Red Bull might be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of action sports nowadays. Still, long before energy drinks became synonymous with extreme sports and death-defying stunts, Reebok was already pushing the boundaries of what athletic marketing could be. In the early 1990s, while most sneaker brands were content with basketball courts and running tracks, Reebok took its cameras to the sky in a way that I think was way ahead of its time.
“Life Is Short. Play Hard.”
This simple yet powerful slogan became Reebok’s battle cry in the early 1990s, capturing an attitude that would define extreme sports marketing for decades to come. But this wasn’t just another tagline, it was a philosophy that Reebok backed up with some of the most audacious advertising ever conceived. Remember, there was no Red Bull or GoPro back then.
One of my favorite commercials from the era of this campaign featured French skydiver Patrick de Gayardon, a pioneer who was redefining what it meant to fall from the sky. In 1991, de Gayardon, along with Patrick Passe and Didier Lafond (who deserves his own sneaker-related deep dive), created a groundbreaking Reebok commercial using a special board made of carbon fiber. The ad was revolutionary not just for its imagery, but for its sheer ambition.
Seeing Patrick de Gayardon on a snowy mountain strapping on a pair of Reebok Pump SXT II Cross Trainers to his snowboard and surfing the sky seems absurd, even if you saw something similar today. In 1990, a whopping thirty-five years ago, Reebok filmed their Cross Trainer SXT shoes on de Gayardon’s feet while he plummeted through the clouds, pioneering the sport that would later be called skysurfing (a fun rabbit hole on “skysurfing”).
De Gayardon wasn’t just any extreme athlete; he was a French skydiver, skysurfer, and BASE jumper famous for pushing the boundaries of skydiving and opening the eyes of viewers around the world to completely new ideas. I think this commercial introduced the idea of sky surfing to the American public. At least for me, as a kid, it was something I had never even imagined before. At a time when extreme sports were still underground, Reebok was broadcasting images of a man snowboarding through the sky to millions of television viewers. The audacity was breathtaking in every sense of the word.
Like most of the risk-takers who brought attention to sports like skysurfing, de Gayardon tragically fell to his death in Hawaii in 1998 during a skydive while testing a modification to his parachute container. But his legacy and Reebok’s bold vision helped pave the way for the extreme sports marketing and culture that we see everywhere today.
Before energy drinks sponsored wingsuit flying, before extreme athletes were racking up billions of views across social media, before “extreme” became a marketing buzzword, there was Reebok, a camera crew, and a fearless Frenchman proving that sometimes the best way to sell shoes is to show them flying through the clouds.
Life is short. Play hard.
