Sharon McClintic

Draft #3

Parkour Article

3/19/07

Rob Ray of Renzhe Parkour tells me that the men of Renzhe share a similar scar. It’s a rainy Saturday morning, too wet and slick outside to watch the team perform their sport—a kind of urban gymnastics focused on finding new ways of flowing through everyday environments. We’ve met over breakfast instead, the team’s energy—a necessity considering the climbing, flipping and running they perform in parkour—is immediately apparent in their demeanor. The look I give Ray regarding the scars must seem incredulous, because soon he and two of his teammates are hoisting their legs up over the diner table, pushing up their jeans and showing me a collection of half-inch scars on their shins.

“All of us have the same one and it really just comes from the minor scrapes and bruises that are associated with being beaten into a gang,” jokes Rob Ray Jr., the team’s spokesperson and co-founder.

“No, what really happens is, you know, the more you run, you’re tired, you get sweaty—it could be that what you’re actually running on busts open…”

It’s hardly surprising to hear that the parkour team receives frequent scrapes and bruises; running, jumping, flipping, climbing over cityscapes and university campuses; just about anywhere that offers interesting obstacles to get around, over, under, and in-between with no pads or helmets seems to invite a certain expectation of injury.

With its roots in French military training (particularly parcours du combatant, or obstacle course training) and gymnastics and its arena on the streets, parkour has garnered much attention and popularity in Europe over the past decade.

Considered the “fathers of parkour,” Frenchmen Sebastian Foucan and David Belle have taken numerous movie and TV roles to promote the sport, with Foucan taking a role most recently in the James Bond film “Casino Royale.” Additional screen time for parkour include several French movies, a series of Nike commercials, a Madonna music video and Mike Christie’s documentaries “Jump London” and “Jump Britain,” featuring the famed Foucan and the foremost British team, Urban Freeflow. It was an American broadcast Christie’s 2005 documentary that hooked Renzhe’s Ray and fellow Renzhe founder, Justice Maynard.

“[Justice and I] have been doing martial arts since we were kids and he saw on the Discovery Channel, ‘Jump Britain.’” Said Ray. “He was like ‘I found guys out here that do it, let’s try to make this happen.’”

The guys Maynard had found were University of Central Florida student Sean Bell, and his long-time friend Kris “Rice” Kropfelder, who had discovered parkour through an article in Men’s Health. Joop Katana, a gymnast, martial artist and stuntman became part of the group after meeting Ray and Maynard. They found a sixth teammate, Jason Mobley, through mutual friends and the original team’s parkour seminars drew their most recent member, Stacey Meunier.

The seven-man team is poised to bring parkour further into mainstream American culture. The Renzhe team has been operating out of Orlando for almost two years and, since mid-2006, has gained plenty of attention within the worldwide parkour community.

“We got on MySpace and we have our Web site and we just kept putting up videos, putting up videos, putting up videos,” explained Ray, “We ended up being highlighted by UrbanFreeflow.com, which is the world’s largest parkour Web site. … That really gave us huge exposure. People started going to our Web site. Next thing you know, we’re getting fan letters from India, China, Japan, Germany, tons from the UK. I mean, we’ve got kids literally all around the world like, ‘Thanks to you guys, we got into parkour.’ We’re all sitting here going ‘Huh?’ We just video tape this stuff ‘cause that’s just… fun!”

On our second meeting I had little trouble finding the Renzhe guys from across the University of Central Florida reflection pond, where we had agreed to meet. A photographer and I had come to watch them in action, though it appeared they had decided not to wait for us to start their fun. Already jumping over benches and into trees, the guys paused as we approached to dish out hugs and introductions where they were due, before leading us to a building marked “Theater” and beginning their practice in full.

            Immediately Ray and Maynard run behind the wall of a building opposite and begin hurling themselves over it. No words need to be spoken for the others to begin and soon they follow suit, first just propelling themselves over the wall with their arms, then bouncing off a perpendicular wall and incorporating flips in their jumps.

            Bell begins to climb a tree effortlessly while others hoist themselves onto railings to precision-jump from one to another. Maynard is doing handstands on the railing and passer-bys stare. The men take us to three more locations—a courtyard between some classroom buildings, where Bell and Ray leap over picnic tables and Maynard walks up walls, and a building opposite the student union where their stunts continue on the railings of a wheelchair ramp.

            As the sun sets the team takes off for another appointment, this time an in-gym meeting with the producer of a film they’ve been hired to perform stunts in. They have fight scenes to practice and flips to perfect. It’s time for the Renzhe boys to get to work.

            Their work looks a lot like their play, though this time the fellows carry shinai—bamboo practice swords—and pieces of plastic pipes. They work on  choreographed fight scenes for an hour before the producer arrives to film them and talk business. Seemingly tireless, the men go through their fight scenes again and again before moving on to jump stunts.

            It’s well past dark by practice’s end and there’s little complaining about soreness or exhaustion. The teammates seem used to such rigorous days and hopeful that their hard work will help take parkour to a new level here in America, where the sport has yet to catch on as it has overseas.

            Slowly, however, the sport is gaining notoriety and Renzhe placed in the top five contestants for the 2006 Yahoo! Talent Show, out of over 5,000 video entries. They have numerous opportunities with film and sponsorships in the works.

            “According to EZ, one of the guys at UrbanFreeflow.com … we are one of the foundational teams of the United States,” said Ray, “We’re kinda like the pre-Tony Hawks of skateboarding for parkour.”

