Extreme sport is everywhere these days and the people that are involved in extreme sports are as different as the sports that they are involved in. Some say that the father of extreme sport is skate boarder Tony Hawk and after years and years of crashing to the ground while using his skate board Tony Hawk is still out there being extreme. Extreme sports has sprouted not just a whole series of new industries worth billions of dollars but it has also fostered an extreme sports counter culture that is growing by the day and is anything but underground. Extreme sports appears in video games, movies, and there is even the Extreme Games which is broadcast on national television every year in the summer and winter. Even though it sends people to the hospital in droves, extreme sports continues to grow and the notion of a sport being considered extreme grows with the popularity of the genre itself. Extreme sports is not just one event or one activity, it is a whole culture of activities and sports that attempt to push that bar of insanity just one notch higher each time.

Extreme sports has its core activities like any sporting culture and those events are spread out over summer type events and winter type events. The center of both the summer and winter events is the thing that started it all, the extreme sports board. The summer extreme sports board is the skate board. A skate board is a manufactured board with four wheels on it and it offers a broad range of stunt capabilities for those that know how to use it. The potential to dazzle people with skate boarding ability is great but there is also a large potential for painful injury as well and you will find that many of the professional skate boarders have had at least one painful injury. In the late 1970’s or early 1980’s people started to skate board inside empty in ground swimming pools and extreme skate boarding was born. From there people like Tony Hawk developed this activity for kids and misfits of society into a multi-million dollar industry that consists of competitions, exhibitions, and also a line of gear and clothing that has found its way into all parts of American society. The skate board started it all and it looks like the skate board is here to stay in extreme sports.

The winter board for extreme sports is the snow board. Snow boarding has become very popular all over the world and is starting to rival skiing as the most popular winter activity available. Recently snow boarding has become an event at the regular Winter Olympics and that has added an entirely new dimension to snow boarding that it never had before along with a level of credibility that it probably never expected to have. Now that its biggest competitors are becoming legitimate Olympic heroes, snow boarding has been able to give all other winter sports a run for their money in popularity. Where ski slopes used to be the sole domain of the skier the slopes are now shared by the skiers and the snow boarders and the feeling is that the skiers do not like it. There has been a long standing disdain that skiers have had for snow boarders but it is pretty apparent that snow boarders are way to busy becoming world famous for them to have time to worry about skiers looking down their noses at them.

It seems like every day extreme sports gets more and more integrated into regular society and making it less of an underground counter culture anymore. It seems that those involved in extreme sports have take their assimilation into the mainstream very well as they continue to appear on national television and in movies all of the time. Success has a funny way of making a counter culture a little more able to accept their new found mainstream financial windfall.