Parkour Has a Pro Athlete Problem.

When I started training parkour in 2007, there were no competitions, sponsored athletes, or influencers. There were no gyms and only a handful of real coaches. It never crossed my mind for those first few months that one could even be a “pro” parkour athlete - excuse me, traceur. After all…what would even separate a pro from an amateur?

By the end of 2008, that had changed dramatically. A handful of athletes were making (what seemed to be) a living competing in events like Red Bull Art of Motion and the Barclaycard World Freerunning Championship. Gyms like Monkey Vault, APEX, and Parkour Visions had popped up. And teams like Tempest, APK, and Urban Freeflow were working with major brands on commercial campaign after commercial campaign.

When I graduated high school in 2010, I was sold on being a “pro.” I’d competed in an Art of Motion, been recruited by the WFPF, and traveled across the Western USA with some of my biggest training idols. Against my better judgement, I decided to stick with school and attend university. It was tough sitting through math class while my friends were starring in feature films (if you count Run and Freerunner as feature films) or traveling the world making parkour videos.

Some of my best memories to this day revolve around those summers I spent traveling Europe sleeping on rooftops, training 10 hours a day, getting home at midnight the night before classes started, and stumbling drunkenly into Complex Analysis like Alice emerging from Wonderland.

But, by the time I’d graduated in 2014, many of those “pro” athletes I’d been looking up to were dropping off the map.

Red Bull stopped investing so wildly in Art of Motion. The novelty of parkour-themed commercial campaigns wore off. And the first wave of parkour gyms began to close as they struggled to deal with the day-to-day realities of running a successful business. That downward trend in parkour’s commercial growth continued until 2020 when the world - and most parkour businesses - shut down.

Since then, we’ve seen grassroots parkour organizations step up.

SPL has supplanted Art of Motion as our sport’s premiere competition and built an international web of regional qualifiers. Companies like Red Bull and Adidas have continued to support a handful of pros. And - until recently - STORROR had been taking a more and more direct role in supporting athletes through competitive video formats and the STORROR awards.

The growth that both COVID and FIG forced our community into has been fantastic. We’ve done more with less than - arguably - any other sport out there. But we’ve also started to back ourselves into a corner. By focusing so heavily on the “pro” and competitive end of parkour, we’ve ignored the big questions that got us here in the first place. What do we get out of parkour? Why should we stick with it? And what do we do when “going pro” doesn’t work out?

What Do We Get Out Of Parkour?

Let’s start with what should be a pretty basic question. What do we get out of this whole parkour thing? Why do it in the first place? For most of us nerdy enough to read a parkour Substack post, the initial answer is that it’s fun. It helps us learn to move better, helps us get stronger, and lets us look at the world around us in a new, interesting way.

Now let’s look at how we present parkour to the world. Does it reflect that narrative? Does our content encourage non-practitioners to see parkour as a practice centered around fun, personal challenge, and a transformative vision of the world around us?

I think most of us would acknowledge that’s not the case. For the past decade, parkour content has almost exclusively pushed physical mastery at the highest level, increasing levels of risk taking, and cosplay. We all know why…it has been one of the few ways athletes could make a living as creators. But the core story it told about parkour was one that made our sport feel equal parts exclusive and cringe, and ultimately meant for consumption…not participation.

There’s an idea in basic marketing that brands should share a mix of entertaining, emotional, and educational content. For a long time, we excelled at the first two and neglected the last. We’d get someone’s attention, get them excited, then leave them with no easy way to engage. Our message seemed to be, if you’re not all in then sit back and watch.

That seems to be changing. I’ve tried to put my money where my mouth is recently by sharing more coaching and community-oriented content. Callun Lavington was one of the first to do so. And more are following. This kind of content is so important at breaking down the perceived barriers-to-entry for parkour. It helps create an entry point for the hobbyist, and gives permission to dabblers.

We need dabblers and hobbyists. Most of us early parkour athletes were exactly that. Strong communities like rock climbing and CrossFit have a huge base of participants that love the practice but have no aspirations to “go pro.” Parkour would be lucky to have the same - and we’ll need to if we ever hope to deal with issue #2.

Why Should We Stick With It?

While I think this question is vital for all of us, it becomes particularly important in the context of gyms. I love that “sport parkour” is growing. Particularly here in the USA, parents often need the external validation of a competitive format to justify keeping their kid enrolled in parkour as opposed to sports with a clear collegiate path like soccer, football, or basketball. But if competitive parkour becomes their “why,” they’ll be in for a rude awakening when they do manage to get to the highest level.

We’ve created an interesting feedback loop for ourselves in parkour. Many parkour gyms rely on major competitions to keep students interested, while major competitions rely on parkour gyms to feed and fund their competitive infrastructure. This model works great in traditional sports where students are funneled into collegiate and eventually professional athletics. The payout for the winners is huge, and it makes it worth the risk for the eventual losers.

In parkour, our most successful competitors are making - at best - a living wage. The risk, both of injury and of time wasted, is massive when the potential payout could have been made working at your local grocery. And we’re left relying on a performance-driven incentive model in a sport where elite performance has little incentive.

Ironically, it ends up looking a lot like the gymnastics model…push tens of thousands of kids through the ringer to end up with a few who make a decent living for one Olympic cycle before fading into obscurity.

While youth students aren’t thinking like this, you can bet a decent percentage of their parents are. And it’s the parents who need to be sold on the benefits of keeping kids in parkour. So if the benefit isn’t financial success or a clear path to a college scholarship, why should they stick with it?

The soft stuff. Leadership. Creative thinking. Problem solving. The stuff beyond skill progression that so many of us get from our practice. If we aren’t building at least a solid chunk of our narrative around these squishier benefits of parkour, we’re doing ourselves a disservice. By raising a generation of “pro athletes,” we’re building higher and higher on a shaky foundation.

What Do We Do When Going “Pro” Doesn’t Work Out?

Enter the dabbler. We need to embrace the fact that most of us will never make a living off of parkour. And that’s good. Soccer is successful precisely because so many of us at one time aspired to be pros and aren’t. Despite that, millions of us still play casually with friends or in rec leagues around the world. And accepting that we’ll never go pro doesn’t stop us from wanting to get better.

We need to find better ways to articulate that progression and profession are not the same thing. If we truly value personal progression in parkour, we should have no trouble finding healthy ways to balance our training with school, or work, or families.

But for a long time, it seems a subconscious narrative has been that we’re all pursuing not a personal peak but the peak level of the entire sport. Social media makes this comparison trap easy, and in a sport as dynamic as parkour it’s impossible for most of us to stay even remotely close to the top athletes.

Our personal peak will always be changing - and unlike the overall level of global parkour, it won’t always improve. Some of us may have hit it already. But the beautiful thing about parkour is that it’s so diverse. When one door closes, four windows open…and while that kong pre you wanted may always be out of reach, accepting that could open up the chance to work the reverse-to-cat…or catback 540…or 360 pre.

Hobbies evolve. They’re self-guided. And they fit into the peaks and valleys of our lives in a way that brings us comfort - not stress.

So many of my fellow mid-2000’s practitioners dropped out of the sport once they realized they couldn’t go pro, or would never replicate their peak achievements. That’s fine. People can absolutely quit or reassess their relationship with their sport! But they shouldn’t feel obligated to do so by a narrative that everyone can - and should - strive to be at the top of the sport.

How exactly we model “hobby parkour” will change from person to person. But by talking about it, embracing it, and encouraging it I think we can redefine the direction our sport seems to be going and build a healthier, more diverse, and more durable community.

-Max