In Brighton, East Sussex, a man stands at a rooftop’s edge. It’s not a long gap to the rooftop opposite, but it is three or four stories high. There’s also the fact that the man isn’t just trying to clear the gap, but to get a perfect stick: only the balls of his feet touching the landing, heels hanging out over air, no forward (or, heaven forbid, backward) movement, just a flourish of grace and balance waiting on the other side of possible death.
With his friends perched on the surrounding rooftops and curious passersby watching from below, the man measures his steps, gathers speed, and leaps. And flies. And sticks it. Cheers erupt, death is defied, and before you can take in the moment, he turns right around and sticks the return jump, doubling down on his temptation of fate just for the love of the game.
The man is Benj Storror Cave, and his perfect stick has just been captured by several carefully angled cameras for the YouTube channel that shares his middle name. This video—“Parkour STICK IT Challenge”—has three million views. And it had better, considering the ostensible disruption Benj and his friends are causing the peaceful community of Brighton, one of many areas around the world that still consider the risky stunt he just pulled a borderline criminal nuisance. But try telling that to the jubilant friends around Benj, or the stunned civilian witnesses who just got more than they paid for. Go ahead and argue the fruitlessness of this micro-miracle to any of Storror’s ten million loyal subscribers—but particularly to one watching in quiet awe from across an ocean, head still spinning with secondhand vertigo.
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There aren’t too many lines connecting Paris, France, and Plano, Texas, but at least one of them is written in cursive. That would be the line traced by parkour, an urban, movement-based sport that originated with the French but eventually ran, vaulted, and flipped its way to an unathletic tween at Rice Middle School, deep in the heart of the North Texas suburbs.
I found parkour as most people did: through some half-remembered combination of The Office jokes and Casino Royale’s opening chase. As John Krasinski’s Jim succinctly defines it in the former, and as Daniel Craig and Sébastien Foucan succinctly demonstrate in the latter, parkour involves getting “from point A to point B as creatively as possible.” That definition is contested, as some—including the so-called “father of parkour,” Frenchman David Belle—theorize a more functional purpose for all that movement. But regardless of whether it’s being performed for survival or seemingly the opposite, there’s something undeniably catchy about watching people fling themselves to, toward, or from something.
Doubly so if you’re the aforementioned tween whose carpool schedule depended on moms with more pressing matters than whether their kids got picked up from middle school right at 2:45 or closer to 3:15. My friends and I were young, bored, “gifted and talented” kids (standardized tests told us so!) with a surplus of imagination and a dearth of after-school outlets in which to funnel it. Just so, we were ready and willing to fling ourselves from a hard day of pre-algebra into the welcoming arms of this extreme street sport the second we learned about it.
Were they any good? you’re wondering. We were eager. The Rice Middle School rear carpool area wasn’t exactly graded for professional parkour, but as it happens, neither were we. What we did have was a vague notion of the sport (“it’s just like… jumping over or off of things”) and preteen bodies built of that cartoonish elasticity that seems to make them either totally indestructible or broken in multiple places—a binary that we were happy to test anytime a delayed ride gifted us a spare 30 minutes.
What that meant in execution was closer to Andy Bernard than James Bond, but in theory, we were immortals. It’s funny: looking back now, I can only think of two-and-a-half moves we would attempt that could even comfortably be classified as parkour-adjacent, but somehow that period of my life feels disproportionately defined by parkour. Maybe that’s because we spent a lot of time watching parkour, talking parkour, considering doing parkour. Waiting outside for one of our moms to arrive, we’d size up the obstacles available to us—a metal bar to hang from, a couple of low walls to jump over, one (1) picnic table—running high-octane, hypothetical lines around the school with reckless abandon.
In practice, we skewed closer to reckless caution, but we did try—hard enough to scrape our knees with honor. Perhaps it was the hardly-investigated local legend that some eighth grader (the name changed with the telling) had once scaled our school’s iconic rooftop rotunda that anointed our spot for daredevilry, but any energy that could’ve been spent questioning the source of our emboldened spirits was instead devoted to acting upon them.
Of our two-and-a-half moves, the first was a “vault.” This is a simple movement whose variations all involve quickly going over an obstacle (say, a low wall), usually by placing one or both hands on the obstacle and vaulting your legs over it. Vaults are a fundamental morpheme in parkour’s grammar and proved surprisingly easy to learn, even for four awkward autodidacts. Less so our second move: a basic roll, intended as a transitory movement between jumps or vaults to reduce the impact of a high drop. Anyone looking for an easy metaphor can find one in the fact that we were sheltered boys pantomiming a pain-reducing maneuver without taking any pain-inducing leaps; one better, we didn’t even practice our rolls on concrete, but on the safe comfort of soft grass.
Maybe that led to some overconfidence, and thus to our half-move—an invented maneuver that, as best as we have the language to describe it, was something like a “crabwalk back-handspring” off of a picnic table. At least, that’s what it felt like; it probably looked like a boy battling chiropractic demons, but thankfully, I only have my imagination to go by, which graciously allows me to remember it as a feat of gymnastic grace worthy of Simone Biles. It didn’t matter, anyway—just like it didn’t matter that we weren’t really doing anything besides risking minor injury for the distant possibility of impressing one another over a picnic table. I was flailing about with my boys; what could be better?
