5 Insanely Dangerous Sports

Sports are okay, I guess. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with baseball and all that, you know, if you’re into that sort of thing. If you’re into cowardice.

But if you’re tired of the usual national sports, then extreme sports may be the thing for you. They’re equitable to the shifty drifter selling drugs out of his leather duster: you know he’s not intentionally trying to kill you, but he very well may. Because bowling isn’t lethal enough, why not try out…

1. Cave Diving

In man’s continued conquest of God’s creation people began diving to absurd depths for no real reason other than they had nothing else better to do. As the name implies, the sport involves diving in search of caves to explore. It’s equitable to the Eliminator on American Gladiators if Turbo and Gemini had guns that fired bigger guns at the contestants. Diving is already incredibly dangerous. Now add low visibility, increased pressure, low temperatures, limited mobility inside the caves and a short oxygen supply to the mix and you have the “sport” of cave diving. Divers joke that the “winners” of the joke are those who come back alive, which should really tell you something. Oh, and those caves you’re exploring? Animals tend to live in those. So yeah, look forward to that.

Experienced divers don’t find themselves with much of an advantage when cave diving because so many things can go horribly wrong incredibly quickly. Among the lives claimed by the bottom of the sea are professional divers. In order to ensure that your odds of participants coming back are better than “not,” the training program usually takes four separate segments.

2. Street Luge

The luge was designed to be as ball-bustingly terrifying as possible: participants lie face up and feet first on a sled not much longer than they are. The sled then races down a bending track usually made partially of ice. The sled is steered with the luger’s feet. There’s no brakes, which is bad news when you’re traveling at 140 km an hour. Despite it’s cough drop-esque name the luge is classified as an extreme sport, and rightfully so. One simple mistake and suddenly you’re being stuffed in a black bag by emergency personnel.

Now take this same concept and do it in the middle of a street. That’s the street luge, and it’s as terrible an idea as it is likely to kill you.

Street luge races are performed on their own closed courses for obvious reasons, but that doesn’t mean someone somewhere isn’t about to luge into busy Main Street traffic. We live in a world where kids will try to power bomb each other through a dinner table because Scott Steiner made it look rad. Safe to assume that there’s been more than one accident where street lugers met passing Le Sabres. Also keep in mind that steering isn’t nearly as smooth as you’d like it to be and that adverse weather conditions are almost certainly going to flip your ass of your sled and into the nearest tree.

3. Heliskiing

Some people are never satisfied. Take skiers, for example. These people get to experience the exhilaration of speeding down a slope on what amounts to two long sticks, jumping off awesome ramps and narrowly avoiding death at the sight of every stone and tree. No, these people need more, which is why heliskiing exists.

The concept of heliskiing is simple: normal ski slopes and are for cowards, and real men only ski on mountains virtually untouched by the hands of men or God. These areas are so far removed from social living that they are only reasonably accessible by helicopter. When you can only reach your destination via the air, that’s should be your first clue that you do not belong there. Once you’ve made it to your starting point you’ll need to beware of simple things like snow drifts, avalanches and very deep snow indistinguishable from snow on stable terrain. Your second clue that you don’t belong in an area is when every step you take could potentially result in a ten foot drop to your grave or a burial via avalanche. Still, people pay big bucks for the chance to flee from winter’s wrath on skis, so heliskiing won’t be disappearing anytime soon.

4. BASE Jumping

Because other methods of entertainment are nearly lethal enough on their own, BASE (Bridge, Antenna, Structure, Earth) Jumpers enjoy life by throwing themselves from buildings, antennas, bridges, cliffs or anywhere else they can climb while risking great personal injury to themselves. BASE jumping is similar to sky diving with your base platform much closer to the ground. However, that distance creates all sorts of different conditions. It’s rare for a jumper to achieve the terminal velocity that allows sky divers to stabilize their positions. This means that jumpers may tumble while falling, which could result in injury before they even touch the ground. Also, jumpers use parachutes for their landing, which can become a real terrible mess should you be caught in a tumble. Strangulation resulting from such a situation has proven to be fatal more than once in the jumping community.

5. Bull Running

Bulls: the Yin to man’s Yang. So rarely in nature is there such a perfect marriage of killing capacity and bottomless anger. The horns it bears and its inclination to charge at just about anything are sure-fire signs that we probably shouldn’t be fucking with these animals. Yet we have people dress up in fancy capes and mustaches do just that, getting cheers from an audience while they intentionally try to piss a bull off to the point where it will attack. And more often than not it does attack, tossing its captor about like a doll and somehow the audience is always surprised by this. Really? You’re surprised that a bull wouldn’t take shit from that guy?

However, not content with making a mockery of the once majestic creature, people in Spain made an even more assholish attempt at making a sport out of bulls. The Running of the Bulls involves releasing the bull in a city street that has been converted into a course. Once free, people freely elect to run in front of an around the bull in order to grab its attention. Once they’ve been targeted for sweet, sweet revenge they then proceed to run away wit the bull in chase. The problem is that the course is incredibly crowded with people participating and getting away from rampaging bulls in a river of people can be result in serious injury (at least two hundred every year). Oddly enough, the sport’s long history has less than twenty recorded deaths, which means that either people get really crafty when a bulls about to tear them to shreds or cattle have gotten really good at hiding bodies.

Author: Ben Dennison — Copyrighted © roadtickle.com