Extreme Sports

How Extreme are Extreme Sports?

The world of extreme sports are commonly represented among your adults who are wanting to push themselves to the limits of their bodies and grasp the concept of fear at the same time. A youthful market of participants is the reasoning behind the appeal and marketing efforts that are geared towards younger adults. This includes a lot of aspects of culture such as clothing, music, and attitudes.

A lot of so-called experts believe that the difference from a normal, traditional sport and an extreme sport is that of perception. These sports are perceived as having higher levels of danger associated with them and with that comes along a higher level of adrenalines, the often called adrenaline rush. For example, the sport of snowboarding comes off a much more dangerous and faster sport than traditional skiing and thusly there are differing marketing strategies for a sport that has more risks and rewards associated with it. Another example is that of something like a demolition derby, which is an adult extreme sport, whereas something along the lines of BMX is an extreme youth sport.

The term extreme sport has evolved over the years as the marketing trends have altered. When the first mention of these sports came about, they were targeted towards sports such as hang gliding, skydiving, scuba, surf, wind surfing, storm chasing, and cave diving. Contrary to what a lot of people might believe, it was not ESPN and its X-Games that popularized the world of extreme sports. This term came about from the pages of Outside Magazine. There were many stores and clothing brands that were first associated with these sports such as North Face, Columbia, Teva, and REI. In today’s society, this term now applies to sports such as BMX, skateboarding, street luge, body surfing, and is associated with things such as Mountain Dew, energy drinks, and video games.

Some of the other extreme sports are paintball, skiboarding, knee boarding, mountain biking, urban kayaking, and tricking. A lot of these sports were brought to the forefront in a show that aired on MTV from 2000-2002 and has had two feature length movies, Jackass. The characters of this program interact in stupid stunts that often involve mishaps with extreme sports such as urban kayaking, skateboarding, and often times mixing these sports with such things as alligators and poisonous snakes.

One of the most ironic twists in the world of extreme sports is that there is now a mainstream aspect to the sport. One of the most ideal examples of this would be in the fact that snowboarding was included as a medal sport in both the 2002 and 2006 Winter Olympics. There are no bigger ways for the acceptance of a sport than to have it voted in as an Olympic sport. However, the mainstream aspect of these sports is not what they have strived for. As time goes on, there will be more ways discovered to push the limits of sports and develop new ways of doing this.