Extreme Sport - History

History

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The origin of the divergence of the term "extreme sports" from "sports" may date to the 1950s in the appearance of a phrase usually, but wrongly, attributed to Ernest Hemingway. The phrase is

"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 seep. 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 (60ft) 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 by X Games, a multi-sport event 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.

A history of the sports was published in 2004. Amped: How Big Air, Big Dollars and a New Generation Took Sports to the Extreme. The book provided an overview of the history, culture, and business of the sports and included interviews with athletes, company owners, and marketers. The film, Last Paradise, was launched in 2012 as an "original footage" history of extreme sports culture and adventure travel over 45 years, including the origins of extreme surfing, skiing, snowboarding, wakeboarding, windsurfing, hang gliding and kiteboarding, to the first commercialization of bungee jumping by A. J. Hackett, and his famed jump from the Eiffel Tower.

Adventure sports have been institutionalized since the 1990s, when the Adventuresports Institute of Garrett College began offering a degree in Adventure Sport Management.