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"Parkour is an art that helps you pass any obstacle to go from point A to point B using only the abilities of the human body."
- David Belle |
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September 30, 2007 - KTVU Channel 2 News
ADRENALINE RUSH: Bay Area Thrill Seekers Turn to Parkour
by Bob Mackenzie and KTVU News
[Watch the video online at ktvu.com]
September 23, 2007 - San Francisco Chronicle
The Free Runner
Will parkour be the vehicle that vaults Russian emigre Andrey Pfening to Hollywood stunt stardom?
by Sam Whiting
[Read the article online at sfgate.com] + [Article video and photos]
The day Andrey Pfening came out as a traceur was no different from any other at Washington High School. He was walking across the courtyard explaining stunts he had seen in an action flick to a classmate. The other kid asked for a demonstration and Pfening turned and ran headlong toward a concrete pillar at the top of a wheelchair ramp.
At the point of impact, he planted his hands on top, monkey vaulted over and landed on his feet at the bottom of the ramp, 4 or 5 feet below.
It was over in a few seconds, but not quick enough to avoid the eye of the campus security guard. Had she been interested in the theory behind the maneuver, Pfening might have explained that he was running the "course of obstacles" known as parkour. At its essence, parkour describes the most direct route from Point A to Point B. There is no reason to arrive at Point B, but a traceur, as a parkourist calls himself, is in a hurry to get there just the same. If a traceur were in his backyard and needed to get to the backyard at the end of the street, he would go up and over all the fences in between. A traceur never goes around.
It is an admirable pursuit, but the security guard was not admiring. Her concern was liability. "Come here," Pfening recalls her saying. "I am going to send you home." He convinced the guard he would never do it again, and he didn't until the following Saturday. By then, he had a bigger plan.
Parkour, which derives from the French word "parcours" (which means journey, run, trip), evolved early this century in a Paris suburb and has been around San Francisco for a couple of years. There is a Web site called SFParkour.com with 100 or so registered traceurs. They adopt aliases such as Corndogg and No Sole and are happy to help beginners and sell them a $15 SF Parkour T-shirt with the logo of the traceur vaulting over the Golden Gate Bridge.
Pfening knew nothing of them at the time. A 17-year-old Russian emigre, he is not socially linked to the postcollegiate office workers who pursue it as an after-work steam burner. A quiet kid with no cell phone, he was online six months ago when he came across a film titled "District B13." The teaser describes it as taking place in a futuristic Parisian wasteland where the gangsters and drug lords are walled within their own lawless neighborhood. Now that is an after-school movie.
"I looked at the title and I just clicked download," he recalls.
The film, lamely dubbed in English, opens with much to recommend it - a dizzying montage in which a shirtless and tattooed acrobat gets away from any number of thugs with any number of weapons by climbing the walls of skyscrapers and leaping over a concrete canyon from a high roof to a much lower one, and so on.
The next day a friend, Slava Blazer, called. "He says, 'Let's go try this new thing. It's called parkour,' " says Pfening, who had never heard that word before Blazer mentioned it. Blazer invited Pfening over to watch a YouTube video and right away Pfening recognized the tricks from "District B13." "It was just a little bit weird," Pfening says.
Weirder still was when a third friend, Max Sidorov, checked in to talk about this video he had seen. That makes three Russian teenagers in the Richmond District separately discovering parkour at the same moment. This kind of coincidence you don't ignore. They formed a trio called the Piton Clan.
Because Pfening is a respectful son, he thought it imperative that his family - parents Yuriy and Viktoriya Pfening, babushka Sorokina Galina and 7-year-old sister Irina - see what he was getting into. So they squeezed together on a mattress that doubles as a couch to watch "District B13." They may have had no choice, because in their apartment, you are either in the room with the TV or in the room with the bunk beds. You can't hide in the kitchen - it's smaller than an airline galley. When all five Pfenings are home, it looks as if there are not enough places to sleep.
From an American point of view, this might be too much family togetherness. But the Pfenings do not have an American point of view. Originally from Uzbekistan, they had no way of staying afloat, so they tried Samara, Russia, which didn't work either. Andrey's Aunt Irina Sorokina was already in San Francisco and three years in a row she entered them in the green card lottery. The third time they won and over they came, not one speaking a word of English. It was December, 2002. Andrey's mother Viktoriya got trained as a medical assistant. Yuriy found work laying hardwood floors until his knees gave out. Then he starting driving an airport shuttle, pulling a double shift - 3 p.m. to 4 a.m. - on weekends.
