| Parkour
To the untrained eye,
parkour looks as absurd
as it does dangerous.
Participants, known as traceurs, throw themselves
around like Spiderman without a web or like
freestyle street-skateboarders
without the skateboards.
They literally
bounce off buildings, leap
across rooftops, run up walls, jump onto thin
ledges, and sometimes fall seven meters to the
ground, all without injuring themselves.
Parkour is ___1___ the art of moving
from point A to point B as quickly and
efficiently as possible.
Any obstacles along the way
must either be passed without a moment lost or used by
the traceurs to ___2___ themselves forward. Seeing someone
doing parkour, you might be ___3___ to think that there is
some emergency and the traceur is fleeing.
Parkour does not ___4___ contests
or teams, and it is strictly
noncompetitive.
In this sense, it cannot
be described as a sport. It
also has a strong philosophical
aspect that sets it apart ___5___ many other physical
pursuits.
Dedicated traceurs take
parkour ___6___, and they even
describe it as "a
way of life."
David Belle, ___7___ his friend Sebastien Foucan,
started parkour in France in the late 1980s. David's
father was an elite fireman
who ___8___ his son to physical training using military
obstacle courses. When this
obstacle-course training was
combined with elements of martial arts and
gymnastics and
applied to the physical
___9___ of a city, parkour was born.
Since its beginning in the ___10___ of Paris, parkour
has spread around the world, and has even
turned up in Hollywood.
Aside from YouTube, you can see some amazing
parkour action in the James Bond film, Casino Royale. |
