ABSTRACT
Alternative sports, like alternative cultures, have often been linked ideologically and in practice as an expression of resistance to both mainstream sport and mainstream culture. Alternative sports have also been linked to extreme, action and/or free sports. One approach to activities coming under the banner of free sports has been to locate or associate such activities firmly with counter-cultures or ‘other’ alternatives to mainstream sport. Data from the US illustrates that the demand for alternatives to mainstream sport choices has emerged at such a rate that the large traditional commercial powerbrokers in American sport may struggle to win back a generational cross-section of traditional devotees to sports such as
baseball, basketball and American football. The values associated with alternative sports have often been linked with notions of individualism, lifestyle, risk, freedom, alienation, excitement, voluntarism and invoking a high degree of agency when compared with mainstream sport and mainstream lifestyles. The spectre of generation X or Y rebelling or protesting against the way things are is not new, since counter-cultural movements have been active throughout the twentieth century and before. BMX biking and skateboarding have more than a 30-year history, but it is only relatively recently that they have been brought to the attention of mainstream advertising. It is not so long ago that the popular trend of jogging struggled to become a mainstream form of activity for certain groups of people and yet, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the attraction of organised fun runs, marathons and half-marathons continues to be a pull for people of all ages. The same cannot be said for pursuits such as surfboarding, skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX biking or undertaking the eco-challenge, all of which mean different things to different groups of people and oscillate between conformity and fighting to remain alternative. Some see the difference between alternative sport as a cult or a religion being purely a question of numbers. If this is the case, then when does an alternative lifestyle become a mainstream activity? Or, given the demo - graphic ageing profile in countries such as the UK, are there likely to be as many alternatives in the future as there have been in the past?