They bunked with Aunt Irina in an apartment on Sutter Street until they scraped together the deposit on their own place in a walk-up populated by Russians and owned by a Pole. The rent is $800, but they are enjoying all the extra space of that second room. In Russia, they lived in a one-room apartment. "Three to a bed," Andrey says as his mother laughs. Still, they wouldn't mind a bathroom that isn't down the hall, or getting away from the cacophony of Clement Street and Seventh Avenue above Fela's Discount Store. This is where Andrey's plan comes into play, as visualized in "District B13."
When the video rolled, his parents struggled to see that the Piton Clan was not headed toward a bad end. You have to get past the part where the hero pulls a crooked cop's head between the jail cell bars and then snaps his neck.
To their relief, Andrey did not see himself as either the heroin marketer or as the corrupt cop but as the sinewy stuntman. In "District B13," the trickery is done by David Belle, the Frenchman who invented parkour. In James Bond's latest "Casino Royale," it is Belle's pal Sebastien Foucan who climbs a steel beam as if it were a coconut tree, then does a flying trapeze maneuver onto a swinging construction crane. That is just two men getting all the glory. Andrey Pfening will be the third.
"I want to get into the movies or something," he says. "It is his dream," adds his mom, whose own dream is for her son to become an engineer. But that would waste his cosmonaut's good looks, plus he has ears that stick out like the new Bond's and the same compact build as his hero Belle.
"I just realized that this is a whole new thing and not many people are doing it right now," says Pfening, whose previous goal was to be the next Lance Armstrong. He'd train by humping his bike down the stairs and riding across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Rafael and back, always by himself. His mountain bike was the wrong equipment, but it was all he had. That's the beauty of parkour: There is no gear. "If I train hard for it, I have more of a percentage to get somewhere with it," he says.
At first, he would study the moves on video, then go to a park and try them with Blazer and Sidorov. There was a certain amount of risk in this, the worst kind for a kid - being laughed at.
"It was a little bit embarrassing because everybody was watching," he recalls.
Next, the Piton Clan went to Washington, or "George Washington," as Pfening formally calls it, way out at 32nd and Geary. They were guaranteed not to be laughed at there because, on weekends, it is locked up and surrounded by a 10-foot chainlink fence. "At first, of course I was scared," he recalls. "I just keep trying and getting it slowly. Little by little, there is this moment where you just are confident enough to go for it."
In time, the Piton Clan was absorbed into SF Parkour, and they all have the T-shirts. There are jams, as workouts are called, on Saturday mornings at Union Square and climbing nights at gyms. Pfening usually posts a Saturday afternoon jam at Washington, catching the wheezing and belching 2-Clement at the stop right in front of his primer gray front door, to get there.
Debarking the 2 Clement at the end of the line, he walks around to the back of the school, where Anza St. meets 30th Avenue. His first obstacle is the fence, one of those tightly wound Cyclones that make it tough to get a toehold in the old-fashioned sense of fence-climbing. This is not a worrisome complication for Pfening. He doesn't need toeholds. He scans the fence for the highest spot and then goes over it in two movements, exactly the way he saw Foucan do it in "Casino Royale." It is over so quick that he comes back over to the street side to demonstrate it again, landing feet together on the far side just like he is coming off the high horse.
On the other side is Chris Levesque, a veteran traceur who founded New England Parkour before moving here from Portland, Maine. Also standing there are two rookies who found SF Parkour on the Internet. One has a red natural like Bernie's in "Room 222" and the other is wearing a gelled-up Mohawk and T-shirt that reads, "I think Pot should be legal."
There are also some skateboarders loafing the concrete benches, but the two groups are in separate orbits and it is easy to tell the traceurs from the skaters. The traceurs are the ones who don't wear pads or gloves. They want to feel the rough surfaces they latch onto. Pfening's arms and hands are nicked like a butcher's. When he scrapes opens a scab he lets it bleed. Traceurs will climb on a rope or scaffold if it is already there. They will occasionally use a handrail, but only for their feet.
After introductions, they do some stretches then Pfening jumps up on a pillar and does a Mobius flip. "Is that your warm-up?" asks Levesque. The answer is no. Pfening's warm-up is walking on his hands down a flight of stairs. Levesque, whose handle is Kaos, is a pure traceur. Pfening, who goes by the less-imaginative Pfening Andrey, is a free runner, a showier offshoot of tracing developed by Foucan. Pfening is prone to planting a hand on a wall and pin wheeling around it, which has nothing to do with getting from one point to the next. He will jump up and stand atop a garbage can, like a crow.
