Personal and Natural Values of Extreme Sports vs Team Sports
Personal and Natural Values of Extreme/Solo Sports Athletes Compared to Team Sports Athletes VS.
Van Powroznik
Radford University
Core 201 Extreme sports are the very expression that immediately summons visions of reckless, heart-stopping, and death-defying pursuits. Many “normal” people, such as those who practice team sports, see these athletes as rebellious unnecessary risk takers, but these enthusiasts see those people as ones who have not yet lived and had experienced the bursting thrills of life. These extreme sports athletes have better personal values, are more in touch with nature, and are better-rounded than their surrounding peers who are less independent in the team sports community. What still puzzles many of us is why these athletes strive to push the limits to these drastic extents and what kind of satisfaction could they be getting out of putting their bodies and minds through these life-threatening endeavors. The desire to physically test one’s self dates back farther than we can imagine, but today’s modern version of this test would be extreme sports. Many of these extreme sports we have today, such as skateboarding or BMX, were founded in America’s subculture communities. They have even been banned in multiple areas for being too dangerous. In many of these sports, individual heroes emerged and set a trend toward mainstream entertainment, putting extreme sports on the map for good. Once seen as an outlawed sport, snowboarding was banned from many ski resorts when it was first gaining popularity and now we have it in the Olympics of all places. If we look at the history of today’s extreme sports, we might determine that the extreme sports of the future will soon emerge among our youth as they seek still another form of self-expression and challenge (History of Extreme Sports, 2007). Extreme sports enthusiasts have goals just like other athletes, but their main goal is not to beat the other
Van Powroznik
Radford University
Core 201 Extreme sports are the very expression that immediately summons visions of reckless, heart-stopping, and death-defying pursuits. Many “normal” people, such as those who practice team sports, see these athletes as rebellious unnecessary risk takers, but these enthusiasts see those people as ones who have not yet lived and had experienced the bursting thrills of life. These extreme sports athletes have better personal values, are more in touch with nature, and are better-rounded than their surrounding peers who are less independent in the team sports community. What still puzzles many of us is why these athletes strive to push the limits to these drastic extents and what kind of satisfaction could they be getting out of putting their bodies and minds through these life-threatening endeavors. The desire to physically test one’s self dates back farther than we can imagine, but today’s modern version of this test would be extreme sports. Many of these extreme sports we have today, such as skateboarding or BMX, were founded in America’s subculture communities. They have even been banned in multiple areas for being too dangerous. In many of these sports, individual heroes emerged and set a trend toward mainstream entertainment, putting extreme sports on the map for good. Once seen as an outlawed sport, snowboarding was banned from many ski resorts when it was first gaining popularity and now we have it in the Olympics of all places. If we look at the history of today’s extreme sports, we might determine that the extreme sports of the future will soon emerge among our youth as they seek still another form of self-expression and challenge (History of Extreme Sports, 2007). Extreme sports enthusiasts have goals just like other athletes, but their main goal is not to beat the other
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