Why the weird name?
Does it have to do with working out your core at the park??
100 years ago, a French naval officer named Georges Herbert was on a tour through Africa. He encountered wild, instinctive humans who were capable of jumping, swinging and climbing with ease. Astounded by the African’s physical prowess, his life’s mission became to bring these methods to the first world, for military purposes.
He soon wrote a book called Le Methode Natuelle (The Natural Method).
In this book, he coined the term parcours du combattant, which translates to “path of the warrior” as a way to describe his obstacle navigation based training protocol.
Parcours du combattant was graciously embraced not only by the French military but by their fire and police departments as well. The name was shortened to just parcours.
Jump to the late 1980’s in Lisses, a suburb in the outskirts of Paris. A group of local teenagers and young adults, whose parents were high ranking military officials, began taking these concepts to the streets.
Led by David Belle, the group came to be known as the Yamakazi which roughly translated from Lingala, an African language, means Strong Man, Strong Spirit. They would train hard, creating a culture of using obstacle navigation as a rite of passage to evolve as people.
In 2003, a crew of French athletes traveled across the English Channel to film a documentary called Jump London. For the English speaking audience, they replaced the ‘c’ for ‘k’ and removed the ‘s’ at the end of the word to bring us to the modern day spelling of parkour.
Jump London was the catalyst for the widespread proliferation of parkour through the English speaking world. Many people who my friends and I look up to in the parkour community got their inspiration from that documentary.
From there parkour spread worldwide, as it continues to do to this day.
