By Otterboy
One of the funniest things about whitewater kayaking is its status as an
"extreme sport". This is a vague term like "postmodern" which gets thrown
around when some half-educated marketing intern needs a catchy phrase. It's
a great marketing scheme, to be sure. Look at all those extreme dudes
running waterfalls while drinking/eating/bathing in our product! Buy it and
be just like them! I boat a lot of class IV, and a bit of class V. Am I
extreme? If so, I want to spell it "x-treme" just to emphasize how much I
rule.
I remember one car commercial featuring 3 or 4 kayakers blue-angeling over a
ledge. Dude! That's extreme! What always struck me about this commercial
(aside from the debatable link between whitewater skills and the model of
car you drive) is the sheer incompetence. Blue-angeling a ledge is a fine
why to land right on top of your buddy who's missed his boof and is stuck in
the hole. This happened to me once on
Icicle Creek
(Washington State). I was following Rob McKibbon but didn't' give him enough room. He was rodeo-creeking in a random
ledge when I landed on top of him. This was great for Rob - I took his place
in the hole and ended up joining the Icicle Swim Team.
The funniest thing is that kayaking takes precision,
discipline and a wee bit of planning. Even when you're bombing down a creek
run, a good boater is always in control. Of course, that control may be
subject to constrains, but that's another issue. It's when things get out of
control that they get extreme, and that tends to suck. The term "no fear" is
a bunch of crap. Fear is a fantastic motivator, sometimes it's that extra
push you need. I remember a time when I waited a bit too long deciding
how to get around a log. My backup plan was "make that eddy or die". Maybe
that was extreme, but it wasn't a lot of fun.
As best as I can tell, extreme sports is a marketing label with the
following uses:
-- selling sugar water to couch potatoes
-- an excuse for incompetent web designers to use way to much flash
animation
I went to Google to see if I could learn more, but that wasn't any help.
Among the top results for "x-treme" where:
#1: x-treme Scooters
My reaction? Those are some mighty nice scooters, but they're not really x-treme.
Second, I wonder if that phone order chick would go out with me. She's hot!
#8: Xtreme Desktops.
Uh.....come again? So if your day job is sitting at a desk putting numbers
in Excel charts this is just the thing for you.
#10: Xtreme Systems: Computing without limits!
There's nothing I can say about this - they've already lapsed into self
parody.
No marketing campaign runs its course until the Christians get involved. Once you have an extreme scooter and you're cruising around town with the phone order chick how do you kick things up a notch? That's right, we're going to get extreme for Christ!
I have to take a sec to figure out what this means. I got it. We're all going to learn ancient Greek, read the Gospel in the original, leave our families and follow an itinerant preacher around Palestine. Once we're bored with that, we'll piss off the authorities and get executed. Maybe Red Bull would sponsor a crucifixion. That, my friends, would be x-treme.