Parkour FAIL!

I’m sure readers are familiar with the sport of parkour (a variant is known as free running, but enthusiasts regard them as the same discipline in different forms). Wikipedia defines parkour as follows:

Parkour (sometimes also abbreviated to PK) or l’art du déplacement (English: the art of moving) is a physical discipline of French origin in which participants run along a route, attempting to negotiate obstacles in the most efficient way possible, as if moving in an emergency situation, using skills such as jumping and climbing, or the more specific parkour moves. The object is to get from a Point A to a Point B using only the human body and the objects in the environment around you. The obstacles can be anything in one’s environment, but parkour is often seen practiced in urban areas because of the many suitable public structures that are accessible to most people, such as buildings and rails.

Parkour has become more widely known through various films, including the James Bond epic Casino Royale in 2006. Here’s a partial chase scene from that movie where the person attempting to get away uses Parkour techniques.

(If you want to see the whole scene, including its climax, click here for the nine-minute-plus video.)

Be that as it may, there are many Parkour wannabes out there . . . and when they try to behave like advanced practitioners of the sport, things have a habit of going horribly wrong (very amusingly so, from the point of view of detached observers such as ourselves). Here’s a video clip of some of the disasters.

Oh, dear . . .

Peter