            They attribute much of their popularity to their ability to organize.

            “There’s not anyone out there who is as organized as our group,” said Bell. He and Mobley lament their lack of a particularly urban environment, but pride themselves on being remarkably inventive with the more suburban places they practice at.

            “People look at a wall and say, ‘I can kong that, I can bash that.’ We have to look at a very small, short environment and go, ‘We have to do everything here. How can we make that happen?’ And we’ve invented moves—I mean, we have half a dozen moves that we have come up with on our own that are now being slowly incorporated into the whole entire parkour scene. I’m not trying to be egotistical, but I mean, that’s huge for us,” said Ray.

That room for inventiveness seems integral to the sport, which focuses on finding creative ways to get from point A to point B.  Though some rifts have come up within the community, much to Renzhe’s dismay, regarding what moves comprise “legitimate” parkour. In fact, a second term often associated with parkour is “free running,” which some members of the community insist is an entirely different sport.

“Here we go,” said Ray, “Here’s the official Renzhe stance on the whole thing: Parkour is free running, free running is parkour. … Parkour is seeing the world through your own eyes and how you flow through it. I don’t flow like Sean does, I don’t flow like Jason does, I don’t flow like Stacey does. None of us flow like the other guy, even though we have the same foundation. So what’s happened is, you get all these new people coming in, moving differently. Some guys are doing back flips and it pissed off a lot of people who can’t do that.

“So instead of looking at themselves and saying, ‘Hey, I need to up my skills,’ or, ‘hey, I can’t do a back flip and that’s okay,’ they go, ‘that’s not parkour.’ …

“Because of the divisions, you lose that self expressionist ability in parkour, because now you have to adhere to this regimen. It defeats the whole aspect of it. Parkour was designed for freedom of movement in an urban environment. It was not designed, ‘Here are six moves you can do. If you do anything other than those six moves then you’re not doing parkour.’ Do your own style man. That’s what we do.”

Internal rifts aside, creativity in movement appears to be at the heart of parkour, and a large part of its appeal. Drawing on moves from such a wide array of disciplines—gymnastics, martial arts, military training, stunt work, et cetera—parkour seems to embrace the new; new ways of viewing an environment; new ways of moving through it and new ways of using existing movements.

With a large part of its draw relying on the edgy appeal of dangerous maneuvers often high off the ground, safety becomes an issue as more and more people get involved with the sport. Few gyms exist solely for the purpose of teaching parkour, according to Ray, whose team rents space from a martial arts gym that houses some of their training equipment and practices often at a gymnastics gym. Most U.S. teams use gymnastics or martial arts gyms to train in, and even in Europe, only one parkour-only gym came to mind when Ray was asked about it; a gym in France he described as “a cityscape inside a warehouse.”

The creation of parkour gyms has its draws, though some might argue it would take parkour off the streets, where it “belongs.” Renzhe is interested in the prospect, thinking that the gym in France has the right idea—“A safe cityscape. Rubberized mats, rubberized floors, whatever the case may be to make the environment safe so, ‘I think I can jump 10 feet from this place to this place, I’m ten feet off the ground… I’m okay because it’s a foam pit. If I did this outside—uhh, not so safe,” said Ray.

“Although people could argue the aspect of, ‘well if you do teach them all the safe stuff, now they feel like can jump this ten feet gap, two stories up. And we’ve seen a lot of deaths, sadly, and a lot of serious injuries because kids don’t do it the right way. In our seminar we teach baby steps, the first year you do parkour you should not be any more than six feet off the ground, period. There’s no reason to be,” he said.

“I’d only say six inches,” Bell said, “If you can’t do it on ground level, you can not do it on any other level, plain and simple. If you can’t do it standing flat on the ground, no matter how high you go, it just makes it more dangerous for you.”

            The deaths he has in mind come not from parkour but from “garage jumping,” which Ray says has gotten “lumped together” with parkour in the media. “Garage jumping has given us a lot of issues when we go out in downtown Orlando,” said Ray. Garage jumping involves jumping from one level of a parking garage to another. “That’s where a lot of the deaths have occurred and a lot of the times alcohol and drugs are involved.”

            Some injuries happen when people watch a video, assume the moves involved are easy, and try to perform them with little or no practice in a safe environment.

“That’s why we do the seminars, because they watch a movie and are like, ‘I can do that!’ We’re okay ‘Okay, well since you can do that, why don’t you go ahead and take a class so you can see what you’re trying to do,” said Mobley.

“All of us have a limit. There are things that I won’t do because.. could I? Sure, but I’ve got to work tomorrow, or I’ve got to go home to my wife. In a gym? I don’t care, whatever, if it’s on the street, there are things I’m just not going to do.”

“Our group is also a group that has that mentality of, ‘Sure you can’t do it? Don’t worry about it,’” said Ray.

Renzhe Parkour’s seminars focus on teaching the proper ways of executing moves in a safe environment before performing them outside. The seminars are also useful for promoting the sport and finding new talent, as was the case with Meunier. Though these introductory seminars are just the tip of the iceberg for Renzhe,. Already recognized for their talent by fans and the press, and already performing stunt work for a movie, the men seem to have their sites set on America as a whole.

“France is pretty much the Mecca for parkour,” said Ray, “London being second and the third… is still yet to be decided.”

“We’re working on Orlando, Florida,” said Bell.

For more information about Renzhe Parkour, visit their Web site, www.renzheparkour.com.