There was a time when football, basketball and handball were the favorite sports of young people. But today’s teens grew up watching MTV and browsing the Internet, and do not always have the patience to sit during the intervals between games or wait for the 2nd time. They want action. They want speed. They want sports.
In early 1990, people born between 1960 and 1980 (known as Generation X and Y) have begun to turn traditional sports and turned their attention to the skating rinks and ski slopes, where rebels like Tony Hawk and Shaun Palmer were taking sports to the limit. In the sports cable channel ESPN, a businessman named Ron Semiao noticed this change. In 1993, he predicted a new televised sporting event – a sort of Olympics of speed. He would have extreme sports like rollerblading, skateboarding and street luge. Athletes would have to jump, flip and turn, trying to outdo each other with tricks faster and shocking.
On June 24, 1995, the first Extreme Games (the name was changed to the X Games the following year) went into action with 200 thousand people in Middletown, the U.S. state of Rhode Island. The four-day festival has 27 events in nine categories, including bungee jumping, eco-challenge, mountain biking and sky surfing. In the beginning, not everyone took the idea seriously. A columnist for USA Today wrote: “If you hold your best friend on the hood of a Ford Falcon, drove it over a cliff, you juggle three babies and a chainsaw on the descent and landing safely while doing a handstand, they would shoot, show for all and call it a new sport. “[source: Pickert].
However, it was Semiao who laughed last. The X Games were quickly into the mainstream, generating interest from sponsors such as Mountain Dew billionaires, Saturn and Taco Bell. The event of extreme sports has become so popular that launched the ESPN Winter X Games in 1997, including sports like snowboarding and snowmobiling. Until 2002, the X Games have attracted a television audience of nearly 63 million people
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