I, along with many people all over the world have seen plenty of Youtube clips of some lunatic attempting (and often failing) to do a backflip off of, or onto a building, jump from one piece of playground equipment to another, or do handstands in some of the most dangerous places imaginable.
When one succedes at these stunts, then one is partaking in a sport known as "freerunning" (when you fail, you just look like an idiot). This sport (sometimes spelled as two words, sometimes as one, I have no idea which is correct, nor I think does anyone else) evolved from the French "parkour" by adding more acrobatics and the new philosophy of a complete freedom of movement. Freerunners (as seen in the BBC specials Jump London and Jump Britian) cover urban landscapes in a new way, finding a path from one building to the next, from one street to another, or across or through any structure one finds in a city that no one else would even consider trying.
Thus, freerunning stresses freedom of movement and expression; a person's imagination and physical abilities the only obstacles to discovering a new way to look at and travel the cities of the world, even as these cities themselves become increasingly homogenous and repetitive.
So, how can you have a Freerunning Competition that forces the freerunners to do all of their work within a relatively small stadium?
I just watched G4's coverage of the 2009 Barclaycard Freerun Championships. The competition took place in London a few weeks ago, housed within a structure built specifically for this reason. The stage had mulptile levels, metal bars, concrete tables, and a seperate, smaller stage so competitors could leap onto and off of it. They had one run of sixty seconds, then, the top ten went a second time to determine a winner. They were scored on their tricks' difficulty, the fluidity of their runs, how well they accomplished their tricks, and creativity.
The competition was fun and impressive to watch and even though I'd never seen one of these before today, even I could tell that the winner Tim "Livewire" Shieff was, by far, the best one.
However, this is a competition in a sport that is supposed to stress freedom limited only by one's own capabilities. So, by putting it into a specifically limited space aren't you already going away from the initial ideas of the sport? There was scaffolding enclosing the competition space, which I thought looked perfect for some of these tricks (it would certainly help your creativity score), but, I kept wondering whether or not the competitors had been told to stay off of it or risk being disqualified. And if that's true, haven't you already lost?
I suppose this is how freestyle street skateboarders first felt when the X-Games and other groups started moving their freedom of movement sport to a small, prescribed space. Actually, some still feel like that, and there is an ongoing controvery between some freerunners, those who compete in freerunning compeitions, and parkour enthusiasts, who believe any competition completely misses the point.
Now that I think about it, any sport like skateboarding, freerunning, or whatever will come next has to lose some of its original spirit in order to become bigger and reach a wider audience. They are selling out to a certain extent, but they're also adapting to changing tastes as one's pastime gets more and more famous on a larger, worldwide scale.
So here's how it works: you start something that gets really popular among a select group; then it starts to spread out from your small fanbase to a wider audience; then you have to continue to grow for the good of the sport you made, so you change some things to make it more accessible; then it gets really popular and you're a genius and a founder of a major sport, but it isn't quite what you originally made, and you just have to hope you were among the first ones to start getting money from what you created in the first place.
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Good point. When an "extereme" sport hits the mainstream, it is never as extereme as it was to begin with. You pointed out skateboarding, but I know that snowboarding has the same problem, if not more so since it is now an Olympic sport. I have heard that some of the best snowboarders refuse to go to the Olympics, especially the half-pipers, since the games put a stop to a lot of their creativity. But, if you are one of the snowboarding heads, are you really going to turn down the oppurtunity to be an Olympic sport, especially with all the extra exposure and hence the extra money that comes with it? Of course you aren't, and if you have to dumb it down to appeal the large cross section rather than your devoted fans, well then I guess you just console yourself on the large piles of extra cash you will have hanging around. You can see this over and over again in anything, from movies (Christoper Nolan, Bryan Singer, and even Alfonso Curon going from smaller pictures to big blockbusters to make a lot more cash) to even, back to previous example skateboarding (Ryan Scheter?-the MTV dude-making a reality show, being called a sell out, but is now laughing all the way to the bank). To use a music example, do you want a small group of devoted fans, never "sell out" and be playing in small bars and clubs your whole life, or do you "sell out" make the video and the poppy type music, and be able to play large areneas to full crowds full of people who probably only know the two songs that got played to death by the radio? Skateboarding and snowboarding took the "sell out" option...now will freerunning? Time will tell
ReplyDeleteSnowboarding is different because there's no "street" snowboarding. Outside of the so-called mainstream professionals, you really only find those few guys that live to find that fresh, pure snow on an isolated mountain somewhere, and most of them don't have the freestyle skills to make it as big as a Shaun White. For that matter, taking a chopper to a mountain just to snowboard is a bit expensive.
ReplyDeleteRyan Sheckler is an interesting case because he has grown up in a world where X-Games and other skateboarding competitions were already big enough to make them a main focus of his career. For that matter, all of the Brazilian skateboarders following in the success of Bob Burnquist have come up in a skateboarding scene where there is little to no genuine street skateboarding and instead a focus almost entirely on competition.
What interested me about the freerunning thing was that I am seeing this shift from an uninhindered sport to smaller, more controlled athletic competitions, which I did not see with skateboarding or snowboarding, because the internet wasn't that big yet, I was still young, and there weren't as many TV channels. Also, there is a philosophy behind freerunning which is literally in the name: Free Running. One Runs Free over an urban landscape where most people seem stuck doing things the same old way over and over and over again. It is uninhindered originality in the face of modern day conformity, and yet by limiting it to an athletic competition, you are forcing freerunners to conform. The philosophy at the heart of freerunning is what makes it different from etreme sports like skateboarding, and what makes its selling out different; almost ignoring everything the founders stood for just to get famous make some cash.