It's the Doping, Stupid: Extreme Sports As the New All-American Pastime

I don't usually spend much time reading about state fairs, but the email that arrived the other day made me sit up in my desk chair and take notice. This summer's fair at the Meadowlands complex in New Jersey, it said, would include all the usual family-based pastimes: juggling, a petting zoo, fireworks, magicians, "racing pigs." But the phrase that leapt off my computer screen was the following: "X-treme Zone Attractions."

This isn't the first time activities like rock climbing and extra-ferocious bumper cars (or some variation of the word "extreme") have been included in state fairs, and it won't be the last. But in light of the latest blights upon the world of mainstream sports--this week's Floyd Landis doping scandal hearings and the news that New York Yankee slugger Jason Giambi reportedly failed a drug test for amphetamines (and somewhat admitted to steroid use in the past)--the email further reinforced the odd place at which we've arrived when it comes to the world of traditional sports vs. "nontraditional" (i.e., extreme or action-sport) ones.

As I learned while researching and writing Amped, my book on the history and culture of action sports like skateboarding, BMX, and snowboarding, those activities are still considered disreputable. Never mind that they take an inordinate amount of skill and practice; never mind their ongoing mainstream crossover. Skiers disdain snowboarders; no-skateboarding-allowed signs stretch from coast to coast. A few years ago, an ESPN executive flew to a publishing conference in San Francisco to try to convince newspaper sports editors that these sports--the province of the network's X Games, of course--should be taken more seriously, a legitimate argument. (Given how little coverage action sports still receives in the media, he was only partially successful.)

And yet which is the more upright sports community right now? Whatever comes of the Landis hearings, the world of bicycle racing has now been shown to be as susceptible to supplements as any other. Further investigations into the use of steroids in baseball are said to be in the works. In contrast, look a the world of action/extreme sports. At last year's Olympics, the all-American, apple-pie star was not the skier (Bode Miller, who wound up being an embarrassment on the slopes) but the snowboarder (mop-topped Shaun White, who's so wholesome that he's a Target spokesman). It's hard to imagine a theme-park ride named after Jose Canseco. But there is now one in honor of skateboarding icon Tony Hawk: In March, a Great Adventure in Texas became of the first of that chain to feature a Hawk rollercoaster ride.

I'm not suggesting that Americans have begun rejecting stick-and-ball players in favor of skateboarders. Nor am I saying that action-sport athletes are newly clean-living, either. (During my time hanging out with skaters, I was offered more than a few joints and bong hits.) But we've arrived at a juncture--one unimaginable a few years ago--in which the seemingly disputable "extreme" athletes are looking more fresh-faced and respectable than the supposedly straight-arrow traditional ones. Some would argue this is a bad thing--that action sports should forever be renegade activities. They're right, to a degree, but to anyone who's been picked last for a school basketball team or lived vicariously through watching a series of jaw-dropping skateboard tricks, there's something thrilling and vindicating about all this. I wouldn't want to read to much into it, but the contrasting scenario is the sporting-world equivalent of watching John McCain stumble as Barack Obama rises: the hypocrisies of the establishment being shown up by the underdogs. And as with that situation, it was only a matter of time.