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So we began in the first part of the lecture in trying to understand

the paradox of extreme sports.

Why people choose to do extreme sports.

And we talked about how extreme sports represent a reaction against the safety

fetish and, more broadly, the dimensions of control and

discipline in modern society.

Let me now add two other attractions of extreme sports that I think also help to

explain the paradox of their, if not huge popularity, substantial popularity.

And a first of those attractions is what I would call the idea of firstness.

Human beings at least modern human beings, like to be unique.

We like to feel like we're special.

And there's always an attraction to being the first person,

the first human being to accomplish this or that feat.

Now, little boys and girls around the world have always

loved to read the Guinness Book of World Records, cuz it's all about firstness and

all the bizarre, how many caterpillars somebody ate or

who has the longest fingernails, and so we're fascinated with firstness.

And extreme sports are very often about firstness.

How far the human body can be pressed,

to what extremes the human body can be pressed to accomplish this or that feat.

And it used to be that this idea of firstness in extreme sports

really revolved around mountains.

Around being the first person to the world's highest peaks.

The quest for Mount Everest was a big extreme sport phenomenon.

And Sir Edmund Hillary he's knighted later for his accomplishment.

In 1953, becomes the first person to ascend Mount Everest.

And it should be said that, actually it was Edmund Hillary but

with a Sherpa local pridesman Tenzing Norgay who was

with Edmund Hillary Norgay tended to get written out of the picture

maybe because how people wanted the like the idea of the affluent British guy from

Mount Everest and weren't so interested in the story of this poor brown guy up there.

And as actually happened in a number of other cases of adventure and exploration.

For example when Robert Perry discovers,

is the first person to get to the North Pole in 1909.

He's with his African-American helper, Matthew Henson, but in later histories,

Henson, much like Tenzing Norgay gets written out of the picture and instead we

get the image of the great white man, of Robert Perry, alone on the North Pole.

Just as we also have tinted out this image of Edmund Hillary alone.

Writing out Tenzing Norgay's role.

So firstness is a part of the attraction of extreme sports.

And now that all of the world's mountains have been climbed,

we've seen extreme sports practitioners develop and

search for new extreme feats to accomplish where they can be the first.

So for example, in free water diving you've had these.

And free water diving has all these different

classifications of with fins or not or male and female.

And so, we see in free diving, the effort to dive deeper and

deeper down into the ocean without oxygen.

And you have world records now that are more than 300 feet below the surface.

Can you imagine that?

Diving without oxygen more than 300 feet down into the ocean and

people have died and been brain damaged in this

dramatic awful alluring sport of free diving.

So firstness is another attraction of extreme sports and

then a third and final attraction of extreme sports,

we've talked about reaction of the safety fetish, firstness, a third and

final attraction is what I would call the ascetic experience.

And the way that it attaches to sports that involve danger.

Now, asceticism is the idea of removing yourself from the social mainstream.

It's the idea of wandering the wilds of the Earth,

of entering into the outside the realm of the normal,

and asceticism in a number of different world traditions,

has actually been associated with sacredness.

Think about St. John the Baptist wandering the deserts of Egypt in communion and

ecstasy with God.

Or think about the Buddhist monk who again wonders in a sacred poverty

around southeast Asia and Asia, pursuing enlightenment.

So the ascetic experience suffering deprivation,

not living the comfortable social life has these associations with sacredness and

extreme sports are also a form of ascetic experience.

In the sense that you're putting yourself into this altered space, this space almost

between life and death, this space where other people don't want to go.

And often,

extreme sports practitioners talk about this sort of dimension of the spiritual or

even the sacred, to being alone on El Capitan on a windy night,

or to that deep water dive deep down into the ocean.

So extreme sports can involve this feeling of asceticism, this sense of sacredness,

and that's a third and final, I would say, part of their appeal.

Now, extreme sports are not an all together new phenomenon.

I can remember back in the 1970s the figure of Evel Knievel,

who was a weird, odd, larger than life american hero.

Evel Knievel was a motorcycle jumper.

Motorcycle jumping certainly being an extreme sport.

One of his big stunts was to try

to jump on his motorcycle across the huge Snake River Canyon gorge in Idaho.

Now, Evel Knievel was an extreme sports guy.

He supposedly broke every bone in his body in the falls that he took.

But he was also about making money and celebrity, and

he wore these Elvis Presley-like rhinestone suits and

got these big contracts to do these various stunts.

And what this points to is that with extreme sports

there have long been these pressures of commercialization.

This idea, this voyeuristic idea of turning the performance of

extreme sports into something you could put on TV and that people would watch.

Now, people are voyeuristic in the sense that,

we like in a strange twisted disgusting way,

we're fascinated by the car crash or by the disaster as it happens.

And so, watching somebody say Nik Wallenda walking across the Grand Canyon on

a tight rope has this inherent kind of dramatic appeal to much of us.

And Wallenda, in fact, walked across the Grand Canyon on a tight rope because

he wanted to, but also because he was getting millions of

dollars from the Discovery Channel that wanted to televise all of this.

So with extreme sports there's always this pressure of commercialization,

this bringing of extreme sports back in to the main stream.

Think of the X Games, extreme sports commodified via ESPN in to a regular

part of their programming, and yet at the same time there's this push and pull.

So as extreme sports get commercialized you have a segment of the extreme

sports practitioners that reject that kind of mainstream sports and

wanna keep it this outlier, rogue, sacred, ascetic experience.

So for instance, you have big wave surfers who are very jealously

guard the locations and the times when the big waves are breaking.

Cuz they don't wanna be filmed on video,

they don't wanna be turned into a big expensive documentary.

Or you have skateboarders who turn up their noses at the X Games as

a kinda commercial carnival.

And instead, do these wild dangerous extreme sport night

time tricks across urban landscapes around the world.

And so, to sum up, what we've seen is a, we're trying to answer the paradox of

extreme sports by explaining some of the attractions of extreme sports.

We've talked about the pressure to commercialize extreme sports and

the ways that those pressures are always resisted in a kind of push and pull.

And I think in the very bigger picture, and we're gonna continue to see this push

and pull between commercial and non-commercial forms of extreme sports.

And I think also that extreme sports aren't gonna go away.

I don't think soccer is in any danger of being displaced as the world's most

popular sport by cliff diving or deep seawater diving.

It's always gonna be a minority of people who wanna take those extreme sport risks.

Yet it seems pretty clear that these sports are gonna

stick around and I think it's gonna be really

interesting in the future to see what new forms

of extreme sports people manage to come up with.

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The Strange Case of Extreme Sports, Part 2

Sports and Society

Meet the Instructors