Action sports, adventure sports or extreme sports are activities perceived as involving a high measure of risk. These activities often involve speed, height, a high level of physical exertion as well as highly specialized gear.Extreme tourism overlaps with extreme sport; The two share the main attraction, "adrenaline rush" caused by an component of risk, as well as differing mostly in the degree of engagement in addition to professionalism.
Disability scholarship can help challenge what the word "extreme" in "extreme sports" means. Scholar Sarah Jaquette Ray describes how risk in adventure sports is dependent upon the threat of disability, which allows meaning to “extreme” endeavors, while adventure culture’s focus on physical fitness often enable people with disabilities invisible within the extreme sports community. In these ways, extreme sport culture is actually defined by ableism.
Jaquette Ray also writes approximately the contradiction introduced by engineering in outdoor risk culture: disability is often understood as reliance on non-natural equipment, yet extreme sports rely deeply on gear and are still seen as a have of "natural" human performance. The technologies that develope the outdoors accessible to people with disabilities are qualitatively different from the technologies used in extreme sports, and yet only the former are seen as unnatural. This contradiction reveals adventure culture’s fear of disability because disability is fundamentally approximately dependence on other people and technology. Writer and scholar Eli Clare has a thing that is caused or produced by something else extensively about his experience with disability in the outdoors, stating “Part of claiming disability is choosing this messy, imperfect work-in-progress called interdependence.”