The Change Mariner

Parkour: The New Extreme Sport

New York Times:

Parkour developed 16 years ago in the suburbs of Paris when sneaker-clad teenagers began navigating public spaces as skateboarders might, but without the skateboards. (The name comes from "parcours," French for circuit or course.) From Paris it made its way to England, and then as far as Finland and Singapore. Using moves from gymnastics and martial arts and a name, traceur, that evokes tracer bullets and radioactive isotopes, parkourists tear through urban landscapes using obstacles like walls, ledges and stairs as springboards and catapults -- rarely with any safety equipment. It might look effortless, but it takes months just to master the proper way of rolling out of a jump.

The sport first crept into American homes in the past couple of years in commercials for Nike and Toyota's racy Scion. The ads featured French traceurs bounding balletically through urban landscapes and referred to the sport as freerunning, from the term adopted in England when the sport took hold there.

But the spread of parkour into the woods of Georgia and the deserts of Arizona occurred almost entirely through the boundlessness of Internet message boards, where traceurs (pronounced TRAY-sers in American English) post videos and photographs of themselves and rate local parkour sites.

Posted by Bob King at March 29, 2004 05:23 PM | TrackBack
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