Parkour
Parkour is a mostly urban sport of treating the city as your own personal jungle gym. It was founded by David Belle in France, who got his inspiration from his father’s military obstacle courses. I heard about it for the first time from Annemone and have spent a while collecting a few good videos, which you’ll find after the jump.
This BBC ad is one of the things that started getting Parkour on the map.
I could swear I’ve linked this one before but couldn’t find it. Then again I didn’t search too hard. It’s an amazing chase scene…
This one has footage from the first video mixed in with someone elses footage. Nice additions.
This one has irritating music and some repeat footage, but still the new stuff is good.
I don’t know if this is Parkour, but this guy is the flippingest dude I’ve seen in a long time!
Look! Even the ladies get into this sort of thing!
These guys are just showing off, though some of this is pretty frighteningly cool. I wish I were this stupid.
For those people in the San Francisco area there’s even a local group doing Parkour (SF Parkour), and more for California in general (PK Cali). Cincinnati has a Meetup.com group, and there are tons more out there for those that are interested in trying this out yourselves.
Whew. Enough for one day.
April 20th, 2006 at 3:40 pm
I’ve heard of this sort of thing, but never actually seen it. The flips and such are pretty cool, but I’d be more into the straight climbing. Man, how I wish I had the time and the physical strength and endurance to do this sort of thing!
I just hope my daughter never finds out about this — she’d be a natural.
here’s one more I found a bit ago on Google: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=515642196227308929&pl=true
April 20th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
That is a pretty amazing video you found! I think I actually like that one better than most of the rest I’ve seen. It’s well produced, but not over the top and you can see the guy actually doing some of the stuff as opposed to some of the others that are mangled in editing.
And I wish I had the strength and stamina, too…
June 11th, 2006 at 9:30 pm
[...] The plot isn’t terribly complex but the action is amazing. Mr. Raffaelli is a master stunt coordinator and Mr. Belle and his Parkour is simply stunning. Like his many asian counterparts like Jackie Chan and Tony Jaa, Mr. Belle has no need of strings or nets when he leaps from building to building, runs up buildings or does insane flips in impossible spaces. Just watch this introduction to Leïto (there are more videos here). [...]
November 14th, 2006 at 8:43 pm
Apparently, Sebastien Foucan will be playing James Bond’s nemesis - or one of them, anyway - in Casino Royale. He and Daniel Craig (the new Bond) will be doing some parkour in the film. Excellent!
Less excellent (but still entertaining) was the parkour music video I saw at some random pub in Edinburgh last week. Parkour+bad Eurodisco+several pints of Tennants lager=just…well, odd.