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There is a lot of PR puff behind the idea that new sports challenge our s afety-first, shrink-wrapped world. by Josie Appleton According to the ads, extreme sports are an antidote to our safety-first, shrink-wrapped world. They offer the opportunity to carve your own path and find out where your limits lie. There is a new extreme sport born almost every week, each seemingly more bizarre and dangerous than the last. BASE-jumping involves parachuting o ff buildings and cliffs; extreme ironing (inexplicably) involves ironing mid-skydive, up a mountain or under water. Hang-gliding and skydiving h ave spawned heli-bungee and sky-flying; skateboarding has spawned street luge, or lying on a skateboard and going fast downhill. Buildering is f ree climbing up skyscrapers, popularised by the Frenchman Alain 'Spiderm an' Robert; free running treats the city as one big gymnastics circuit. Then there are events such as the Verbier Extreme, which challenges snow boarders to find the most daring way of descending a mountain. Extreme sports - also known as lifestyle sports - have roots in 1960s cou ntercultural movements, and have been growing since the late 1980s. Rese arch by American Sports Data found that new-style sports such as snowboa rding and paintballing have increased at the expense of traditional spor ts. Softball and vol leyball fell by 37 per cent and 36 per cent in the same period . Given the high-adrenaline image, it's unsurprising that male 15- to 24-ye ar-olds are the prime market. But these sports attract a wide variety of participants. BASE jumpers include thirty- and fortysomething solicitor s and accountants; and the new free running training academy in east Lon don attracts 80 people a session, including everybody from kids to the m iddle aged. The myth of 'extreme' sports But it isn't really the danger factor that marks out extreme sports. Heyworth notes that 'many extreme sp orts guys have got safety equipment up to their eyeballs, and a complete safety team. You would be lucky to get a cold sponge and a bucket of wa ter at a Sunday league rugby match'. A helicopter packed with medical eq uipment tracks participants in the Verbier Extreme. Improvements in equipment allow the reduction in risk and pain. In the 19 60s, skydiving was done by penniless daredevils using surplus US airforc e chutes. Even the most extreme of extreme sport pales into comparison beside the exploits of the early climbers and explorers, for whom the risks we re great and the outcomes unknown. The advert for Sir Ernest Shackleton' s 1914-17 Trans-Antarctic expedition read: 'Men wanted: For hazardous jo urney. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, const ant danger, safe return doubtful. Extreme sport goods - including T V programmes, graffiti art, design, drinks, and clothing - are a bigger business than the sports themselves. The Extreme Sports Channel has an e stimated audience of 20million across Europe, most of whom wouldn't go a nywhere near a half-pipe - it's popular among Portuguese women, for exam ple. The Extreme Media Group sells a range of clothing and drinks. The 'Extrem e energy' drink is formulated to 'deliver an intense physical and mental energy boost', using Asian fermented tea, Siberian ginseng and guarana (a natural form of caffeine). There is even 'Extreme water' ('the pure a rtesian mineral water from the Rockhead source in Buxton, will rehydrate you fast'), and Extreme Chillout ('new gen soft drink created to aid re laxation, recovery and all round chilling') . Meanwhile, there is an X-Games brand of mobile phone: 'Carry the excitement and attitude of X G ames with you everyday. Beneath the hype, lifestyle sports are a new kind of sport for a new age. While traditional sports elevated the values of commitment and fair play, these new sports offer individuals a more per sonal kind of challenge. Sport: from team to individual Most traditional sports were institutionalised in the final decades of th e nineteenth century. Prior to that, sport had been more informal, with the different teams in a rugby match deciding on the rules at the start of the game. Indeed, many sports were just a more or less organised form of fighting: early 'football' involved neighbouring villages scrapping over a pig's bladder. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm outlines in The Invention of Tradition, in stitutionalised sport provided a gel for an industrialising society. Fac tory owners set up football teams for their workers (Arsenal was the tea m of London gun-makers), to tie them into the firm and provide an outlet for aggression. Meanwhile, the ruling class formalised its own sports - tennis, golf, and rugby union - which Hobsbawm describes as a 'consciou seffort to form a ruling elite'. Business was done on the tennis court a nd golf course, and the values of sportsmanship and fair play became the signature tunes of the British elite. Now that class and community identity is on the wane, traditional sportin g associations have suffered. A boys' football team, for example, requir es parents as volunteer helpers, and for each member of the team to play by the rules and turn up for practice. Professor Neil Ravenscroft, a re search fellow at the University of Brighton, tells me that 'Volunteers t o run sport outside of school are declining. And young people have less commitment to the idea that you adhere to sets of rules that are not you rs, and turn up to training regularly'. Lifestyle sports provide more individualised ways of pushing yourself. Th ere is no winning and losing as such, and little organisation into teams or leagues. Each individual is really competing against himself: the fo under of free running, Sebastien Foucan, said that the sport was about a 'desire to overtake yourself'. How a free runner tackles the urban land scape is up to him. There are some established moves - a cat jump, speed vault, a palm spin, and so on - but you are always free to invent your own. This contrasts with sports such as gymnastics, when athletes have a certain time to perform, a set piece of equipment and a limited series of moves.
Rather than work within leagues and sporting bodies, participants say that they are doing it fo r themselves. Bandit canoeing goes down forbidden waterways, and off-pis te snowboarding and skateboarding crash off set tracks. Free runners cla im to challenge the official architecture of the city. Ez, who runs the east London free running academy, says: 'I like the freedom aspect, the fact that every individual has their own way of overcoming. A street basketb all site or skateboarding half pipe will have a set of agreements about what's allowed. At Brighton skateboarding park, for example, there are d ifferent times of the day for different abilities. Once boys were se nt out to freezing football and rugby fields to make men of them; They go at a jump again and again, falling off and picking themselves up until they can finally do it. One climber explain ed the attraction: 'there must be something which can be won and somethi ng which can be lost. The winning can be the unutterable joy as your que sting fingers latch a crucial edge. Some free runners a re scared of heights, yet will perform complicated leaps between high bu ildings. They still their minds before the jump, overcome the part of th em that wants to balk. This isn't about taking risks for the sake of it: instead, it's the calculated judgement of the sportsman. Ez argues that free running 'requires discipline to do it properly, which is transferr ed to other aspects of life'. Some claim that the thrill of the jump can cast the grind of everyday life into perspective. One young BASE-jumper says: 'It's the way to refresh things, to keep the mind awake. They wa nt the appearance of doing something 'craaa-zy' like skydiving or bungee jumping, while relying on the instructor to ensure that nothing goes wr ong. But some participants want to put themselves to the test. This come s at a time when institutionalised sports are being tied up in regulatio n, with risk analysis required before every rugby game and players suing the referee if they get injured. In school...
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