The most detailed article I’ve yet seen on the art of Parkour including Insightful personal interviews with the founder:
Parkour was created in Lisses, a medium prosperous suburb of Paris, in the early nineteen-nineties, by a reserved and restless teen-age boy named David Belle.
His father, Raymond, who died in 1999, was an acrobat and a hero fireman. In 1969, he appeared in newspaper photographs hanging from a cable attached to a helicopter above Notre Dame. The night before, someone had hung a Vietcong flag on the cathedral’s tower. Raymond was lowered like a spider on a thread, and he grabbed the flag.
David Belle is now thirty-three. …
The Sporting Scene: No Obstacles: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
from the movie District B13
Gymnastics Coaching.com 