extreme sports

extreme sports

Sports events characterized by high speed or high risk. Such sports include aggressive inline skating, wakeboarding, street luge, skateboarding, and freestyle bicycle events (wherein tricks such as back flips are performed on a bicycle). Many of the events—snowboarding, skateboarding, and freestyle biking are examples—are performed on ramps and inclines or in a halfpipe, some with walls as high as 50 feet, which allows the athletes to get air, or achieve the height necessary to, for example, rotate on a bicycle. Many of these sports were made popular by the X Games (championship competitions sponsored by the cable-television network ESPN). The 1998 and 2002 Olympic Games featured extreme snowboarding events in a halfpipe, in which boarders performed jumps, rotations, and mid-air maneuvers.