Al Gosling

Founder and chief executive The Extreme Group

Since becoming passionate about extreme sports as a teen, Al Gosling (1998) had the vision to create and launch the world’s first TV channel dedicated to extreme sports. Entitled the Extreme Sports Channel, the goal was to launch a 24/7 TV channel broadcasting these sports worldwide via satellite to an underserved audience.  The channel is now broadcasting to more than 38 million homes across 60 countries in 12 languages.

In 2002, Al launched extremepie.com which is now Europe's leading online and mail-order surf, skate and snow shop.  The same year, Extreme Publishing was established as a joint initiative.  Boardsports Source magazine was launched — an extreme sports trade magazine.  In 2003, Extreme Drinks launched with a completely natural range of ‘functional’ drinks.  In 2004, Extreme bought Legends, a high street surf shop chain of 22 shops, which had run into some trouble.  2005 was also a very busy year with the launch of the first Ex Stores and the re-branding of the old Legends stores.  The group also announced the plan to launch Europe’s first youth focused mobile phone network Extreme Mob, an MVNO in partnership with Vodafone.  Additionally, Extreme Entertainment was merged with Media action sports to create SMT a new B2B Sports TV distribution and sports marketing company. 

As well as these businesses the Extreme brand has grown to incorporate Ex Travel - a one-stop shop for all your travel needs, Extreme Hotels which opened its first hotel in Cape Town, the first ‘Real Time Live’ site on the planet, which offers access to the lifestyle and social networks associated with extreme sports and Extreme Cred - the revolutionary pre pay card biz which works like your pre pay Mobile phone top up card but you use it like a credit card as well as many more.