As a parkour facility, Washington High has been greatly improved by a summer construction project, which means metal storage units that look like boxcars on a railroad. There are also garbage Dumpsters, with and without metal lids. Levesque and Pfening climb a chainlink fence, stand on the top of it and jump up to grab the ledge on the roof of a portable classroom. They scamper across it and drop down to the pavement then climb to the top of a Dumpster that connects to another portable roof.
After a few laps on that circuit, they go down to the football field to demonstrate the rudimentary roll. Pfening is a patient instructor, but soon enough his eyes fix on the 30-foot-high frieze at the back of the end zone. He scales it and climbs over the rail, then runs around to the grandstand, goes down the steps and across the field to do it again, always running as if being chased.
"Whenever we practice, we try and find spots like this where there are random things," Levesque says. "It's hard to find places where there is everything you want to practice on." Practice is clearly a high priority, but they are not practicing for anything specific. There are no goals for parkour, no huge buildings to conquer the way rock climbers train for the big walls. "There are some business men trying to take over parkour, turn it into a competitive thing," Levesque says. "But the vast majority of people across the world do this because they love it. They want to improve themselves and they want to help others. That's all there is to it."
But there is more to it for Pfening. He has been at this just six months, but is ready for exposure. He went looking for it at the Colorado Parkour National Jam a month ago. "Maybe there are going to be people who look for people to do some tricks to get into advertising," he says.
He didn't get a Hollywood deal, though the U.S. Army has shown an interest. Since his return from the "Big Jam," he has installed a pull-up bar in the kitchen door jamb to improve muscle definition and taken to free running with no shirt on, the way they do in the movies. His father, meanwhile, has left the airport shuttle and gotten a job in construction, which comes with family benefits, "in case I get hurt," Andrey says with a smile.
In the evenings, Sidorov comes by and they walk over to Mountain Lake Park to do some parkour work on that strangest of contrivances: a Par course. Walking up to a pair of slanting benches that form the "sit and reach" station, Pfening looks at the lengthy written instructions and laughs. He already knows how to use it. He stands on one of the benches and broad jumps to the second. He knows how to use the pull-up bars, too, as a challenging set of parallel bars. He dismounts with a back flip.
Sidorov, who just graduated from Lowell, was more brazen than Pfening in his school-day exuberance. Once, between classes, he scrambled onto the roof of the school, then went roof to roof, doing flips over the gaps, he says. This earned him a two-day suspension.
"They got mad for that, but you have to constantly train yourself," he explains. "My mom was like, 'Oh, he was on the roof? OK.' " Sidorov sounds like any other American teenager, while Pfening still sounds like a Russian. The difference, Sidorov says, is that he's been here two years longer. "Seven and a half years," he says, snapping his fingers. "Accent outtahere."
He's outtahere, too, headed to UC Davis. Blazer is already at UCLA. The Piton Clan is down to the Piton, and he mostly practices alone now. Behind his apartment building is a shared backyard that was overgrown and shared by nobody until Andrey discovered it. It took him three long days to haul away all the trash and overgrowth. He weeded it, then found a mattress on the street and dragged it back there. This is where he practices his flips.
At night, he stretches for an hour in front of the TV. Right away he could bend over backward and touch the floor, which came as a shock to his mother. As a child he showed no interest in the common Russian pursuit of gymnastics.
No one could have seen this coming except maybe a tough kid on the playground, years ago at Roosevelt Middle School, the brick fort on Arguello. He nicknamed this quiet new Russian Peter Parker, the real name of Spider-Man. No reason other than a vague resemblance. Pfening didn't climb anything then. The nickname lasted about a year, then faded away, but they ought to bring it back when they see Peter Parkour in action at Washington High this year.
March 28, 2007 - The HayWord
Parkour in the 'burbs
by Matt O'Brien and Jane Tyska
[Watch the video online at insidebayarea.com]
Review photographer Jane Tyska recently captured some images of local suburban "traceur" Justin Cruff demonstrating the art of parkour high up above Castro Valley. See her video above. Also, SF Parkour has become the local parkour resource, Wikipedia is always chock full of info and watching David Belle is a good start to seeing how the phenomenon has made a worldwide impression through viral video.
March 1, 2007 - San Francisco Magazine
Click - photo section
Four SF Parkour traceurs are featured in a two-page photo spread in San Francisco Magazine's March 2007 issue in the Click section (page 38). Check it out on newsstands around the bay!
