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The word is French, though it doesn’t look it, being a respelling of parcours, ‘course’, here in the sense of ‘obstacle course’. In Romance languages, where k is alien, it has a trendy flavour. Spanish squatters call themselves okupistas instead of ocupistas.
Parcours has an amusing history not apparent in current usage. It derives from the late Latin percursus, which, about the time when William was conquering, meant ‘the right to drive pigs into a forest’. The aim was to feed them on beech mast or acorns. In Britain percursus was either ‘the right to pursue game into a forest’ or ‘an agreement about the migration of tenants’ — all very Norman.
By the 1970s parcours had found its way into American English to mean ‘a jogging track with exercise stations at intervals’. Then along came David Belle, a Frenchman born in 1973, who applied gymnastics to concrete architecture, sprinting up rock-climbing installations and vaulting stairwells in banlieues. He came to attention in a video called Speed Air Man. Belle and his circle of young practitioners were nicknamed Yamakasi, although, for Parkour enthusiasts, he preferred the name tracers, now modified to traceurs. For ten years BBC television has used for self-publicity a sequence of him jumping from building to building, but I had never bothered to find out who was doing it.
An Englishman, Damien Walters, is good at the art too, and at free-running. The difference between the two is not easy to discern, though a piece in The Big Issue in 2009 is quoted by the OED to suggest that free-running is parkour’s ‘more freeform acrobatic cousin’. Neither is as easy to pursue as video clips suggest, and many teenagers do themselves injuries that cannot even be shown on E4’s Rude Tube. At least it convinces youngsters that the Orthodox Church is not for softies.
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