> For that matter I recently revisited an extreme skiing video I bought long ago. Several of the people in the credits are dead now.

As someone who has been doing backcountry snowboarding for a long time all I can say that adrenaline is a hell of a drug and in general it’s not that hard to guess which of your friends will die (have died) doing this stuff. Avalanches just don’t care about how cool your line is.

Though nowhere near as bad as my friend who also does parachuting (wingsuits mainly these days). Once people get into base jumps and/or proximity flying end never seems to be that far away.

It's the money factor where I draw the line. It's a kind of perverse selection that the best of these athletes in extreme sports are the ones who get paid to do it, though probably just enough to scrape out a living until they age out, or die.

I'm sure there's some obscure spelunker who died in a cave, unknown to anyone but their friends. It's the commercialization of risk for entertainment that makes it icky. At some point along that curve it's OK for a civilized society to just say no, to boxing, for example.