February 4, 2007 - ABC/KGO Channel 7 News
A New Urban Sport Called 'Parkour'
by KGO News
[Watch the video online at abc7news.com]
You might have noticed a new sport in the latest Bond film 'Casino Royale" as 007 chases a villain who jumps, flips, and does anything to escape Mr. Bond -- those jumps and flips have a name and it's called 'Parkour.' ABC7 had a chance to catch up with a local group that claims this sport is more of a way of life and the art of movement.
September 11, 2006 - Hooked on the Outdoors
Running Free
by Tim Sprinkle
[Read the article online at ruhooked.com]
Call it Euro-kookiness, but the sport of parkour is taking off in (and leaping across the rooftops of) North America
"Skateboarding without the skateboard" is how Mark Toorock describes his favorite sport. Others call it super-hero running, Euro foolishness—or just plain nuts. What sport is this? Toorock is one of North America’s leading practitioners of parkour, a running and jumping game developed by a pair of bored French teenagers in the late 80s.
Parkour, often called free running in the US, has evolved into an athletic discipline that sends participants (called traceurs) up walls, over fences and under railings in search of the smoothest, most efficient route through an urban environment. "It's all about moving with a purpose," Toorock says, "sort of like you would through an obstacle course. But we take that urgency and apply it to movement for the purpose of bettering ourselves, like you would with a martial art."
For San Francisco traceur [Corndogg], the mental challenge defines parkour. "As you're free running, you're constantly looking for the best line through an environment," he says, "but you're also pushing your limits."
Parkour may be big in Europe (where TK people participate), but can such a heady sport really find a future here? "Definitely," says Toorock, whose AmericanParkour.com website brings traceurs together in cities across the country. "It’s been known about here for about two years, and in those two years we’ve probably gone from a handful of people to a few thousand practicing."
Still, purists worry that growth will water down the spiritual side of parkour, turning it into yet another American "action" sport. "It’s very easy to overlook the philosophy behind it and just focus on the flips and flashier moves," [Corndogg] says. "I hope we don’t see the day where there are 'no parkour' signs next to 'no skateboarding' signs, or where parkour competitions are televised on ESPN2 and traceurs are getting endorsement deals."
Become a traceur or just watch the action at www.americanparkour.com and www.urbanfreeflow.com.
July 15, 2006 - "Freedom of Movement" SFPK jam video filmed by current.tv
On April 23rd, 2006 current.tv filmed an SF Parkour jam. After extensive editing, the video is now available on the current.tv website at http://www.current.tv/studio/media/9351022. Please check it out, vote for the "green light" or post comments!
March 25, 2006 - San Francisco Chronicle
Parkour is a new craze in which kids treat the city as their gym.
Spider-Man would approve.
by Helena Echlin, Special to The Chronicle
[Read the article online at sfgate.com]
[Download the article in PDF format]
The boys look as if they're trying to outrun the police. They jump over a wall, drop 10 feet and somersault to break the impact of landing. They leapfrog over a garbage can and clear a bench. They dash a step up another wall, grip the top and shimmy over.
But no one is chasing them. They're simply practicing parkour, the modern art of navigating through your environment with maximum efficiency. In the past few months, Bay Area youths have taken it up, and, if the demonstration last weekend was any indication, they've progressed by leaps and bounds.
Most parkour fans are teenage boys, and it's easy to see why. All you need is a pair of sneakers -- and a daredevil spirit. And because most boys have plenty of experience climbing trees and jumping off walls, in a sense they've been practicing parkour all their lives.
Vince Lorenzo, a 17-year-old practitioner, said: "I've been doing this for years and years, since I was old enough to jump off something. When I found out about parkour, I was like, 'Wait, it's a sport?' "
Two French teenagers, David Belle and Sébastien Foucan, developed parkour in Lisses, a Paris suburb. They drew on their experience in gymnastics and martial arts, as well as the obstacle-course training that Belle's father underwent as a soldier in Vietnam. The name is derived from the French phrase, parcours du combattant, roughly translated as "military obstacle course." Practitioners of parkour are known as "traceurs."
A 2001 French film called "Yamakasi," for which Luc Besson wrote the scenario, kindled the public's interest. The next year, Belle appeared in a commercial for British TV channel BBC1, and then Foucan starred in a documentary, "Jump London" (2003), in which he and his confederates used London landmarks as launch pads for ninja-like stunts.
Brands like Nike, Toyota and Adidas began using parkour in ad campaigns. Soon enthusiasts all over the world were using Internet message boards to swap tips, share pictures and arrange practice sessions, known as jams.
