X Games marketing made extreme a 1990s brand
Extreme or action sports are activities seen as carrying high injury or death risk—speed, height, adrenaline, specialized gear. The label lacks a crisp definition yet surged in the 1990s via X Games marketing. Uncontrollable environments separate them from sealed stadiums even when judges score style.
ESPN created the X Games, first staged in 1995 as the Extreme Games at sites including Newport and Providence in Rhode Island and Mount Snow in Vermont, and the Extreme Sports Channel spread the label further. Researchers now often use Rhonda Cohen's 2012 definition: a competitive or self-judged activity that pits the participant against speed, height, depth or natural forces and demands fast, accurate perception. These pursuits skew young, are seldom taught in school PE, and tend to be solitary, though rafting and paintball are team affairs.
The line about only three true sports, bullfighting, motor racing and mountaineering, may have come from writer Barnaby Conrad or motoring author Ken Purdy rather than Hemingway. Oxford's Dangerous Sports Club made the first modern bungee jumps from Bristol's Clifton Suspension Bridge on 1 April 1979, then leapt from the Golden Gate Bridge, where Jane Wilmot made the first female jump. The club also rode ski-mounted sculptures down slopes at St. Moritz until managers refused its London double-decker bus, and it hang-glided from active volcanoes and rolled pilots inside giant plastic spheres.
Many sports descend from others. Windsurfing put a mast and sail on a surfboard; kitesurfing joined a kite-buggy parafoil to a wakeboard-style board, and wakeboarding itself grew from snowboarding and waterskiing. Surfing began centuries ago in Polynesia. Rugby union is dangerous and thrilling yet not deemed extreme, since it lacks stunts, speed and shifting terrain.
Medical opinion credits the rush less to fear-driven adrenaline than to dopamine, endorphins and serotonin released by hard exertion. Brymer and Gray reserved true extreme sports for pursuits where a botched mistake most likely kills, and Brymer found participants report experiences resembling meditation.
Source: Extreme sport
