Andy Cousins limbers up with a few muscle stretches and then climbs onto a concrete banister in Millennium Park. He balances on his Adidas for half a breath — and then launches into space, pinwheeling his 21-year-old body forward in a flip 10 feet off the sidewalk.
His feet touch down, and that’s as far as he gets.
A security guard appears and tells Cousins and his crew to get out of the park.
“OK, OK,” Cousins mutters.
He nods to his four friends — who call themselves the “Aero crew” — and they take off, ambling toward a plaza across the street.
It’s too bad. The new park, Cousins says, has “great topography” for parkour.
Parkour is an urban sport still unknown to most America teenagers — and security guards. An import from Europe, it’s a new way of bringing together the spring-loaded bodies of young males with stairways, park benches, the stuff of city blocks and suburban shopping malls.
Call it skateboarding, but without the skateboards — a form of extreme gymnastics that swaps parallel bars and mats for fire escapes and concrete.
The sport was invented in the late 1980s by two suburban Paris teens, Sebastien Foucan and David Belle, who began experimenting with obstacle course-style exercises taught to them by Belle’s father, who had served in the military. Parkour (pronounced par-KOOR, “like Coors beer,” Cousins says) translates roughly from the French “parcours,” or obstacle course. Parkour athletes use whatever is around them — stairways, benches, even rooftops — as obstacles and springboards to vault and jump off of in a series of moves called “runs.”
Foucan and Belle added their own techniques they borrowed from gymnastics and the martial arts. By 1997 they had a complete repertoire, which they considered an art form, “the art of movement,” as well as a band of followers, eight parkour athletes who called themselves Yamakasi (or “modern-day samurai”).
Being a French sport, it even comes with a dose of philosophy. Participants aspire to “freeflow,” or achieve a state of mind over matter in which their bodies move — flow — over any obstacle in their path from point A to point B, vaulting railings, jumping over stairwells, running along walls like Spider-Man.
“When you’re moving in this kind of way, it makes you realize the human body has no limits,” Cousins says. “You feel like you can do anything.”
In Chicago, the Aero crew is the only group doing parkour, according to the member rolls of www.urbanfreeflow.com. Urban Freeflow is a London-based group with a Web site that serves as the sport’s hub, its message board and the closest thing it has to a sanctioning body. The site was launched last year and reports 16,000 daily visits; it offers parkour instruction, has a calendar of events and keeps a roster of traceurs — as parkour athletes are known — around the world, counting 3,600 subscribers.
After getting the boot from Millennium Park, Cousins and his buddies cross Randolph Street and head for the Doral plaza on Michigan Avenue to check out the lay of that land.
Homer Azari, 18, eyes a spotlight attached to an exterior brick wall. Grinning at his own audacity, he clambers up on a nearby planter to reach it. He gives it a tug. It holds his weight. So he pulls himself up — is climbing on a spotlight trespassing? probably — until he’s balancing about 8 feet off the ground. He thinks for a moment and then he has it — his run. He hoists himself back down, takes a few fast strides and leaps from ground to planter, and then an athletic bound onto the spotlight. His feet touch just to deflect him back down to the planter, and then another bounce into a barrel roll of legs and arms.
Parkour remained little known until the documentary “Jump London,” televised in Britain last year. It showed parkour master Foucan leading a group of traceurs as they turned London landmarks into their own jungle gym, leaping from the HMS Belfast on the Thames and scaling the rooftops of the Tate Modern.
Explosion of interest
Interest in the sport “exploded,” says Paul Corkery, the founder of Urban Freeflow who is better known in the parkour world as EZ.
Hundreds of British kids began copying what they’d seen in the film and searching out his Web site. (Urban Freeflow has since been incorporated as a company and Corkery works full time promoting the sport.)
Along with it came parkour’s first wave of injuries — falls resulting in broken bones and the like, Corkery says. “You had kids going out thinking they could go out and jump off high objects. Very quickly they found out that to do so, you need to practice landings and how to roll and transfer the energy of the jump.”
