Extreme sports

Extreme sports (also called action sports, aggro sports, deportes extremos, sports extrêmes, الرياضة المتطرفة, 极限运动, 極限運動, ekstremaj sportoj, Extremsportarten, sport estremi, 極限スポーツ, 익스 트림 스포츠, extremum sports, sporty ekstremalne, esportes radicais, экстремальные виды спорта, extrema sporter, انتہائی کھیلوں and adventure sports) is a popular term for certain activities perceived as having a high level of inherent danger.These activities often involve speed, height, a high level of physical exertion, and highly specialized gear.

HISTORY

"There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games."

The implication of the phrase was that the word "sport" defined an activity in which one might be killed. The other activities being termed "games". The phrase may have been invented by either writer Barnaby Conrad or automotive author Ken Purdy.

The Dangerous Sports Club of Oxford University, England was founded by David Kirke, Chris Baker, Ed Hulton and Alan Weston. They first came to wide public attention by inventing modern day bungee jumping, by making the first modern jumps on 1 April 1979, from the Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol, England. They followed the Clifton Bridge effort with a jump from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California (including the first female bungee jump by Jane Wilmot), and with a televised leap from the Royal Gorge Suspension Bridge in Colorado, sponsored by and televised on the popular American television program That's Incredible! Bungee jumping was treated as a novelty for a few years, then became a craze for young people, and is now an established industry for thrill seekers. The Club also pioneered a surrealist form of skiing, holding three events at St. Moritz, Switzerland, in which competitors were required to devise a sculpture mounted on skis and ride it down a mountain. The event reached its limits when the Club arrived in St. Moritz with a London double-decker bus, wanting to send it down the ski slopes, and the Swiss resort managers refused.

Other Club activities included expedition hang gliding from active volcanoes; the launching of giant (60 ft) plastic spheres with pilots suspended in the centre (zorbing); microlight flying; and BASE jumping (in the early days of this sport).

In recent decades the term extreme sport was further promoted after the Extreme Sports Channel, Extreme.com launched and then the X Games, a multi-sport event was created and developed by ESPN. The first X Games (known as 1995 Extreme Games) were held in Newport, Providence, Mount Snow, and Vermont in the United States.

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