The first time he tried parkour, Dagan Shaw felt like a superhero.Supplied
Dagan Shaw didn’t plan on becoming a parkour coach – it started with a whim and a church wall. Seventeen years ago, fuelled by his Taekwondo training and a flash of curiosity, he tried climbing the side of a building. To his surprise, he made it. Perched on the roof, high above Ottawa’s streetlights, Shaw felt something shift. “I could see the whole city from up there,” he says. “It was like this little world that belonged just to me.”
At the time, Shaw didn’t know what he was doing could be classified as parkour, a high-adrenaline sport where practitioners run, jump, vault and roll over urban obstacles. “Our only judge is the concrete,” Shaw says. “If you land feet-first and it doesn’t hurt, that’s a success.”
Even when battling the urban landscape, Tamila Benabdallah of Montreal says she finds parkour to be meditative.Supplied
Founded in the outskirts of Paris in the 1990s, parkour is steadily growing in popularity, with dedicated parkour gyms springing up in Canada. At his Ottawa parkour school, Shaw, who goes by Dagan Mercury on social media, offers weekend classes for over 100 students. “To see them go from not knowing their left and right, to being able to run up a wall and roll off a ledge – it’s incredibly rewarding.”
One of the beginner parkour moves is a shoulder roll: a diagonal roll from shoulder to hip, allowing for an elegant recovery from a jump. The technique can come in handy even outside of practice. One of Shaw’s students recently tripped while running in the rain but remembering his training and swiftly tucked into a forward role. “He popped back up on his feet, took no damage at all, and looked cool while doing it,” Shaw says.
More advanced moves include the reverse vault: spinning your body 360 degrees in mid-air while vaulting over an obstacle.
One of Shaw’s students, Simon Norman, 17, says he loves setting a goal for a new move, and then spending weeks or months perfecting it. “When I finally get the move, it’s a great feeling,” he says.
Norman has been trying to coax his friends to join him at parkour, and hopes the sport will keep gaining momentum, especially with the help of social media: “It’s really cool to see all the interesting moves and creativity of the community,” Norman says.
For Shaw, that shared creativity is one of the best things about parkour. Because nobody is competing professionally, there’s no gatekeeping when it comes to new parkour techniques. “We’re not against each other. It’s us against the concrete,” says Shaw.
When the International Gymnastics Federation tried to regulate parkour, there was swift backlash from the community. “No one owns parkour,” Shaw says. “We’re supposed to be dashing across rooftops and vaulting over cars. This isn’t a fancy, fussy sport for judges to give you a score on.”
That was appealing to Louisa Chang, based in Toronto, who got into parkour after being a competitive swimmer. In swimming, you’re always looking to beat the time, Chang says. However, with parkour, she found creative freedom. “Everyone can find their style. There’s no one way to do parkour,” she says.
Although the sport can appear risky, depending on the landscape, parkour practitioner Tamila Benabdallah of Montreal describes it as “meditative.” She trains almost daily and has over 40,000 followers on Instagram. “I find a flow when I do it that makes me really be in the present moment,” she says.
When Shaw first started doing parkour in Ottawa, some passersby would watch him climbing on city infrastructure, like flipping off a utility box. “They’d tell you they’re going to call the police on you,” he says.
Things have changed. Now, Shaw says it’s more likely to have people ask to record videos of him. He hopes parkour will remain free-form and rooted in community and would love to see more dedicated parkour parks and gyms where enthusiasts can safely practice the sport without disruption. “It’s still pretty niche, but I’ve seen recognition of the sport grow,” Shaw says.
