Women Go Extreme in Summer Sports

By David Romanelli

The 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta propelled women's sports into the headlines. With the gold medal team victories in soccer and basketball, images of U.S. women Olympians draped in medals amid the Stars and Stripes flashed across TV screens and magazine covers for weeks following the games.

The so-called advent of women's sports now has evolved beyond the basics into the extreme. Traditional sports, such as basketball and soccer, may take a back seat to kayaking, water skiing, wakeboarding and surfing to just name a few of the more popular women's extreme sports.

Extreme sports are here to stay. It is likely that the next generation of Americans will grow up choosing between football and in-line skating in the fall, basketball and snowboarding in the winter, and baseball and wakeboarding in the summer.

Our Olympic champions and heroes could be surfing and kayaking their way onto cereal boxes of the future, and the NCAA version of the X Games very well could rival January's football bowl games.

Debuting in 1995, X Games are now an annual extreme sports extravaganza that receives national television coverage on ESPN and ABC. This year, women from around the globe participated in six sports, including wakeboarding. Andrea Gaytan, the most popular women's wakeboarder, recently was named one of the top 10 athletes of the year by Women's Sports & Fitness Magazine.

The recent popularity of wakeboarding clearly is understandable, as lakes are much more accessible than oceans to the great majority of Americans.

In case you have never seen one, a wakeboard basically is two water skis fused together and is described by many as easier than water skiing and much more fun. Wakeboarders use the "wake" or trail left by the boat to jump into the air where they perform various tricks that range from the "911" to the "Pete Rose" to the "OHH" to the "S-Bend."

Simply stated, the tricks involve flips and turns with a strong enough shock value to draw more than 4,500 spectators to the wakeboarding venue at the X Games V in San Francisco. If you think wakeboarding sounds like it must be pretty new on the scene, you're right. The winner of X Games V Gold Medal, Maeghan Major, was only 15-years-old.

You don't have to look far to bear witness to the visual delights extreme sports have to offer. The 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, will include women's kayaking. Women worldwide will race down a 300-meter course while negotiating 20-25 gates amid the turbulence of roaring rapids. Lest we forget a victory will result not in some gimmicky "extreme" trophy but rather an Olympic Gold Medal.

While kayaking may be a bit obscure, surfing and its tropically inspiring images have dazzled Americans for ages; however, only recently have women taken to the waves en masse. For instance, current world champion, Australian Layne Beachley, recently won more than $20,000 from her triumph at the Newquay Pro Women's Surfing Event in England.

Pro tours with events on beaches in exotic locales such as Australia, Brazil, Hawaii and California have lured the spotlight to women's surfing. The pioneer of women's surfing, Lisa Andersen, has set the stage for a new generation of women riding waves into the American mainstream. Andersen, the women's four-time surfing world champion, is honored for her "strength, courage, natural beauty and confidence," as she recently was featured by Surfer Magazine as one of the top 25 most influential surfers of all time. Her reputation and status have led Reef^® beach clothing and accessories to introduce the Lisa Andersen Signature Shoe, a stylish sneaker that Lisa says can be used for "skating to the beach, traveling the world or kicking back with friends."

Surfing may be a career for some, but it is a passion for many. In La Jolla, Calif., Surf Diva has opened what it calls "the world's first surf school for women and girls." The school offers weekend clinics on the sandy beaches of Southern California, a far cry from the summer camps of yesteryear.

If surfing doesn't interest you as a potential summer camp option for your child, you may want to consider the Tahoe Extreme Sports Camp in Lake Tahoe, Calif., where activities include paintball, ultimate rush, bungee jumping, glider flights, in-line skating, parasailing, river-rafting and jet-skiing.

Additionally, universities are realizing how popular these sports are for women. Many universities already include women's extreme sports into their rosters of programs. For example, Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz., searched far and wide to bolster the strength of its women's water-skiing team. Senior ASU student and water-skiing standout Manuela Jaramillo received a fax one day offering her a water-skiing scholarship. Interestingly enough, she was not sitting at your local American lake house waiting to receive the good news. She was thousands of miles away in Bogota, Colombia, waiting for this "opportunity of a lifetime."

Today, more than 30 U.S. universities currently field women's water skiing teams. You can bet that soon enough, college athletes will be jumping from wakes and slicing through tubes as cheerleaders root them on amid a crowd of raucous spectators enjoying a lakeside party. Sounds fun doesn't it? That's exactly the point of extreme sports.

Extreme sports don't necessarily demand athleticism so much as they do the willingness to have a good time. So this summer don't be afraid to hit the waves, ride the wake or steer your kayak through the roaring rapids. It may take a while to grow accustomed to the strange, new equipment, but the thrills will make your summer memorable.

David Romanelli is a Hath yoga instructor and frequent contributor to SunWellness.