Erasing the Intentions of Countersports

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of parkour is the media craze from the early 2000s that featured individuals bouncing or running off walls in ridiculous ways to gain clout and internet fame off of Youtube. Similarly, when I think of skateboarding, I think of the style and aesthetic of skaters and the skater lifestyle made popular by brands like Thrasher and Pacsun. Both of these “sport countercultures” started off as athletic movements that meant to connect practitioners with their urban environments in ways not intended by the institutions that laid out the rules and regulations of the urban cityscapes in which people live. Now, these resistance sports have been commodified and regulated through skateboarding competitions or widespread media attention which strip the nuance and purpose out of athletic movements that were supposed to help individuals reject the mainstream institutions that police the use of urban space.

In an article about Parkour and Anarcho-Environmentalism by Michael Atkinson, parkour enthusiasts, or “traceurs,” use parkour as a method of discovering the natural interconnectedness of their urban environment that is subverted by the capitalist-technological control of urban space. Traceurs believe that the zoning and regulation of cityscapes block opportunities for interconnectedness with others and self-discovery to maintain humans as cogs to advance technology and production for capitalist benefit. Therefore parkour became a sport counterculture movement with the goal to help individuals become more aware of the restrictions of their urban surroundings and to help free up mental space and energy within themselves by confronting physical struggles during their “free running jams.” However, once mainstream media began to cover the parkour movement, more emphasis was placed on the spectacle and performance style of the countersport and the meaning behind the movement was lost to commodification.

As another type of sport counterculture, skateboarding underwent a similar commodification and loss of meaning to parkour as it has become a mainstream sport and lifestyle in popular culture. What started off as a fringe countersport meant to antagonize the intended use and purpose of public city structures and space, has turned into an Olympic sport and lifestyle brand that has ironically become integrated into the capitalist institutions the sport’s underlying purpose rejected.

Both of these athletic counterculture movements were originally practiced as forms of physical antagonism towards the regulation and oppression of natural movement within urban spaces by dominant capitalist institutions. Traceurs and skateboarders alike used these forms of creative physical expression as ways to gain individual meaning and ownership of spaces by antagonizing the rules set on those spaces that control humans for the sake of capitalist-technological development. While the transgression of urban institutional rules by these countersports could be seen as a crime, what I believe is more of a crime is the absorption of the countersport movements into institutionalized popular culture and the erasure of the purpose and intention behind creative physical expression in urban spaces.