Extreme sports battle for
business By Ralph Jennings
BEIJING - Ma Hetai of Guangzhou takes
regular weekend rock climbing trips to Yangshuo, a
tourist city in the karst peaks about a day's
drive from home. He piles into a car with friends
and stays with another friend who owns a bar in
Yangshuo. Ma owns his gear, a one-time expense, so
his trips cost 100 yuan (US$12) to 200 yuan per
trip, mostly in road tolls, an acceptable price
for the average Chinese wage-earner.
Scaling cliffs "meets needs" that ordinary
nightlife and tourism - staples of China's young
moneyed generation - cannot, says Ma, who has
practiced the sport for three years.
The
number of people like Ma - practitioners of
"extreme sports" like rock climbing, bungee
jumping and skateboarding - has been increasing by
about a factor of five each year in China since the
mid-1990s, when extreme sports
first appeared here. "This is especially true for
young people, since their exposure to the sports
is increasing," he said last month amid dozens of
amateur climbers, most in their twenties and
thirties, testing their skills on an indoor Beijing climbing wall
rimmed by outdoor sports ads to the tunes of Rage
Against the Machine.
Ma's age, his reason
for cliff climbing, and his expenses are typical
for China's new extreme sports sector. These
sports, which made their first official mark in
China during the Shanghai "X Games" held
in May 2001, are struggling to become an industry.
Although individual companies are profiting
modestly from equipment sales and organizing group
tours, businesspeople say consumer income,
transportation and overall sporting awareness
problems have limited the development of an
extreme sports industry thus far.
"In 1998
I produced an "X Games" exhibition to introduce
the concept to the masses, and had Pepsi sponsor
the deal with DJs, stages, and the whole parade,"
says Cortney Smith, owner of Bungee International,
a Shanghai company that specializes in extreme
rides design and construction. "After that, I saw
that to make a living in this industry was going
to be a charitable effort from my passion, and not
a means to own a car, so I diverted [my] efforts
into the amusement park industry and land
development.
"There is a perceived image
[that extreme sports] is big because of the media,
attention, advertisements and the eye-catching
properties of what it is," says Smith, whose
company built mainland China's first bungee tower
in 1995. "A few years ago there were many
rock-climbing places opening, bungee sites going
up, roller-blade teams forming, skate parks
opening, and mountain bike sales but I haven't
seen more openings these last couple of years.
Many of those businesses failed."
Over the
past 10 years, China has seen a bit of everything:
cliff climbing, mountaineering, off-road biking,
skateboarding, surfing, bungee jumping and various
snow-based sports. Three Chinese magazines cover
extreme sports. The Shanghai X Games drew 200
athletes and 20,000 fans, the state-owned Shanghai
Star newspaper reported.
Businesses that
sell equipment or organize trips can make money.
Extreme Experience, a 600 square-meter,
half-year-old Beijing outdoor gear store owned by
a developer who has trekked to the North Pole,
organizes everything-included weekend rock
climbing trips for 200 to 300 yuan to the Beijing
suburbs and summer trips to Tibet.
Gear for
sale includes 880-yuan ice axes, boots for 1,600
yuan and Everest tents for more than 2,000 yuan.
Extreme Experience, which also sells memberships
to an in-store climbing wall and offers diver
training in a seven-meter-deep tank, plans to add
1,400 square meters of additional space by early
2006. The shop competes with smaller stores that
have more branches in better Beijing locations.
"Extreme sports have a future," says
Suyileitu Wenhua, the assistant club manager. He
says the relatively wealthy cities of Beijing,
Guangzhou and Shanghai show the most promise:
"After [former leader] Deng Xiaoping, there have
been lots of changes. But you won't see it in
smaller cities. For the most part, people there
are dealing with basic subsistence issues."
Trip organizers must also offer added-cost
bus rides to accommodate the general lack of
private cars and preferences for group over
individual activities. The eight-year-old Beijing
Flying-Man Club, for example, takes some of its
200 members and three coaches out for weekly
paragliding and microlight aircraft flying lessons
in the Beijing suburb of Changping. The club
charges 2,100 yuan for eight hours of coaching,
equipment usage and transportation, said club
marketing assistant. Members pay, he said, because
"lots of people like the feeling of flying".
Mountain biking tours also begin with a
group bus ride, said Paul Stepanek, owner of Bohdi
Bikes, a mountain bike store and tour organizer
founded in Shanghai seven years ago. Bohdi takes
busloads of 30 cyclists to rural Shanghai and
adjacent provinces for trips. The company competes
with name-brand mountain bike shops in major
cities. The fat-tire business has "grown but not
exploded" and remains "too small to be
significant," Stepanek says. "[Most customers] are
guys on the bleeding edge - mavens and
white-collar types wondering what to do on the
weekend."
Official statistics say urban
Chinese earned an average of 9,422 yuan per year
in 2004, while rural people earned 2,936 yuan. But
Ma Wenjie, a purchasing manager at TGI Friday's in
Beijing, spent 6,000 yuan on transportation,
lodging and legal fees, after buying equipment, to
hike 6,500 meters up Mount Everest on a weeklong
volunteer trash-pickup mission. She scaled the
mountain in 2002 at her own expense, despite
safety warnings from family and friends, because
that year she had enough money. "When my friends
saw the photos, they wanted to go, too," Ma Wenjie
said. "Everest is a special place. It's the
world's highest mountain. It's got a lot of
appeal."
Ralph Jennings is a
Beijing-based foreign correspondent.
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