PHILADELPHIA (KRT) – As the videotape opens, mountain biker Josh Bender is hurtling downhill toward a dirt-and-rock ramp, his launching point for a spectacular 30-foot drop.

His takeoff is smooth, his milliseconds of airtime seeming to last forever. But his landing goes badly.

Bender bounces hard. The back wheel of his bike comes up, pitching him forward and forcing his arms down on the handlebars.

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Bender’s helmet makes it impossible to see his face, but it’s easy to imagine that his jaws are clenched in grim anticipation. Or else they’re split wide apart, emitting the scream that foreshadows what’s to come.

He vanishes behind a screen of trees and spectators. When he emerges a split second later he’s on the ground, barreling down the mountain on his chest while his bike turns mad cartwheels above him. He slides to a stop in the middle of a road, trailing a cloud of white dust.

Pain isn’t just for the old, the decrepit and the dying. Pain is for the young, the athletic, people who hurt not because their bodies are worn out, but because they’re being pushed to the limit.

McNeil is setting out to position its flagship product, Tylenol, as the pain reliever of choice for people who embrace ache and injury as their personal badge of honor:Mountain bikers. Skateboarders. Break-dancers. Surfers. Snowboarders.

Counterintuitive? Absolutely. Most people don’t seek pain – they seek release from it. But company executives believe there’s a whole group of young, able-bodied enthusiasts out there for whom pain is proof of their devotion, a natural byproduct of everything they love and believe in.

And the execs may be right.

Despite its astonishing imagery, mountain biker Bender’s fall is atypical only in its degree. Extreme-sports Web sites routinely post pictures and videos of horrendous crashes, along with after-the-fall shots of skateboarders and bikers proudly posing with their broken fingers, fractured ankles and legs skinned to the bone. Thrasher magazine runs a regular feature called the Hall of Meat:photos of skateboarders showing off their gashed heads and severed fingers.

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“This group is a group of very active – I won’t say thrill-seeking, but adventuresome,” says John McDonagh, Tylenol’s director of marketing. “They avoided pain relievers.”

Now Tylenol is beginning to market directly to this fearless 18-to-23-year-old age group, spreading its message at what it calls “pain places.” Those include gyms and trainers’ rooms, but also BMX, skateboarding and extreme-sports competitions and championships. It has built a new skate park in Brooklyn, and signed up a team of “pain partners” who include surfer Joel Tudor, BMX biker Dave Young, break-dancer Asia One and skateboarder Tony Trujillo. Its new Web site, www.ouchthewebsite.com, features an aptly titled photo montage called “Little Scars” and a column titled “The Bleeding Edge.”

“One of the fears with something like this is, is it going to make sense?” McDonagh says. “This is not ‘Launch it today and watch your sales go up.’ I think it’s going to be some time before you see sales impact.”

There’s a big potential drawback to trying to position pain as hip, young and desirable, and it boils down to these five words:Pain can hurt like hell.

Pain isn’t something people want. It’s something they want to go away.

Margaret Campbell, who studies consumer behavior at the University of Colorado, thinks Tylenol has hit on a winning strategy.

The company has been moving its product steadily down the age chart, broadening its use from the elderly to the middle-aged, she says. Its commercials often feature people who just need a little relief after exercise or gardening. So going after extreme-sports devotees is the next logical step.

“It’s just such a natural extension of the baby boomer jogging to the Gen-Xer skateboarding,” says Campbell, a marketing professor. “They say, ‘You have these activities you want to do, and we can help you do that.’ … It’s a very consistent and I think very reasonable attempt to expand the market.”

You may have missed this:Dippity-Do, the tired, 1960s-era hair goo favored by your dowdy, dateless older sister, is now a trendy styling gel for men.

It’s true. Dippity-Do underwent a sex change two years ago.

Gone are the small round tubs of pink goop. In their place are phallic bottles of cobalt blue. Dippity-Do now sponsors the Summer X Games, as rough-and-tumble a competition as can be found.

The transformation occurred when the maker of Dippity-Do discovered that hair-styling products had become the fastest-growing segment of the men’s personal-care market, sales up 5 percent a year since the late 1990s. And men were increasingly driving overall gel sales.

Put those two trends together, and, voila – Dippity-Do becomes Dippity-Do Sport.

It’s what the business-school types call “repositioning.”

To the cynic, repositioning represents a company’s attempt to squeeze out a few more bucks by persuading people that a weary old product is actually new and different. To the optimist, repositioning is a sincere effort to find a new market for a good product, to revive a trusty brand by finding it a new niche.

What Tylenol is doing is a little different – moving its brand into what McDonagh and his colleagues call “white space,” a previously unnoticed and untapped market.

Plainly Tylenol is in search of new buyers. Its tablet sales slumped 8.2 percent in the last year, and its revenue fell 8.5 percent, according to IRI. (The analyst’s figures do not include sales at Wal-Mart stores.)

And whether the tactic is called repositioning or searching for white space, it’s a proven business strategy, coaxed forward by overt techniques such as celebrity endorsements and subtler methods such as name and packaging changes.

“The important thing in repositioning is they don’t start new,” says Anthony Fortini, who teaches business at Camden County College in New Jersey. “They take what worked for them before and tweak it. It’s a way for a company to take a product, dust it off a little bit and get back into the game.”

Will it work? Or is the extreme-sports set too media-savvy to credit such an obvious play for their devotion and their dollars?

New York filmmaker Coan Nichols, whose movies celebrate skateboarding, says the kids he knows are intimately familiar with the wiles of corporate America. But they’re also realists. And so is he.

He’s accepted Tylenol’s help in promoting the movies he makes with Rick Charnoski through their company, NCP Films. People can download a clip of their new film, Northwest, from the Ouch Web site.

In a perfect world, Nichols says, he wouldn’t need a sponsor. In the real world, it’s often a choice between making a movie – or not.

He does believe that companies that earn money from a particular sport or culture have a responsibility to offer their financial support in return, and he thinks Tylenol is doing that.

“They’re saying, ‘We support what you’re doing, so support us,’ ” Nichols says. “You’re going to take a pain reliever, so why not take the one that’s building you a skate park in New York? Or that’s helping the guys who are making films about skateboarding?”