During 1902, French naval lieutenant George Hebert witnessed the indigenous people of St. Pierre, moving around the Caribbean island with great ease during a volcanic eruption. They were able to get around great obstacles in there path with extreme grace and efficiency while the Europeans on the island were very clumsy in comparison and often searched for familiar paths which no longer existed. This sight inspired him to create “the natural method”, a training discipline that involved running, swimming, and climbing. This training method evolved from becoming a basis for all French military training, to what we know of parkour today.
Fast forward almost one hundred years and Raymond Belle, a veteran of the French Special Forces, returns home and teaches his son David Belle, and David's best friend Sebastian Foucan what he learned in his training. David and Sebastian take that training and combine it with gymnastics to create parkour. They get a practice group together and name themselves the Yamikazi, after a tribe of warriors in Africa. Soon after Sebastian moved to the UK and started to create a more creative vision of parkour known as freerunning. Freerunning focuses less on going somewhere, and lets the traceur incorporate flips, break dancing, and martial arts tricking into their movement.
What made both parkour and freerunning popular extremely quickly was in 2005 with the arrival of YouTube. Anyone from around the world could post their video online and parkour became a global movement. The worlds first major competition involving parkour and/or freerunning was the RED BULL ART OF MOTION held in Vienna in October 2007.
“It was at this event that the first contact between the eventual WFPF founders (World Freerunning Parkour Federation) and their athlete partners Ryan Doyle and Tim Shieff took place. First place in the competition was taken by Ryan Doyle. Doyle experienced a bad leg break on his third and final round, reminding everyone that this was indeed a sport that entails considerable risk, and giving some justification to those who did and do believe that competition could have a negative impact on the sport and movement.” (http://www.wfpf.com/history-parkour/)
