2 minute read
Finn Evans: Manitou’s parkour king
by Flor breuer
Senior Finn Evans has participated in the sport parkour since a young age. He was always climbing, jumping, and getting hurt. “I got into parkour in elementary school, through YouTube videos and things like that,” Evans said. From there he started learning on his own. “In 2016, I started training consistently; and I started taking classes at Flipshack where I am currently employed.”
But, parkour hasn’t always been fun. Evans suffered a serious injury a couple years ago. “I broke one ankle; and after 13 days of being able to be active with parkour again, I broke the other ankle.” Evans made a documentary about this experience. His injuries have been, according to him, “mainly due to dumb stuff. I broke my wrist but that’s from a mat falling, and then I’ve had some shoulder issues from falling and not being in the right mindset to train.” Thankfully, nothing has been life threatening.
Evans doesn’t just do parkour for fun. In 2017, he started competing. “I started doing Jump Fest, which is a parkour camp,” Evans said. At the end of the week there was a competition. “I thought it was really cool, cause you can do speed, skill, and style.” He has done it all; however, his favorite is speed, as he’s too tall for the other categories.
Following through with the flow and keeping pace is also a specialty of his. One of his main influencers is Jesse La Flair, who’s a stunt man in California on a team called Tempest. “He has his own shoe, and he’s always on Instagram doing these crazy 360 videos and that’s really inspiring. There’s this guy named Jason Paul. He’s a German freerunner and is sponsored by Redbull, he has his own clothing company. He makes these crazy videos, so he’s somebody I look up to as well.” Finn Evans hopes to reach the same level of fame and success.
In 2019, Evans competed in the Rocky Mountain Parkour Championship for the youth division in speed. He planned to compete in the Adult Division this year, but due to Coronavirus, he was unable to compete. He has hopes to go farther even though he is at professional level. Evans coaches as well as takes classes on his own. “I want to try and get more into the stunt side of parkour and action modeling,” Evans said. His plan is to take a gap year next year and train vigorously in hopes to get even better than he already is. “I want to get better at double flips and double twists. That’s something that has been really difficult for me because of my length and my dimensions, you know. A lot of jumps and basic A-B stuff is my specialty.”
