Note, March 2012: The video links in this post are dead; I haven’t been able to relocate the video on YouTube or elsewhere. I’m sure the video exists somewhere — when I find it, I’ll update this post.
Here’s the coolest thing I’ve seen online in weeks: an astonishing eight-and-a-half-minute reel in which an incredibly agile young man demonstrates his skills at parkour, a physical discipline of French origin that’s equal parts extreme sport, urban dance, and life philosophy. Parkour really took off in Europe a few years ago, thanks partly to a fantastic 2002 promo ad for the BBC that starred the founder of parkour, David Belle, as a man who traverses dozens of physical obstacles—roofs, walls, fire escapes, people—as he rushes home to watch his favorite BBC1 shows.
The dude in the video below is apparently Russian or Latvian. You can watch the video here (a decent-quality Flash version) or here (a lower-quality streaming version). The first two or three minutes are a little slow, but then it really takes off. The bleak postcommunist landscape is somehow the perfect setting for this guy’s amazingly graceful moves.
Lots more info about parkour here.
