The new skateboarding?
The trib has a somewhat interesting article on Le Parkour. Le Parkour seems to be skateboarding without the skateboard mixed with Urban Spelunking.
The wierd thing is a friend and I were just having a conversation about skateboardings continued rise to mainstream acceptance. We were postulating about what could be next for kids coming up thinking that they wouldn’t hang out with skateboarders for the same reason we wouldn’t hang out with football players…..
I’m the overly paranoid type. So my first thought was that this is some sort of made-up sport created by some lame-ass guerilla marketing company in hopes of getting more people to see Spiderman 2. Or maybe it will be just as lame as extreme pogosticking. But who knows…. It would be pretty cool to see kids running around downtown jumping off of crazy shit.
Anybody seen anybody doing frontflips between the roofs of skyscrapers?
It’s not made-up, it’s just French.
There’s a great (in terms of the stunts) and terrible (in terms of acting and story) movie called Yamasaki that’s got lots of good Parkour action.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0267129/
And here’s a Parkour news site:
http://www.urbanfreeflow.com/
It’s also British enough to have shown up in Global Frequency #6, published in the first half of 2003 (a story titled “The Run”) with a Le Parkour running over London to stop a Ebola bomber in the Millennium Eye.