Bristol Parkour
Parkour or free-running is an urban sport consisting of jumping off and on to things in various equally dangerous and exciting looking ways. You might have seen it in the recent James Bond film Casino Royale. It’s lesser know name is ‘l’art de deplacement’ which reveals it’s French origins. The aim of Parkour is to move from A to B as quickly as possible - no matter what is in the way. This might involves leaping over a wall or swinging from the branch of a tree.
The sport was founded by David Belle and focuses on developing efficient movements to enable your mind and body to overcome obstacles in an emergency. Parkour is founded round the philosophy that when faced with a hostile person there are three options option. To talk, to fight, to flee. Parkour teaches the fleeing part.
Efficiency is important in Parkour. The traceur or traceuse, the official male and female names for a person taking part in Parkour, must follow the course in the most energy efficient and direct way possible. So if a small wall stands in the way the most direct way past it is to jump on to it and over rather than running round.
The sport isn’t confined to Paris or a movie set though. Bristol town centre has started to form it’s very own Parkour community. If you think about the locations in Bristol which have a bit of open space and plenty of things to jump off Castle Park, by Broadmead really stands out. It has walls of different sizes to be leapt on and off, stairs, trees and lamposts. You can quite frequently see groups of traceurs jumping off things in Castle Park.
There are various movements in Parkour which allow the traceur to move efficiently and directly. In Castle Park you might spot someone ‘vaulting’ a wall or doing a ‘pop vault’ where the traceur kicks off the wall to transform forward momentum in to upward momentum. Or maybe they will be doing a ’swinging jump’ where they hang or swing from a bar, wall or branch and then let go dropping to the ground or to hang from another object.