Foucan, now 30 and living in the Paris suburb of Evry, tries to get at the nature of their creation and the meaning of free flow in an e-mailed interview. “It’s a mix of animal, water, and Spiderman,” he writes. “Gymnastics like track and field are a part of my Discipline but they’re a sport with rules! Not enough place for creativities! Dance is more close the way! Feeeeeel!!!”
Doing it with feeling
Parkour purists say they are worried about where they already see the sport heading — emphasizing the tricks and jumps, but not the feeling.
Parkour is making in roads into the United States, helped along by word-of-mouth on the Internet — along with Urban Freeflow there are a few other sites devoted to parkour, including one run by Foucan at www.parkour.com — and by recent converts and images of the sport popping up in the media. Nike has used parkour to sell sneakers. Toyota hired Foucan to star in a parkour ad for its new Scion.
Of the American traceurs registered on Urban Freeflow, most are East Coasters, but Cousins hopes to hold a Midwest jam in Chicago this weekend. He expects about a dozen traceurs from Indiana and Wisconsin. Arrangements made via the Urban Freeflow “PKUSA” message board are for everyone to meet up with Cousins on the Art Institute grounds Saturday for several hours of parkour.
Cousins says he was hooked after seeing parkour mentioned on a TV news show several years ago.
He was into extreme sports such as snowboarding and freestyle cycling, and his brothers, who now are on the Aero crew, competed in high school gymnastics. Cousins dabbled in gymnastics but wasn’t crazy about the discipline it required.
Parkour, he says, tapped into his inner kid that — walking along an ordinary sidewalk — is secretly itching to vault over barriers, swing from a street lamp and climb things.
“It’s like when you’re walking down a street, and you see a sculpture, or you see a ramp leading up somewhere. You almost get the urge to go up there,” he says. Parkour embraces that.
“It’s really liberating. You’re doing things other people can’t do. Or think they can’t ever do,” he says.
Cousins, who is from Northbrook, will be a senior this fall at DePaul University, majoring in mathematics. He and his brothers Ryan, 18, and Will, 16, and the rest of the crew venture out to do parkour at least once a week during the summer. Any place with lots of obstacles and plenty of room will do. Cousins resists the comparison of parkour to skateboarding. But he sums up its rebellious appeal this way.
“We can move like no one else can. There’s no one [cops included] that can catch us on foot,” he says.
He and his brothers downplay the physical danger, saying none of them has been seriously injured and echoing EZ’s line about the necessity for training before trying anything big.
“I’m glad they’re active, and at least they’re being creative,” says their mother, Paula Cousins. “I want them to have fun with it, but I do hope they use some common sense.”
Azari, however, boasts of being tempted by an “L” platform at the Blue Line’s Damen Avenue station.
“There’s a rooftop right next to it; I’m working on it. I think it could be a jump,” he says. He estimates there’s a 9-foot gap between the platform and the roof below. “With enough training, I think the human body is capable of jumping from any height.”
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Do you speak parkour?
– Parkour (par-KOOR): A form of extreme gymnastics. The first parkour athletes copied the moves required on “parcours,” or an obstacle course used in French military training. Also called “urban freeflow” and “freerunning.”
– Traceur (TRAY-ser): A parkour athlete.
– Crew: A team of traceurs. Also “clan.” Parkour can be practiced alone, but it’s more fun with a group.
– Freeflow: The nirvana of parkour. A traceur who achieves it is moving at an almost fluid state over his or her surroundings, with a mastery of all the various parkour techniques to hurdle obstacles.
– Cat leap: Jump that requires both hands and feet to land, such as by gripping the edge of a ledge.
– Tic-tac: A wall run, enabling a traceur to run at a vertical surface, leap up and take several fast steps before springing off.
– Dash vault: Fast vault over a low obstacle. Jump over legs first, leapfrog-style, and the hands touch down on either side and spring off the obstacle midvault.
– Gap jump: A long jump between rooftops or over some other gap. In “Rush Hour,” a TV commercial for the BBC, sport co-founder David Belle leaps between rooftops across a city street, landing in a rolling crouch and running away.
– Jam: Gathering of traceurs to do parkour. Not a competition, because competing is against the ethos of the sport. Traceurs show off their stuff, share techniques and videotape themselves to post on the Internet.
