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Why Walk When You Can Parkour?

By Elina Beketova, Ukraine

A new urban extreme sport called Parkour is getting a bounce from the most unlikely places. Featured in the upcoming James Bond film (due out later this year), parkour is also getting celebrity attention from Madonna who has adopted some of its basic gymnastic moves to her fitness routine. But parkour is also growing in popularity among young people in Eastern and Western Europe who are trying its death-defying moves.

Parkour comes from France where gurus David Belle and Sebastien Foucan started this sports craze. Using city landscapes as the gym, tracers (those who participate in the sport) are like spider-men scaling city buildings, jumping from rooftop to rooftop in a single bound, rebounding off building facades like rubber balls, and swinging one-handed from atop ledges many floors above the ground.

Not a sport for the queasy, the fearful, or those who suffer from vertigo, it can be said that parkour builds strong bodies in ways other sports can't, relying primarily on skills in gymnastics and sheer guts.

"It is like the scream, the call of heart," said 19-year-old Denis from Kharkov (Ukraine). "I can see a big building or another obstacle and understand how to overcome it exactly. It's about developing persistence, having a purpose, and trying to achieve it. All that came to me after watching movies, like Jamakaski."

Loosely translated from French as stripe of obstacles, parkour has achieved dizzying heights. It has been popularized on French TV, on sports programs like Stade 2, and even featured in a French musical, Notre Dame de Paris.

Parkour came to Ukraine several years ago and since then young people like Denis, Zhenya, and Lesha have been obstacle-coursing, building muscles in ways they couldn't imagine. Training for parkour is hard. "You need to prepare your body for an important deal," Lesha said. That's why novices to the sport start with simple gymnastic exercises. "It's an art form," said Denis. "Skills achieved in other sports like martial arts and track-and-field can be useful to parkour."

Zhenya and Lesha smile. They know exactly what he is talking about. Not so long ago they tried to jump from one building to another but angry dogs below were not entertained. They didn't want trespassers on their turf. "At that moment we had to be very athletic in order to get from A to B very fast," they said.

Parkour is a serious sport and not for clowning around. "Life is short and [parkour] intensifies all of the senses," said Zhenya. "Fear is not part of the equation. You can't be afraid of heights, or it will ruin you. If you think something bad will happen, it will."

There are dangers to the sport - and tracers have been mistaken for thieves. Recently Denis was picked up by the police as he was about to climb the walls to the roof of the prosecutor's public office building in Kharkov. "I spent several hours in the police station explaining that it was just the extreme sport, and nothing else," recalls Denis. "The [police] looked at me very suspiciously and were not particularly friendly... I promised that I would never come closer than 200 meters to public offices in the future and they allowed me to go. Tracers must respect the town, its buildings and the people living there." Nonetheless, the sport is stealing the hearts of young people who continue to discover new ways to defy gravity.