Women Who Want to Live on the Edge 汉译

Tracey Mosley was always a bit of tomboy. Growing up on a farm, she and her brothers spent hours messing around on their bikes in England’s Worcestershire countryside.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Now though, those hours have paid off as the 24-year-old has become the world’s number three female downhill mountain bike racer, and spends her time careering down slopes at high speed, jumping over rocks and cycling through mud.

Mosley’s phenomenal achievement is not just about exploring physical limits. She is one of Britain’s new breed of female dare-devils who have entered the male-dominated world of extreme sports and, against odds, are conquering it.

Having encroached on traditionally male territory, such women are providing the equal of men—and are reaping lucrative rewards.

In the macho world of sky-diving, snowboarding and underwater free-diving, women are finally making their mark.

“The culture was that women should not be doing this kind of sport,” says Mosley. “But now a lot of girls I know can ride better than most men. The tracks we race on are the same and the prize money is the same. I can make a living through sponsorship and racing.”

Mosley is not alone. Britain has extreme sports women performing at the highest levels around the globe. On September 13, the UK women’s sky-diving team won a gold medal in the World Championships and this year Lesley Mckenna, a top British snowboarder, came first in a World Cup competition.

The number of women-only competition in all these sports is soaring, and with success comes commercial potential. Britain’s extreme sportswomen are about to become big business.

Born to a British mother, Tanya Streeter was brought up in the Caribbean. She first went into the water when she was six weeks old. In 1997, she went to her first free-diving clinic, a sport where the diver takes a deep breath then descends deep into the sea. Three months later, she broke an American championship record, and soon went on to break the women’s world record. Men were shocked.

“They thought I was a joke”, she says. “It took three years competing before they accepted I could do it.” By then she had broken three world records, wiping away the men’s achievements.

Sharing her sense of adventure is Lucy Adams, 19, Britain’s number one skateboarder. She is sponsored by Nikita, a clothing company in Ireland that caters for “girls who ride”. She laughs at suggestions that she was on the path to becoming a multi-millionaire: “I don’t understand where they got that from.”

But in America, men at the top of the skateboarding scene earn fortunes. Such opportunities may soon be available to women as more sports brands come to sponsor women athletes in order to promote the sales of women-specific goods.

Not only are sportswear manufacturers muscling in on women athletes. The Extreme Sports Channel—a satellite TV station—is joining in too, running dedicated women’s programming.

Alistair Gosling, owner of the Extreme Sports Channel, says: “ think, to date, women have been in the shadow of men, but now two things are happening—women are getting better and female retail sector is growing massively, outstripping the men’s in many areas.”