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On Monday, the International Olympic Committee met to define the program for the Olympic Games in Paris 2024 and, among other things, to confirm which new sports will be introduced during the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad, already chosen last June. Unsurprisingly, parkour, a particularly spectacular athletic discipline commonly practiced in the city, was not included: but the purists were glad they didn’t want to go to the Olympics.
While on the one hand the International Gymnastics Federation, which recognizes it as a discipline similar to the ones it regulates, promoted the inclusion of parkour competitions in the Paris Olympic Games, on the other hand the smaller but more national and international federations recognized. Sports practitioners like Parkour Earth insisted that parkour should remain a more independent sport.
Parkour is an “urban” athletic discipline born in France in the early 1980s. It consists of overcoming obstacles, climbing walls and jumping from one structure to another in an efficient, acrobatic and spectacular way, advancing along a path (“course”, In French) in an agile way. It has spread, creating its own niche, even in Italy and the athletes who practice it are called “parkourists” or “trackers” (“tracers“): That is, they draw an itinerary to move from one point to another with fast and fluid movements, which combine exercises typical of military training with those of climbing and body weight training.
For this reason, parkour is also a beautiful activity to watch. With him free running -a similar sport that, however, pays more attention to the spectacularity of the movements than to their effectiveness- has become popular especially since the late nineties precisely because it was filmed in different contexts and told through videos and films first broadcast by television, and then shared on YouTube or social networks.
Thanks to its popularity and the fact that it can be practiced almost everywhere, parkour has spread to Europe and then the rest of the world, and since the 2000s there have been “speed run” events and competitions, based on In the speed with which a certain route is approached, or “freestyle”, in which the athletes are judged by the difficulty and execution of the different “tricks”. In addition, since 2017, the International Gymnastics Federation has also started organizing its own parkour events.
For such a large and complex organization, which already participates in the Olympic Games with disciplines such as rhythmic gymnastics, artistic gymnastics and trampoline, it would have been easier to ask the Olympic Committee to introduce parkour competitions. However, as Parkour Earth manager Damien Puddle observed, the FIG is not a parkour federation and there is not all this anxiety about participating in the Olympics among those who play the sport.
At the beginning of December Parkour Earth had sent a letter to the International Olympic Committee to point out that the FIG continues to “encroach on the boundaries and appropriate” a sport that does not belong to it, but above all to ask the Committee to reject any request for inclusion. parkour at the Olympic Games in Paris. The letter clarifies that parkour “has been recognized as an autonomous, differentiated and independent sport, so it cannot be considered a secondary discipline or belonging to gymnastics or other sports.” According to Parkour Earth, any decision to participate in the Olympics rested and will eventually be with the national and international parkour federations, and not with the federations of other sports.
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For the next edition of the Tokyo Olympic Games, which has been postponed until 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic, competitions of five new Olympic sports have been planned: baseball-softball (which the Olympic Committee considers together), karate, skate , surfing and sport climbing. These last disciplines have also been confirmed for the 2024 edition, during which break dance, the typical dance of hip hop culture, will also be introduced, but not parkour.
According to Puddle, although athletes participate in parkour competitions “most do it for experience” and not to get to the Olympic Games: for many of them the enormous competitiveness of the Olympic Games conflicts with the very spirit . of sport. It’s a discussion that also took place among skateboarding professionals, before it was included in the Olympics.
The philosophy of parkour focuses primarily on freedom of movement and the expressiveness of those who practice it. As David Belle, one of the founders of the discipline, explained, it is a mainly recreational sport, which has more than anything the objective of “overcoming mental or physical obstacles to make those who practice it stronger and more agile”, so not seen. as a competitive sport. According to the Englishman Ryan Doyle, one of the best-known parkour athletes: “Parkour is an art form, a discipline,” and “asks: Who is the best parkourist?” it would be like asking “what is the best song in the world?” ».
We are very happy that the IOC today rejected the FIG’s request to bring parkour to the 2024 Olympics under a gymnastics banner.
YES, and when parkour is considered again for the Olympics, it MUST be under the auspices of the true parkour community around the world. pic.twitter.com/AVbajWWOYy
– Parkour Generations (@PKGenerations) December 7, 2020
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