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FORGE PRESS Friday September 18 2009
13
FEATURES
Meeting the men who jump across Sheffield’s skyline
Michael Hunter An alternative art form founded in France over 20 years ago is leaping around the fringes of Sheffield’s student suburbs. And given the soaring cost of gym memberships, who can blame anyone for taking up this cheap, new form of exercise? “It’s an excellent way of keeping fit – and it’s free,” Jordan Barrett told me as he hung from scaffolding in Millhouses Park. I first met the 19-year-old a week earlier when I saw him practising jumps with friends on Northumberland Road near Broomhill. Now, I don’t usually approach groups of topless young men throwing themselves around in the street, but I had to know what on earth these guys were doing. “It’s Parkour,” revealed Dave Sedgley, wiping the sweat from his forehead after landing an impressive jump. “Ah,” I said, pleased with myself that I recognised the name. “That’s like free running right?” “No.” Oh. Eight days and three lengthy conversations later, Dave and Jordan managed to spell out the intricate differences between Parkour and free running as they demonstrated their skills at the annual Cliff-Hanger event in Millhouses, south Sheffield. Basically, free runners are show-offs. Of course, there is much more to it. The latter encourages free, yet practical, movement with the aim of body conditioning and self-improvement. Free
Forge Press talks to some of the enthusiasts making Sheffield a hotspot for the athletic art form known as Parkour running, on the other hand, is heavily motivated by aesthetics, incorporating elaborate flips and difficult jumps into a similar mantra. But confusion between the two is forgivable; free running was, after all, created as a spin-off to Parkour following a disagreement between its co-founders, Frenchmen Sébastien Foucan and David Belle (pictured).
‘Most guys are checking out girls when they’re walking down the street, but I’m checking the walls’ Scott McQuade, enthusiast And it was Foucan’s fancy free running which caught the spotlight first in a 2003 Channel 4 documentary, Jump London. Two years later, Foucan returned in Jump Britain; precariously scaling the heights of Edinburgh Castle and the Millennium Stadium amongst other iconic
landmarks. Meanwhile, Parkour pin-up Belle was inspiring budding practitioners – known as traceurs – with a host of online videos depicting his breathtaking moves. Inevitably, with Foucan and Belle strutting their stylish stuff in the mainstream media, the stereotype which was to haunt the discipline from thereon was one of bare-chested exuberance and death-defying stunts. But jumping from a rooftop, hurling yourself through mid-air and clinging your fingernails to the nearest ledge on a daily basis was, and still is, the sort of stuff reserved for the specialists. The reality for curious newcomers here in Sheffield was toddling sheepishly along to Arundel Gate on a drizzly Saturday afternoon for a tentative beginners’ session outside the Odeon cinema. But Parkour has proven popular in South Yorkshire. Now, almost three years on, the weekly sessions which began on the back of the Jump films continue to attract new recruits. Dave was one of the brains behind the Sheffield Parkour meetings. The 27-year-old co-founded the ever-growing Northern Parkour group while studying a degree in Computational Physics in Manchester five years ago. He recalled: “Initially, I was just trying to find out more about it so I went on the internet
and found a lot of websites in French and just the odd one or two in English. Looking over the websites I managed to find some other people who were trying to start off in my area.
I don’t usually approach groups of topless young men, but I had to know what on earth they were doing “I was at university at the time and I managed to get in touch and arrange to meet them that weekend. I went down and just started practising things with them”. Dave returned to Sheffield, in 2006, and set about giving traceurs an environment in which they could learn and develop. “When I started Parkour there were very few people practising around the country, no more than 50 or so, so you pretty much knew everybody else who practised Parkour anyway. “It took off faster in some areas
of the country than others. I had a fairly large hand in creating the Sheffield scene because we organised a beginners’ session which sparked a lot of practitioners taking it up here.” Now Dave is chairman of the British Parkour Association and a full-time Parkour He explained: “There are a lot of people around the country interested in taking part but the difficulty is trying to let them know exactly how that can be done. “We set up the website Northern Parkour to try and show people ways to get in touch with practitioners across the north of England, and that has proved pretty successful. “The early sessions here tended to take place towards the centre of Sheffield; the Odeon cinema and the Sheffield Hallam University buildings just above the station were quite popular meeting points for the first few years. “But once the practice got a bit more established and we got to know the areas around Sheffield a bit better, the practice started moving towards less populated areas, so a lot of the areas around the University of Sheffield buildings in Broomhill are quite popular at the moment.” And with the Peak Distict on its doorstep, Sheffield is even attracting practitioners from outside the city. Twenty-year-old student Scott McQuade came from Leeds to be at the Cliff-Hanger event in July. He said: “The great thing about Parkour is there’s something new everywhere you go. “Most guys spend their time checking out girls when they’re walking down the street, but I’m checking out the walls.”