Will it be what’s best for the sport?
Parkour could be in a future Olympic games, but at what cost?
Today’s letter is going to be a little headier than my usual stuff, but it’s an important conversation going on right now in the parkour community.
Who is FIG?
Most sports have an international governing body which establishes quality standards and represents the interests of the practitioners, coaches and businesses involved.
In order to become an Olympic sport, a discipline MUST have a governing body attached to it.
Let’s introduce the international governing body of gymnastics - the Federation Internacionale de Gymnastique, known as FIG for short. FIG was founded in Belgium in the 1880’s, making them the oldest governing body of any Olympic sport.
In 2017, they begun efforts to integrate parkour into the body of gymnastics as a push to get parkour into the Olympics.
The parkour community has not taken too kindly to this gesture.
Let’s look at what the naysayers are thinking:
Gymnastics as a discipline has been consistently shrinking since the early 2000’s, this is especially true of men’s gymnastics. Largely thanks to the popularization of less expensive, yet more exciting movement sports such as parkour, breakdancing and tricking. Gymnastics, the doubters claim, is clapping back as a final attempt to reclaim all that lost revenue.
The FIG has taken efforts to redefine the sport of parkour and create official guidelines for the correct and incorrect ways to teach and host competitions. They have even attempted to trademark the word “Parkour” so that anyone who teaches “Parkour” would have to pay FIG royalties to use that term.
Many high level athletes seem to think the format which FIG is using for competitions has created largely uninspiring, cookie cutter straight line courses. they can be exciting for viewers but are quite limited from an athletes perspective.
The way they design competitions makes sense from a commercialized, mass viewership perspective, but FIG lacks understanding on the subtleties of direction changes, obstacle variety and other niche variables which only grassroots parkour practitioners would know.
It’s as if the MLB decided to create a soccer league, rewrite the rules and then claim that their Soccer league would be the only official one that could set athletes up for the Olympics.
Meanwhile the whole MLS exists.
A common saying within the community since 2017 is
“We are not gymnastics”.
Some welcome the FIG with open arms:
Friends of mine willingly attend and compete in FIG competitions and think they’re awesome. They are 1v1 down and back courses, quite similar to the one I did during the USA Parkour Cup last year. They are exciting to watch and thanks to FIG’s economies of scale, they reach a very large audience.
Many business owners including myself would love the influx of interest in parkour which would come from having parkour being an Olympic sport. We want as many people as possible to be exposed to this wonderful discipline.
Conclusion:
I would estimate that the parkour community is 80% against the FIG while 20% are embracing the new entity in the sport.
Personally, the idea of parkour being in the Olympics would be awesome. The corporatizing of parkour, however is something I am deeply against. I think the introduction of parkour to the Olympics should be a slow and deliberate undertaking.
Rock climbing recently became an Olympic sport but they way in which competitors had to compete was out of alignment with how they actually trained. Not to go into too much detail here but the climbing community was quite unhappy. We don’t want this for our beloved parkour.
Best case would be parkour having an official governing body to effectively represent us and organize a championship which pipelines to the Olympic level. This body could protect our legal rights to teach our own methods, utilize the best practices for competitions and establish grounded standards for coaching certifications. The right representatives could dot the I’s and cross the T’s for the Olympic Committee to admit us into the games.
Most parkour athletes agree that Sport Parkour League (SPL), with their format for Speed, Skill and Style divisions is the ideal model for elite level parkour competitions.
[You can easily find their recorded competitions on Youtube]
Parkour Earth is an organization who is vying for this position and there may be some other entities trying to do the same, but they don’t seem to have the resources and reputation to overpower FIG yet.
From my perspective, the right competition formats already exist, budding governance organizations are forming. It’s just a matter of time until we as a sport take the situation by the horns and “land” our spot in the Olympics on our own terms.
Until that happens, us athletes, coaches and business owners will keep doing our thing: embracing the sport we love.
