Running free - the urban craze of parkour takes off

A few years ago, parkour was an underground training method practised by a handful of teenagers. Now it ia a worldwide phenomenon that features on films and adverts. I went to a class to find out why the sport-cum-art has taken off at such speed.

Seven figures in black hoodies pursue a man across a dark and empty west-London car park. Their eyes are focused and their jaws set. The atmosphere is tense and silent
except for the pounding of their feet and their controlled but heavy breathing.

The group gains on the man as he reaches a five-foot brick wall. He is running out of space but does not slow. “Don’t think, don’t stop”, he calls in a heavily-accented voice before running up the vertical wall – up the vertical wall – briefly placing one hand on the top as a pivot and vaulting over. He hardly pauses to forward-roll before he is sprinting again. This is parkour.

The underground youth culture of parkour is about speed, agility and a focus on body over thought. The aim is to move between two points as quickly and efficiently as possible. No obstacle, whether a dustbin, a wall or a high-rise tower block, is an
object.

It looks easy as the other seven ‘traceurs’ in the class – one woman and six men – try to imitate the French instructor’s vault in canon. But as horses falter at a fence, 17-year-old Abdul and myself bottle it. Abdul reprimands himself with two pull-ups and we run around the car park wall to catch up with the rest of the group. He has only ever tried his sprint-leap-sprint skills indoors and I am a total
beginner at one of London’s four outdoorparkour schools.

Until the late 90s, parkour was an insular, self-taught underground culture. Young people on council estates would precede or emulate Hollywood legends like James Bond and Jason Bourne, whose directors had borrowed action moves from real-life parkour in the first place.

Now parkour classes are making the growing art form more accessible. The only prerequisites are a hoody, comfortable trainers and a decent level of fitness. Don’t take a handbag as I did – there is nowhere to put it down – and do be on time.

It was 7.03pm when I arrived, already breathless, at Latimer Road tube station. The parkour class I had signed up to online was already a blur at the end of the road. This art is all about discipline.

The following hour was also a blur. Johann, the Parisian who set up a parkour organisation a year ago, explained that this is the way it should be: “Think in advance but don’t think when you’re just about to do a move. Clear your head or you’ll get scared and fail.” So that’s where Abdul and I went wrong.

Jordan, a traceur with muscles that bulge against his tracksuit, assures us it becomes second nature after a few months. “A couple of years ago, I would see a car park barrier and think, that’s just a barrier. But you start seeing parkour possibilities everywhere – walls, posts, slopes,” he says. “At school I was crap at
football. Now I’m fit and I keep up with the best.”

On the other side of the wall – the frightening unknown – appears a quiet road perfect for practising precision jumping. For Abdul and me, this means calming our pulses while jumping on and off a high curb, keeping feet together and concentrating on balance. For Johann and the most advanced traceurs, it means standing three inches from a four-foot wall and leaping directly onto it with perfect poise.

“Keep going, keep warm,” insists Johann when anyone pauses to watch. All his instructions are brief, repetitive and to the point – like the art form that is gripping London’s teenagers.

It seems that in central London you’re never more than 10 feet from a traceur. You see them, nimble and disciplined, doing ‘three-point tic-tac wall runs’ in the recesses of the South Bank arches and feet-first ‘kong vaults’ over walls and railings on Lambeth estates.

So most pedestrians don’t even glance over as we sprint through a children’s playground and past a tube station – we both fit in with the urban landscape and give its bleak homogeny, together with any stern looks, the finger.

Even with my woefully inadequate fitness and total lack of skills, the air of action film escapism is palpable. It doesn’t matter that some of us are more comfortable in our hoodies than others – parkour is fresh, wholesome and bloody difficult for everyone, no matter how easy the pros make it look.

Leaps and bounds
Parkour gained its name – a corruption of the French term for obstacle course – in the Paris banlieues when it started as a counter to the dull slog of jogging in the 80s. Co-founder David Belle said of his ‘vision’: “You just have to look, you just have to think, like children.”
The art, combining this philosophy with gymnastics and martial arts, gathered momentum. More than 19 million YouTube surfers have watched the parkour pro Urban Ninja doing flips, vaults and sprints. Parkour has now spread to America and Europe, with four established schools in London.
But parkour comes with a health warning. Last year, a Hampshire borough councillor said he could “not think of anything more stupid than running along a roof” when a 16-year-old narrowly escaped death after plunging 70 feet from a Woolworths building. Parkour Generations advises beginners to start slow, stay low.