There are few things I like better than being out in the sun, TRYING to take GOOD action-type photos and meeting new people. So, when the opportunity presented itself for me to do all three simultaneously, you can bet your last dollar that I grabbed it. The 5th Asian X Games was recently held in Kuala Lumpur, from the 20th - 26th of January. Whilst I knew that KL was hosting the X Games, I didn't have any particular interest in going as I basically didn't know what it was. I remember seeing some advertisements but nothing that would grab my attention (advertisers take note here... your advertisements do NOT work!). So how did I end up at the games? Well, this really nice guy wrote to me via my website (sometimes it pays to have a website 
) looking for information regarding Malaysia. Turns out that he is a coordinator for the games and suggested that I come check it out. As I had driven past the venue and saw some interesting setup, I thought "why not?", so I did and I have no regrets about doing so.
Now, until I went to the Games,
I knew absolutely NOTHING about
extreme sports, or X games / sports
or Xtreme sports as it is more
commonly known. In fact, when
a friend of mine told me that
he picked up wake boarding last
year, I had no idea what it was.
He wanted me to try it and from
what I've learnt of the sport,
whilst it does look astronomically
exciting, I somehow pictured myself
with a broken leg or two and perhaps
even a broken neck (lad broke
his ankle 
). I am more comfortable underwater
than above it unfortunately, but
the sport does look WONDERFUL!!
So
what is extreme sports? Well generally
speaking, it is a broad category
for sports which are relatively
dangerous. We are not talking
about tennis or basketball here,
or even American football or Australian
footie which can be somewhat "dangerous"
(especially when the participants
lose their temper or are in fact
drunk and / or stoned
) . No, we are talking about sports
which the participating athlete
has to have some sort of death
wish, no fear of injury, be an
adrenalin junkie and has to be
somewhat insane I reckon .
We are not talking about extreme
danger 
like
that of souped up motorised machines
going at hundreds of miles per
hour in circles, we are talking
about people doing stunts on skateboards,
somersaults on bicycles, crazy
things on motorbikes etc.
A little gripe here... the Asian X Games website leaves a fair bit to be desired, half the links aren't working, the site is slow and what's up with having to download Word DOCUMENTS in order to read certain bits of information?? Grrr... I know a fair bit about the IT industry and web consulting is something I used to do... so when I see sites like this, I get a little irritated. I would have thought that a site such as this one would be heaps better and updated more often... in fact, the copyright notice is still for the year 2002!!!
Anyways, for the Asian X Games,
athletes competed in the following
category of sports. If you are
like me and don't know squat about
Xtreme sports, you can read about
them in the links below (quite
interesting actually... read the
glossary and you'll see how absolutely
MAD these people really are
). FYI, as I HAD to (grrrr) download
the files, I decided to convert
the information obtained from
the Asian
X Games website into HTML
pages, to save you my dear reader
from having to wait for the download
and to spare your precious eyes
from the badly formatted word
documents. Note, the pages below
are a direct cut and paste job
from the website. You can get
the original documents here.
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