Dramatic footage of Australian student Erin Langworthy bungee jumping from a bridge high above the Zambezi only for the cord holding her to snap – which results in the 22-year-old plunging headlong into the raging waters below – has been the internet’s star attraction lately.

It is a truly remarkable, gut-wrenching video, already viewed by tens of thousands of people. Death appears certain but, miraculously, Ms Langworthy escapes with her life, suffering only a broken collarbone and some minor cuts and bruises.

Since time immemorial, 22-year-olds have embarked on crazy assignments, done stupid things.

In one respect, therefore, there’s nothing unusual, per sé, in a young woman wanting to dive off a towering African bridge held only by a piece of frayed elastic.

In another, however, Ms Langworthy’s miraculous escape has catapulted (if that’s the correct word) ‘extreme sports’ into an international spotlight, raising its collective profile even higher.

According to Rob Burton, a lecturer at Southampton Solent University, where students may now study ‘Extreme Sport Management’, the steady rise of extreme sports has gone hand-in-glove with the corresponding growth of the internet, although it is increasingly becoming mainstream.

“We are seeing a lot more extreme sports through mainstream media – for example, ski cross at the Winter Olympics, or BMX at this year’s Olympics,” says Mr Burton.

However, another explanation for extreme sports’ burgeoning popularity is also laden with the richest irony: the UK’s increasingly ridiculous preoccupation with health and safety.

“Society is becoming a lot more risk averse and because of that people are looking for alternative ways to find those risky situations,” maintains Mr Burton. “People want their thrills, but they want to walk away with their limbs intact.”

It was only a couple of decades ago that most Britons were first introduced to the notion that sport’s traditional parameters were considerably more pliable than we had originally believed.

In the late 1970s, winter was for football and rugby, while summer was a time for cricket, athletics, a smidgeon of golf and our perennial search for a home-grown Wimbledon winner.

Superstars may have been only slightly less contrived than professional wrestling (though the hairstyles were similar), but the popular TV series presented a generation nurtured on sporting staples with the-then novel idea that a competition involving several unusual sporting disciplines spread over a number of days, could, unlike the decathlon, enjoy mainstream appeal.

Of course, ‘extreme’ sports were first established a century before Kevin Keegan’s bubble perm invaded our pitifully small TV screens in Superstars.

And, as might be expected, the first significant development of non-mainstream sport evolved from a combination of economic necessity and the preparedness of an entrepreneur to take a risk.

In September 1864, Johannes Badrutt, an hotelier based in St Moritz, suggested to four of his British summer guests that should they return in winter and find the town not to their liking, he would pay for the cost of their return journey.

Badrutt’s risk was limited: he was anxious to develop his winter trade and, if his guests returned, he was convinced they would enjoy the Alpine air.

His hunch proved accurate and he was saved his guests’ travel expenses; indeed, it could be argued that Badrutt invented winter tourism as Switzerland‘s first tourist office opened in the town in the same year.

In his excellent book, Sport & the English Middle Class 1870-1914, John Loweson describes how British visitors to St Moritz helped develop a range of ‘new’ sports, including the famous bobsleigh Cresta run, skiing and mountaineering.

The town’s Winter Sports Club, which boasted “the elective advantages of an English club” for 10/6 (52.5p) a year, even had its own ‘Who’s Who’, which, as Loweson points out, ensured members “would meet only their own sort in the Alps.”

Despite such overt displays of snobbishness, many of St Moritz’s initial visitors could be rightly called the first ‘adrenaline junkies’.