Last summer, Brandon Quan, a 28-year-old business analyst from San Francisco, came across a video of Belle online, and was hooked. "It's like what Spider-Man does ... except that it's even cooler than a movie because it's real," he said. Enlisting his co-worker Jeff Schoenhard, 29, Quan began to practice moves, and he set up a Web site, www.sfparkour.com, so that local devotees could organize jams.
I joined them on a recent expedition to San Francisco State University. Because the campus has plenty of ledges, walls, railings and stairs, this is a favorite playground. (The traceurs also like the Civic Center and UC Berkeley.) It was a perfect day for parkour, crisp and sunny. The competitors, most younger than 20 and all men, were dressed for ease of movement in sweatpants or shorts, T-shirts and running shoes. "That's the cool thing about parkour," said Schoenhard, an amiable redhead in an Adidas windbreaker. "There's no official gear. You walk out in loose-fitting clothes and just do it."
The traceurs tightened their shoelaces and rotated their shoulders to warm up. Then they were off, swarming over, under and around obstacles with simian agility.
Although their movement looked natural and unscripted, parkour has its own lexicon of maneuvers. These include the speed vault, where you place a single hand on the obstacle and swing both legs over it to one side. There's also the monkey vault, where you place both your hands on the obstacle and swing your feet between them; the precision jump; the cat leap; and the tic-tac.
Some say parkour should comprise only the most efficient route from A to B, and should not include showier moves like handsprings and backflips. Purists prefer to call the more acrobatic style freerunning or freestyle parkour.
Quan, a gracious man with khaki pants and gel-spiked hair, lags behind the traceurs with me. He recently sprained his wrist in a botched maneuver and is unable to join them. We watch as one overeager traceur, attempting to perform a headstand on a railing, slips, strikes his back and flops full length onto the ground.
Quan insists that there's little chance of anyone ending up paralyzed. Parkour is risky, but just enough to generate a frisson. Indeed, most traceurs seem to look before they leap, evaluating the distance. Nor are they interested in antagonizing authority. According to Quan, as long as they're on property that's publicly accessible and they're not breaking and entering, they're not doing anything illegal, provided they obey any no-trespassing signs and leave if asked to. Nonetheless, they pause prudently as a police car noses its way across campus.
Doug Groshong of the San Francisco Police Department's legal division said, "If the owners of the building don't make an issue about (parkour), we won't, but they (the owners) probably won't like it because it raises a liability concern."
Ultimately, parkour is not about tomfoolery. "It's not like 'Jackass,' " says Slava Blazer, 17, referring to an old MTV series in which people performed outlandish and dangerous stunts. "It's about overcoming fears and setting goals and achieving them."
Like the martial arts that helped inspire it, parkour is a mental discipline as well as a physical one. Blazer sums up the parkour philosophy in a tagline succinct enough to sell sneakers: "There are no limits, only obstacles, and every obstacle can be overcome."
I'm the kind of person who, on seeing a tree, wants to sit under it with a book, not climb it. Nonetheless, I find parkour seductive. The traceurs have turned SFSU's boxy buildings and concrete stairwells into a world of possibilities.
We climb a flight of steps up the side of the Cesar Chavez Student Center. Then they haul themselves onto the roof, race up, and perch on top, free as birds.
I'm tempted to follow. After all, there are no limits, only obstacles. But it's no good. I'm frightened that I will break my neck, or at least drop my notebook. I stay behind with injured Quan, scooping up the others' abandoned backpacks.
In traceur lingo, the person left to tote everyone else's stuff around is called a bag bitch. The others drop off the roof somewhere on the other side of the building. Meanwhile, we bag bitches will have to take the stairs.
PHOTOS IN PAPER:
Pierre Blosse, Andrey Pfening and Alex Jacks (from left) leap over a railing during a parkour "jam" at San Francisco State. Chronicle photo by Paul Chinn
Daniel Girondeaud performs a leap in France, the country where parkour got started. Reuters photo by Emmanuel Fradin
The San Francisco State University campus is a favorite spot for parkour practitioners, called traceurs. Here, John Dizon balances on a rail. Chronicle photo by Paul Chinn
Marco Falsitta back-flips over a concrete wall. Chronicle photo by Paul Chinn
PHOTOS WITH ONLINE ARTICLE:
Eriq Cho jumps from an upper deck in front of the library at San Francisco State. Chronicle photo by Paul Chinn
John Dizon leaps from a concrete deck. Chronicle photo by Paul Chinn
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