Gen-Xers Do Tricks On Water Wakeboarding Latest Hip Sport Pairing Excitement With Glamor

Balance yourself.

Now imagine slicing through a speedboat’s wake at a brisk 22 mph with your feet strapped to a five-pound board.

Too easy? Try a midair somersault.

“It’s not hard to get the itch,” warns Greg Nelson, 24, an artist on the water. “With wakeboarding, you’re going to catch that bug the first time.”

Call it an epidemic. Fed in part by the explosion in popularity of wakeboarding, extreme water sports like bodyboarding and barefoot water-ski jumping are making waves from coast to coast.

“This stuff is more exciting,” says Mike Stewart, 34, a 10-time world bodyboarding champion, whose own sport requires lying flat on a board and negotiating swells. “It’s a shift in perception of what sport is and what sport has to be.”

And it doesn’t hurt that the pioneers in these sports are athletes who are so attractive that they’re spinning off careers into TV and fashion.

“This is an exciting time to be an athlete based on the water,” says Lisa L. Hickman of MKM, an industry marketing firm. “Surfers are already gaining recognition as marquee stars. Wakeboarders are going to be next.”

Dubbed the fastest-growing sport on the water, wakeboarding emerged a decade ago, combining elements of water skiing and skateboarding. Competitors zip across wakes left by a speedboat, keeping the tow rope taut enough to launch themselves up to 40 feet into the air, where they spin, flip and perform stomach-turning tricks.

“It’s in the public’s eye,” Nelson says. “In the seven or eight years I’ve been riding, this is the first year where I truly believe that wakeboarding is its own thing. It’s about time.”

It’s also about money.

Since the first professional wakeboarding competition in 1992, the splashy sport has launched a clutch of magazines, hours of TV coverage, dozens of big money contests and, most importantly, the interest of corporate sponsors.

“I could probably list 15 guys who make a decent living wakeboarding,” says Nelson, one of 30 under pro contracts by sponsors and the first pro rider to start his own wakeboard company, Double UP. “And then there’s a big bunch of other guys trying to get to that point who are living a good life.”

The good life? Doing a 360-degree flip over a lake is lucrative?

“Oh, yeah,” says Andrea Gaytan, 26, a four-time world wakeboard champion and world record-holder. “The image of the sport has really changed and that’s because of the professionalism of a core group of riders.”

Wakeboards account for 20 percent of the water ski market, a sizable chunk considering there are 30 million water skiers worldwide. Bodyboarder numbers have been put at more than 2.5 million Americans, a double-digit increase from 1996.