International Gymnast - January/February 2009

on a waiting list. The course was very successful.”

I jumped at the chance of getting kids

Reddin points out that safety is paramount, and that only experienced gymnastics coaches can offer Freestyle instruction. Even then, only a prescribed list of skills is offered for insurance purposes.

off the streets, into a safer environment.
Now we have at least 200 a week.

—Anne Bidmeadof Basingstoke Gymnastic Club, on her gym’s “Freestyle” class

The curriculum was created by Basingstoke Gym Club coaches Anthony Rose and Steve Hough. “The response was initially almost hostile to the idea of accepting this as a discipline within British Gymnastics, but we were able to show that most of the skills on the proposed syllabus were simply … variations of existing gymnastics elements,” Rose says.

After the 2003 Freerunning documentary “Jump London,” (starring Foucan), the interest level for Freestyle in Britain has been on a continual upswing. “It encourages teenage boys to be practicing gymnastics, a section of the population that is notoriously difficult to attract to or retain in a typical gymnastics class,” Rose e Bxplains.

ASINGSTOKE is one of the first clubs to offer such a program, and gym owner Anne Bidmead is a believer. “I jumped at the chance of getting kids off the streets, into a safer environment,” she says. “Now we have at least 200 a week.”

These students rarely miss a Freestyle class, Bidmead says. “In traditional gymnastics, everybody has to line up on a piece of apparatus, and you have to wait for your go, and then join the queue at the end,” she says. “These kids don’t want to do that; they just want to keep moving. We have a coach on each piece, so they rotate around when they feel like it. …They’re not actually going towards competition. They’re just doing it because they really are enjoying [it].”

Gabe Nunez won the first World Freerun Championships last September.

Chase Armitage, 23, has been flipping off fences since he was a teen in Basingstoke. “Me and a few friends began before we even knew that Parkour and Freerunning were around,” he

Chase Armitage (right, below) of England started his own team called 3RUN ( www.3run.co.uk), which has done numerous commercial ventures. Armitage is currently in negotiations for a reality TV show.

says. “We didn’t have any access to gyms, so we just trained out in the streets and tried [to] find ways to use the environment.”

When the gym in Basingstoke opened, Armitage encouraged Bidmead to add Freestyle to the curriculum. Now he and his friends train there a few times a week. “We absolutely love that place,” says Armitage, a six-time British champion in the Chinese martial art of Wushu. “The (spring) floor’s kind of like a dream for us.”

Armitage also started his own team, called 3RUN, and the acrobatic talents of its members are in high demand for commercials and movies. But making a career out of

Freerunning was never the plan.

“It’s more of a discipline about making your body and mind strong,” says

Armitage, whose team includes younger brothers Cole, 20, and Cane, 17, and several others. “It’s all about being healthy.”

Regardless of the label you put on it—Parkour, Freerunning, Freestyle—most individuals share a common passion for the discipline. Chris

Stevenson, a wiry 18-year-old from Oklahoma City, is a relative newcomer to Parkour. Inspired by David Belle videos and Jackie Chan movies, Stevenson co-founded Oklahoma Parkour. They meet three times a week for an open “jam,” where he and his friends offer free instruction to anyone who wants it.

“A lot of people who get into Parkour think it is climbing on roofs, because that’s what they saw some-

body in France doing,” says Stevenson, who also trains at Oklahoma Gold Gymnastics. “Clearly, our whole goal is to help people and show them the safe way to progress. It takes a very long time to get to where the movements are actually even impressive.”

Since the obvious place of practice is often a populated urban environment, Stevenson tries to keep a low profile while executing movements that would make Spiderman jealous. “We try to stay away from crowds, because they usually influence people to do things beyond their limits,” he says.

Such might have been the case at the first staged competitions. Ryan Doyle (England) won the Red Bull “Art of Motion” in Vienna, Austria, in October 2007, despite breaking his leg during a bad landing.

The inaugural World Freerun Championships were held in London last September, and the first of 23 competitors from 17 countries went splat and lost a tooth. For the record,

Gabriel Nunez, a member of Team Tempest out of Los Angeles, was declared the world champion by his fellow competitors, who also served as judges.

Of course, injuries are part of gymnastics, too, but it’s debatable whether a discipline with no firm rules should be a contest in the first place. “It didn’t represent the sport in the right way, so we didn’t get involved in that,” Armitage says of the world championships. “It was more of, like, an acrobatic display.”