Airborne Sports > Articles > Don’t try this at home

We’ve all seen the BBC advert: human spider-bloke, muscles rippling beneath his glistening, bare skin like walnuts stuffed in a condom, summersaults adroitly between tower blocks, scales 50-ft buildings and frog leaps obstacles in order to make it home for a spot of telly. The ad, starring French urban acrobat David Belle, was the water-cooler topic of the summer, generating accusations of computer trickery and palpitating moral opprobrium from the Daily Hell readership, who warned of copycat yoots scattered across suburban pavements like broken plates.

But, to devotees of the sport/art form/ life philosophy known in France as le parkour, or obstacle-coursing, the ad’s depiction of a TV left on standby was more reckless than any of David Belle’s daredevil antics. The 28-year-old Belle, who claims never to have been seriously injured, is credited with having invented parkour 15 years ago, when he and friend Sebastian Foucan reclaimed the grey urban tundra of the Parisian suburbs as a concrete playground. The two lithe, fearless teenagers led a gang of ‘parkouristes’ known as the ‘Yamakasi’, who combined their addiction to adrenaline with study of the philosophies of the brick-breaking Shaolin monks, who famously perform super-human feats of endurance by harnessing the powers of the mind. The Yamakasi went on to find fame in 2001 as the stars of the eponymous Luc-Besson-directed film. By this point however, and typically of a burgeoning urban culture, Belle had left the crew, claiming to be disillusioned by their commercialisation of the sport – somewhat incongruously in light of his recent work for the BBC and corporate giants US Nike.

As parkour’s founders endlessly play out their courting ritual with the youth brand money-men, keen to cash in on the parkouristes’ ‘cool’ quotient, their sky-leaping legacy spreads across the globe like a triple-x virus in cyberspace. Ross and Baz are two Bristol Business Studies undergraduates who have cultivated their own, less dramatic version of the trend and coined it ‘Urban Street Running’.

‘We started as a few mates going out jumping over stuff after a few drinks. We enjoyed it so we started doing it sober. I’ve always been into rock climbing and breakdancing, so this seems to be a natural extension. My non-running mates think I’m a bit mad, but I’m sure they thought that before.’

Exponents of the sporting branch of parkour, and concerned mainly with testing their testosterone-charged physical limits, the Urban Street Runners are dismissive of the existential and philosophical precepts of French parkour ‘People believe what they want, don’t they? Some people might call it freedom of expression, but we’re competitive, it’s a challenge.’ Not so for the Saiyan clan, a group of Barnet-born teenagers attempting to gain acceptance as the first true British parkouristes. Cable, the group’s founder and spiritual leader, speaks in a US-inflected drawl, stumbling over his words with raw excitement as he attempts to explain the Saiyan clan’s raison d’être.

‘Society looks upon what we do as a bad thing, but they built up this concrete jungle around us. Concrete, roofs, whatever. And we’re told we can only walk in a certain way, we can only move in a certain way. Mankind has struggled for centuries to be free. The pursuit of parkour for us is a pursuit of freedom. The first big high I got from parkour was when I was sitting on arooftop in central London. A pigeon sat with us. We were where the birds were and I suddenly felt free.’

Formerly a graffiti writer ‘before I got into a spot of bother’, Cable claims to see links between the two illicit cultures in their attempts to reclaim urban space and their sense of belonging to a secret brotherhood. The Saiyan practise every day in their childhood stamping ground Barnet, or in central London, where increased risks increase the kick. Blake, the Marshall Arts fanatic amongst the Saiyan crew, remembers a couple of close shaves with the central London police force, who are baffled by a group of energetic young lads clambering around rooftops without aerosols or any obvious evidence of illegal intent:.

‘We try to avoid the police as much as possible, if they look angry we’ll run. We use our parkour skills to get away. We were chased on a bus once, the bus wasn’t going very fast, it was funny’.

Cable takes the point up here: ‘Yeah, when we do get caught we have a little scam. We always bring a tennis ball with us and if we’re caught, like we were a few weeks ago, huge riot van and everything, we say we’d just gone up on the roof to collect a tennis ball. They call us ‘teenage daredevils’, they can’t understand what we’re doing.’

The police aren’t the only ones attempting to clamp down on the nascent trend, As parkour explodes from TV screens out onto the rain-soaked rooftops of the city landscape, detractors circle below, fearful of the risk to the milk-nourished bones of the nation’s youth. In France, where parkour has been in common consciousness for a few years, one right-wing daily notoriously dubbed the sport ‘suicide’ and, as British local papers begin to pick up on the trend, canting out ‘Spiderman copycat’ headlines, the situation begins to look bleak for the UK street leapers. Do they think that parkour’s increasing popularity inevitably leads to increased media criticism?

Cable: ‘Yes, But it’s not that we’re trying to show off. The criticism is inevitable, and understandable. If we’d just watched the BBC ad and tried to fling ourselves off the nearest roof then OK. I’ve been leaping over objects since I was young, before I even heard about the French parkour community, and my body is built up enough to pull off extremely high jumps. We didn’t start high; we’ve been working up to it for years. That would be suicide.’

Parkour, as its French originators would have us believe, is all about calculated risk, and, to the initiated, is about as dangerous as a quick trip to Sainsbury’s on the microscooter. Therefore a poorly thought-out or unsuccessful jump is antithetical to the ethos of parkour: the humility of man in response to his environment and, importantly, knowing your body’s limits. The long-serving French Traceur and Yamakasi clans are scathing bout those who sustain injury in pursuit of parkour, particularly their Johnny-come-lately British parkour cousins, comments one member: ‘They say they are skilled but no-one practising parkour will ever say that. Any fool can jump from one roof to another but will he know if he’s really capable of doing it? A beginner must understand that in parkour, his body is his tool, so there is no room for kamikaze-type moves. parkour is the total opposite of madness.’ I asked the British parkour crews if they’d honestly ever injured themselves.

Cable: ‘Only in trying to overdo myself. I learnt my limits. I’ve dislocated my left arm once, my knee three times, almost electrocuted myself jumping between platforms at Golders Green tube station. I learnt my lesson, you know. And when you have to go to hospital you can’t exactly say ‘I was doing parkour’, we don’t want it to get a bad name.’

Despite the middle-England-baiting hi-jinks and occasional physical scrapes these latter-day spidermen should be championed as an example of human nature crying out against the claustrophobic strictures of modern times, rather than being vilified as a threat to the nation’s youth. A youth who are, let’s face it, capable of watching endless acts of TV violence without heading down to the local mall for a gun-happy shooting spree. As globalisation – once hailed as the force which would break down world barriers, leaving a happy, prosperous, communicating world in its wake – threatens to choke urban dwellers in a gagging concrete garrotte, masquerading as verdant consumer choice, the parkouristes are truly reclaiming the streets. They’re kicking through the fences and artillery of a repressive urban façade. As Naomi Klein puts it: ‘Maybe it’s Thai peasants planting organic vegetables on over-irrigated golf courses, students kicking ads out of their classrooms or swapping music online… These are postcards from dramatic moments in time, the first chapter in a very old and recurring story, the one about people pushing up against the barriers that try to contain them, opening windows, breathing deeply, tasting freedom.’

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