LE PARKOUR URBAN SPORT
April 27, 2008
While watching the feel good show this week, we were introduced to a new urban sport that’s spreading rapidly among young adults across the globe.
Le Parkour (pronounced Lay Par Core), or the Art of Movement is a sport that is basically flipping and jumping off stuff. It incorporates jumps, flips, rolls, and scaling walls to navigate an obstacle course. The obstacle course being the concrete jungle.
It’s a pretty interesting sport that will gain exposure from being on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and we expect many kids to be following this new urban sport. We can definitely see a culture building around it including an effect on the clothing of the participants of this sport. We suspect that many would be fans of the rapidly evolving streetwear market.
You can read more about Le Parkour here and here. (The articles are dated so this thing’s been around for a minute.)
And here’s a Le Parkour video.
Parkour does not have flips, and is not a sport. Parkour is the art of efficient movement and because flips slow you down, they are not efficient. Freerunning is the art of beautiful movement and is very similar to parkour but does not require the movements to be efficient or useful. Parkour is not a sport because it is strictly non- competitive. It is non-competitive because competition ruins the community based system that parkour has. Not to mention that it pushes people to do things that are dangerous or over their experience level. Redbull sponsored a freerunning competition last year and someone broke their leg trying to do a flip they weren’t ready for. Sadly enough they won. This is what we want to avoid, and so most Tracuers do not compete in parkour and never want to, so it cannot be called a sport. It is the art of natural and useful movement, and the most amazing thing in the world.
Thanks for the addition Julia!
You’re right in saying that it is more of an art-form than a sport!