Robert Bosch, Extreme Photographer

The origin of the divergence of the term "extreme sports" from "sports" may date to the 1950s in the appearance of a phrase usually, but wrongly, attributed to Ernest Hemingway. The phrase is
"There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games."
The implication of the phrase was that the word "sport" defined an activity in which one might be killed. The other activities being termed "games". The phrase may have been invented by either writer Barnaby Conrad or automotive author Ken Purdy.
In recent decades the term extreme sport was further promoted by X Games, a multi-sport event created and developed by ESPN. The first X Games (known as 1995 Extreme Games) were held in Newport, Providence, Mount Snow, and Vermont in the United States.