Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 4.19
Vancouver, Canada.
Olympic
gold medal winner Shaun White
performs a snowboard stunt on
the halfpipe at the Vancouver
Winter Olympics in 2010.
© Sports Illustrated/Getty Images
food, fi nancial advice, and a number of other products and
lifestyles, including fashion and skin care.”
Like new music or other forms of popular culture,
extreme sports become more popular, mainstream, and
commodifi ed. Once that happens, the fan base turns its
attention to a new extreme sport, and the corporate spon-
sors begin to tap into the new popular sport, helping it
follow the same path to popular, mainstream, and com-
modifi ed status.
One of the best known recent examples of this
trend is the popularization of Ultimate Fighting. In the
early 1990s, advertising executives and sports promoters
drew from a long history of mixed martial arts fi ghts in
Brazil to produce a series of fi ghts in the United States
among different martial arts and boxing experts to see
who was the best fi ghter. The new fi ghts, called mixed
martial arts, grew a fan base through live matches and
pay per view on cable television. The early mixed martial
arts fi ghts had few rules including no headbutting and no
weight classes.
The fan base grew quickly, and by 1993, the
Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) formed to
serve as a professional organization for mixed martial
arts (Fig. 4.20). The sport continued to grow during the
1990s, with the establishment of rules over time allot-
ments for matches, the institutionalization of promo-
tions and marketing, and the growth in popularity of a
reality television show called
The Ultimate Fighter
. The
Fight Network reports the UFC has diffused to “over
130 countries, territories, and jurisdictions, reaching
430 million homes worldwide, in 20 different lan-
guages.” UFC has deals in China and India to broadcast
fi ghts. In China, UFC is working to build a fan base
through a Chinese UFC website (ufc.cn) and a Chinese
version of
The Ultimate Fighter
reality show. The rules of
the UFC, including 7 weight classes and specifi cations
for the fi ghting arena called “the Octagon” or “the
Cage,” have been institutionalized as the basis for ulti-
mate fi ghting worldwide. References to ultimate fi ght-
ing and ultimate fi ghters (such as Chuck Liddell's
appearance on HBO's
Entourage
) are diffusing into other
aspects of popular culture, spreading both the commodi-
fi cation and the popularization of the sport.
Identity and the desire to remain outside of popu-
lar culture will continue to spur the creation of extreme
sports to rival the big three. In discussing MTV's pro-
duction of culture, Rosati explained that the founda-
tion of industrial capitalism is not simply “meeting the
existing needs of the public.” Rather, industrial capi-
talism demands that corporations continue to produce
goods that “become socially
desirable
.” The need for
corporations to create the “new” so that they have
something to sell that is “socially desirable” applies to
MTV and the music industry, as well as to major sports
promoters and marketers. Skateboarding and ultimate
fighting will be followed by the next extreme sport and
the next, as long as corporations can spur the con-
sumption of the new.
Stemming the Tide of Popular Culture—Losing
the Local?
The assimilation policies practiced by American, Canadian,
Russian, Australian, and New Zealand governments were
offi cial policies designed for the express purpose of disrupting
