What is Parkour?

Parkour is an extreme movement discipline where the goal is to get from point A to point B by overcoming all the obstacles that are in our way, assuming that no fortress is impregnable.  It involves agility, explosivity, speed. It’s a question of logic: how I leave this place, climb this wall, natural movement of the human body.

History

I never liked to do things like everyone else, to follow the mass. My twin brother Stéphane and I didn’t want to do football like everyone in the recreation fields. we always wanted to do things differently. Doing martial arts, splits. So Parkour was a revelation, but it was also logical for us.

With our friends, we were already playing with hip hop, diverse martial arts, and capoiera. We amused ourselves in the streets, jumping over things. But we didn’t have a name for it.

In 1998 on December 7 there was a French TV show about hip hop, and they spoke about Yamakasi and their discipline.  That was the first time I heard the term ‘L’art du displacement’ (the art of moving). A revelation. There were video clips and I recognized the locations, La Défense and Evry (the home town of Yamakasi).

I was already a gymnast. After the show, I planned a challenge to myself to make all the same movements.

We began in 1999. We made « soirées bitume » (hard ground). With my brother Stephane and other friends, at a place near a station in Gennevilliers. We played music. We were friends who trained capoiera. We made hip hop, capoiera, and eventually the movements of parkour. We learned alone, without help.

At first we were Stéphane, Daniel, Otmane, Raimundo, and Nabil. Later came Cyril and Niemoul.

I proposed that as a team we would live adventure, blog, film, internet, to become known.

I had the idea to find a name, and I thought of « The Shadows ». But there’s a problem with people who mispronounce in English. And when they mispronounce it, it’s a name of laundry soap. One time Stephane and Raimondu saw a capoierist with pants with the word Adrenaline. It’s a logical name. At first we were just called ‘Adrenaline’. Later we became ‘Team Adrenaline’.

Yamakasi’s terrain was Evry. There was Paris 13, the Chinese Quarter, which became known as a spot for Parkour. We didn’t want to train our own district at first, because we didn’t like it. So La Défense became the quarter of Adrenaline. The first TV video of Yamakasi in 1998 was filmed there and I went there to copy everything, to create evidence to prove ourselves. We trained a lot at La Défense. We met people there who didn’t know Parkour before and discovered it through us.

One of our guys, Raimundo, had a blog at a French site Skyrock, where he introduced Team Adrenaline.  The people adored our blog because we were the first to show gifs of Parkour. Skyrock had « blog of the week ». For two weeks we were the top blog. Many people thought that Adrenaline opened the « generation Parkour Skyrock », because many people discovered the Art of Displacement through our blog.

There was a site le-Parkour.com. Bruno managed that site. He was in contact with David Belle and others. One day we sent a message to the forum to say hello to the practicants. And we received a mail from Bruno, who was very happy to hear from us because he had heard we had a super level. He asked if we had a video. And at that moment we had a video of our training. Stephane had amused himself making an edit, called  15.17. We sent a shorter version called Adrenaline L’art du Displacement to Bruno and he adored it. He said he had never seen a video made like that, it was truly different. He put it on the site and the server crashed because so many people downloaded it. And after that many people knew us. I think that first video was 2004. Later we put 15.17 on the internet too. 

We made another video before, Vertige, but it was never online. It was long. It was when we were 7 members. No one else has seen that. Another video that was never on the internet was Adrenaline No Limit. We showed it at the festival, la Folle Journée du cinoche.