2010EDT