Man who invented parkour

The challenge had to completed at least 10 times in a row by a traceur without injury, in order for it to be deemed a success. Then all members had to also compete the movement. If a mistake was made by a traceur, then the whole group had to begin again.

New members could only join if they were recommended by an existing member and then pass tests that not only included physical strength in but principles too. Members could vote to kick out those who did not follow the principles and values that were established. Complete trust in the group was essential along with respect and humility.

To watch parkour, many see an influence of martial arts and think of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. David Belle did spend 3 months studying in India kung fu. The philosophy of parkour is similar to martial arts but parkour is non-combative. This became the beginning of several changes to the group. First, the group named themselves Yamakasi, sometimes spelt Yamakazi. Many members also believed that the performance did not demonstrate all aspects of their discipline such as their values and ethics.

Pierre on the Caribbean island of Martinique, killing some 28, individuals in a flash. A young, French naval lieutenant, George Hebert valiantly coordinated the evacuation of over people, both indigenous and European, from the outskirts of the town. The experience had a profound effect on him. For as he watched people move in those crucial first moments, it seemed that the indigenous people overcame the obstacles in their path with grace and creativity, while the Europeans moved badly, searching for familiar pathways, which now no longer existed.

Traveling extensively, Hebert continued to be impressed by the physical development and movement skills of indigenous peoples in Africa and elsewhere. As the first organized group of traceurs, the Yamikazi began to develop a following in France that included filmmaker Luc Besson. He lives in an apartment in a rambling house with two roommates. We sat in the living room. Ford said that he discovered parkour on the Internet toward the end of his junior year in high school, in Golden, Colorado.

He wanted to learn how to run up to a wall, plant his foot on it, and do a backflip. Looking for instructions, he found images of David Belle, among others. In the fall, he quit the football team, on which he was a wide receiver, to pursue parkour.

You get down on the ground first and practice your rolls, then maybe you find something three feet high to launch yourself from. When you can do something correctly a hundred times out of a hundred, you increase your task. If you feel confident. People wonder how David Belle can leap between buildings and fall thirty feet. He started low and built up the difficulty. It was a warm day, and the windows were open. We heard a dog bark, and a woman tell it to stop.

When I see a skilled traceur , I admire the dedication and the mental strength. There are some people who just have superior physical ability, but there are no secret techniques in parkour.

Some people can master fear. Other people might have more determination and, in the end, accomplish more things. I see myself fuelled more by determination than by the ease of putting fear in the back of my mind. Then he frowned. True parkour is hardly ever done. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. A man must constantly exceed his level. The next morning, I drove to Denver with Ford; his girlfriend, Kathryn Keller, who is brown-haired and petite and was a gymnast in high school but had to give it up when she hurt her back; and a tall, skinny high-school boy with freckles and a turban named Sat, whose full name is Sat Santokh Khalsa.

He had gone there for six years—he was now fifteen—and had just started Boulder High School. We drove downtown, to a small park called Skyline Park, outside a Westin hotel. Ford had invited several other traceurs to join us, and when we arrived one of them, a Russian named Nikita, was sitting beside a fountain that had been drained.

Nikita was twenty. He had shaved his blond hair, and he had a small face, avid eyes, thin lips, and a sharp nose. He was six feet two and weighed a hundred and sixty pounds. He looked like a big spider. He said that he was from Belarus. It is about twenty feet tall. Making a run toward the gap, Sat made a cat leap to one of the blocks. He was so slight that it seemed as if he had been lifted into the air by a wire.

Once he had grabbed the block, his feet slid against it as he pulled himself up. When you first start, you rely more on the equipment to hold you in place, your sneakers, then you learn to use your strength. Warming up, Nikita twisted from side to side, like a screw. Ford did a handstand but had difficulty maintaining it.

Ford walked about ten paces. I should have landed in that flower bed, but I clipped a foot and fell into the gap and hit the wall. At first, I thought I broke my collarbone. I also cut my head.

I drove home using one arm. While we stood looking at the wall and the flower bed, another traceur , a high-school boy named Dan Mancini, came walking across the plaza. He was tall and thin, with brown hair, and wore a T-shirt and jeans. We watched him pace off a ten-foot gap from the border to the fountain, then approach it at a run.

Ford got a video camera from his knapsack. He stood on a block beside the one Nikita was attempting to surmount and filmed Nikita as he came rushing forward, leaped into the air, and struck the block feet first, like a hawk, then grabbed the edge and pulled himself to the top. They grew tired of the fountain shortly and began hoisting themselves onto a railing a few feet above the ground and walking along it on all fours: a maneuver called a cat balance or a cat walk.

The railing framed three sides of a rectangle. The longest section was about thirty feet. Nikita shook his head. Technically it is known as a freerunning competition because it features the more acrobatic and stylish aspects of freerunning. But many parkour athletes consider freerunning to be a style of parkour and not separate from it. It was mostly being featured in films, documentaries and adverts with the best parkour athletes showcasing the best parkour had to offer.

This is one of the reasons parkour went from being a discipline to an action sport with a similar culture to skateboarding. As more and more parkour athletes shared videos on YouTube many more people would be inspired to start doing parkour and share their videos as well.

Parkour reached its peak in terms of popularity in the mid to late s when it was being featured in many films and ads. It slowly started to lose a lot of its mainstream popularity after and is not as big as it once was. Parkour athletes are continuing to innovate in the sport and coming up with new parkour moves to do and learn.

FIG the International Gymnastics Federation even added parkour as part of the sports that they cover due to its popularity. Most parkour athletes rejected the idea of parkour being considered a gymnastics discipline because of the differences between parkour and gymnastics.

There were talks of parkour being added to the Paris Summer Olympics but the application to add it to the Olympic program was rejected after Parkour Earth fought against it. Your email address will not be published.