Parkour vs Shortcutting

Ollie (great name) demonstrates a side vault.

Today there exists the lingering, mainly Youtube, fad of Parkour.  It is defined as: the non-competitive sport of traversing mainly urban landscapes by running, climbing and jumping. I heard a podcast recently that even named the founder: Dave Belle.  One day in the nineties he vaulted a mail box, thus Parkour was invented.  Hold up...really?...really?   I seem to remember vaulting in the seventies and eighties.  The big difference is that Dave Belle filmed, posted, and formalized this activity. What a weird media construct world we live in.

French and I did not invent Parkour either, but we had our own trend: Shortcutting.  We'd challenge each other to see who could get to school the fastest.  I guess this is the rule we broke: Parkour is strictly no-competitive.  To win you'd have to go through people's yards; this would cut entire blocks off the route. 

We'd vault fences, climb onto and over garden sheds, and sprint through lawn sprinklers to get to school the fastest.  Pancake had one secret route that went behind a garage, then across an old boat, then over a pool fence. 

French and Sweaty were pretty hard to beat.  They could really "haul ass" on the straight stretch.  The only time we'd win for sure was when French brought Bruce Fish.  He'd have to slow down and boost him over every fence. 

My sons have taken this up recently.  It is not 1979 anymore, when we got away with shortcutting, so I had to explain that in 2011 people call the police if kids run through their yards.  My sons have made some "fake" videos of  "Parkour" - consider them more about film making then Parkour.  Maybe they'll go down in history as the inventors of  Parkour 2.0, or Shortcutting 2.0, or ...?