By Leaps and Bounds: Shanghai Parkour
By Elena Rubanik
One afternoon along The Bund, a small group of athletes dressed in sportswear begins to leap, flip and pop handstands on the concrete, momentarily drawing more attention than the iconic views of Lujiazui across the water. It’s a sight we’re apt to see more in the future. Parkour has come to Shanghai.
Parkour is a sport that doesn’t just defy expectation; it leaps over it in a single bound. The men and women of parkour soar through the air, bouncing off walls and flipping over obstacles with such ease that we can scarcely believe our eyes; it’s the stuff of Chinese kung fu fantasy movies.
But unlike the actors in these dramas, parkour practitioners, or traceurs, perform their feats without the aid of a harness or wires. It looks dangerous, an activity reserved only for a bunch of elite professionals. However, a chat with some members of Shanghai Parkour reveals that nothing could be further from the truth.
From beginners to long term enthusiasts, the membership base of Shanghai Parkour is vast, and the biggest challenges affecting everyone tend to be more mental than physical. Thoughts of what could go wrong when attempting a backflip off of a two metre high wall are apt to discourage most of us from even beginning to learn how to accomplish such a feat. Still, Kyle Shapiro, a representative of Shanghai Parkour explains that mastering any sort of trick in parkour, much like any other sport, requires an intense period of training in order to become good. "We don't do things that we can't do. We train to prevent injuries."
Eye-catching results it may have, but a large part of becoming good at parkour comes from being introspective and understanding one’s own body more and its limitations. Only after coming to an understanding of what these limitations are, are traceurs able to proceed to the "next level" and begin doing tricks. This often comes with the discovery that if a certain move can’t be made in one way (due to one’s own physical limitations), alternatives are always available. In this way, regardless of skill level, some aspects of parkour are accessible to everyone.
Becoming a traceur can for some people be a once-in-a-while activity for staying active, or a way towards becoming a professional performer or stuntman for movies and commercials. It is the latter that Shapiro and his teammates are most interested in, and have consequently formed a stunt team loosely affiliated with Shanghai Parkour called Link, training seriously in some of the more challenging stunts of parkour.
Link’s impressive skills, as to be expected, offer a lot of surprises, but there’s an additional surprise to be had in finding out that women are also very much involved in the sport. "We are all very close friends," says Simone Zhang, one of the women involved in Link. In her own experience, she says that the only way in which women might be treated differently is that they gain more support and help during training sessions. But, of course, this really depends on the woman and her goals. Some women who join Shanghai Parkour have been gymnasts in the past; others, like Zhang, just enjoy active sports such as running.
Shanghai Parkour and Link hold training sessions four to five times a week, each time for three to six hours. So far for Shanghai Parkour, over one hundred people from across Shanghai have found themselves involved: men and women, locals and foreigners, with a range of different backgrounds and ages (from fifteen to mid-thirties).
Language turns out not an issue either. If your Chinese is only on the level of an awkward ni hao, there’s no need to worry. After all, picking up parkour involves using your voice less, and focusing more on seeing the possibilities of your body.
To find out more about about parkour in Shanghai, e-mail [email protected]
