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publ ic and aspiring traceurs
phy.
One follower of Hebert’s Natural Method was Raymond
Belle, a French national born in Vietnam in 1939. Belle lost
his father during the Vietnamese uprising against the French
and was taken in as a teenager by the French army. He was
trained as a soldier and seems to have been part of a group
of people who adapted Hebert’s Natural Method to train for
combat in the jungle. He later went on to become an athletic
hero in the French army and a member of the elite French
military fire fighters.
Raymond’s son David Belle would inherit the knowledge of
movement that his father developed as well as the athletic
talent. As a teenager David Belle and 8 others – William
Belle and Chau Belle Dinh, Frederic and Yann Hnautra,
Laurent Piemontesi, Charles Perriere and Malik Diouf –
would take their childhood games and influences from their
cultural history, Methode Naturelle, action films and video
games, and turn them into a discipline of developing their
physical and mental capacities through finding ways to
overcome obstacles around them. Early on this whole group
called themselves Yamakasi and called what they did either
Parcours or L’art Du Deplacement. More recently they have
gone their separate ways. David calls his art Parkour and
stresses utility, while Foucan uses the term “Free Running”
and stresses freedom of movement and finding your own
way. Remaining members of the Yamakasi use the term
“L’art Du Deplacement” and focus on the development of
courage and strength through training. All are a part of the
training that traceurs do and the first generation traceurs
stress that it does not matter what you call it, only why you
personally train the way you do.
As time passed the original traceurs inspired many others
to join them, first in the small French suburbs of Lisses
and Evry and then further afield in France. In 2002 David
appeared in a British TV commerical called “Rush Hour”
after which a UK scene initiatively consisting of just a few
traceurs formed. The London Parkour scene grew and in
2003 a documentary called Jump London was produced,
followed by another called Jump Britain. Many local web-
sites all around the world sprung up after that, and the sport
has been growing ever since.
Parkour Today
In the last few years, Parkour has become increasingly
popular on the Internet as well as in movies like Casino
Royale, Live Free or Die Hard, and David Belle’s District
B13, as well as in many television advertisements. Local
news coverage of Parkour in the Northwest has also in-
creased significantly.
The founders of the discipline have also begun to take a
more active public role, including doing interviews with
major publications, participating in large-scale public
demonstrations and setting up clinics. Some groups, includ-
ing Parkour Visions, are working on organizing certified
Parkourcoaching and guiding Parkour’s introduction to
the mainstream. Parkour has also been used very success-
fully as part of physical educations programs in many UK
schools and Parkour Visions is modeling those programs for
use in the Northwest.