Those exact gaps—between limitation and transcendence, Paris and Plano, friend and brother—are the ones I’m most interested in parkour’s ability to cross. Even with no practical knowledge, little executional skill, and hardly any tangible success, the very idea of parkour had given us a springboard, something to clumsily chuck ourselves off of in the pursuit of some cooler, more creative way to move about our preteen world. Little did the French inventors of parkour know, but the spark of creativity and freedom that their sport inspired was being gratefully torch-borne by four brace-mouthed middle-schoolers in Texas who were only one or two faceplants worse for the wear, and oh so proud to wear the scars together.
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As for those French inventors, the origins of this nontraditional sport are appropriately shrouded in myth. The most commonly held history begins with France’s military training for World War I. Their methodology was designed by a Georges Hébert, and involved honing soldiers on intensive obstacle courses (one imagines these were slightly more elegant than the Tough Mudder-esque American variety) that prioritized speed, balance, and economy of movement.
Raymond Belle—father of David Belle, the aforementioned “father of parkour”—was trained in these methods when he served after World War II, eventually parlaying that training into a career as a legendarily nimble firefighter. This grandfather of parkour then passed that catlike agility onto his son, who took those principles and let them loose on the streets and rooftops of Paris in the 1980s and ‘90s.
What began as a practical exercise naturally branched into a sport as multitudinal and vibrant as the many streets over which it leaped. Belle and his crew continued to popularize their version of parkour through viral videos (before that was even a thing as we know it) and public performances, but it quickly outpaced them, gradually following the sorts of ideological divides innate to other street sports like skateboarding.
Just as there were young people far beyond Paris (or Plano) witnessing insane jumps and movements through their computer monitors and attempting to recreate them out in their own backyards and rooftops, there were also athletes with more traditional gymnastic and climbing training (and/or more punishing climates) bringing parkour indoors to gyms. And while some believed that official competitive organization was antithetical to the sport’s inherent freedom, competitions and organizations continued to spring up as parkour became more globalized.
Rather than diffusing into separate subsports, these conceptual divergences only broadened the definition of parkour, allowing for different schools of training to achieve parallel excellence. Fast-forward to today, and you can see some of those divergences and tributaries reconvening into a more holistic sport. You have gym-trained athletes taking their safely-tested, absurdly technical flips out into the streets; street-honed athletes seeking out specialized training from climbers and gymnasts; “full-send” big-jump merchants focused on daring stunts; smooth-as-water movers emphasizing flow and creativity of movement across long urban lines—all these and more, communally recognized and celebrated as limbs of a massive parkour body.
While parkour maintained its usefulness as cinematic glue to tack action-movie set pieces together, all of these macro- and micro-evolutions played out largely in the alleys and no-man’s-lands of global urbania, and thus almost necessarily below the mainstream cultural eye. My friends and I always appreciated it when it popped up in the odd Michael Bay movie or Assassin’s Creed video game, but we outgrew our obsession with the sport around the same time that we almost broke our legs jumping from a friend’s second-story balcony. Unbeknownst to us (but fortunately for posterity), there were seven British boys out in Brighton documenting everything we were missing—and having a hoot and a half doing it.
Speaking of gaps bridged, it’s a little poetic that I first came to love parkour with my boys, then rediscovered it when I was missing them most. Literally and spiritually snowed in during the pandemic and longing for an outside less likely to kill me, my brother unknowingly blessed me with a virtual escape when he introduced me to Storror—a band of literal and spiritual brothers who have been uploading weekly parkour vlogs to YouTube for over a decade.
Here was everything I’d been missing in one bingeable package: a snack-sized entertainment to vary my days of increasingly joyless TV and movie-watching, a vicarious vacation to the wide world outside my bubble, and a safe-to-me thrill when even leaving my apartment felt risky. Better still, here were seven dudes—Benj and Max (brothers); Callum and Sacha (brothers); Toby, Josh, and Drew (basically brothers)—whose friendship both echoed that of my own childhood friends and existed as a sort of moonshot reflection of us; they were who we were in our middle-school dreams. They would also become my grad school for parkour studies.
So what do they actually do? Quite a lot. The average Storror video ranges in length from under ten minutes to over 40. Depending on the week and the injury report, it might feature all of the boys or just a few of them, often with the addition of one or more of their parkour friends. Many of the videos are set in Brighton or the UK at large, but they’re also liberal with their travel; if you send them a spot on Google Earth worth climbing or jumping on, chances are they’ll fly there to have a go.
Format-wise, it’s parkour potpourri. I’m partial to the lengthy competition videos, where Storror faces off against other groups or one another in a series of tricky physical dares, racing and vlogging from all angles in a sort of acrobatic, DIY Survivor. Then there are the popular water challenges, which usually involve a risky precision jump (aka a “pre,” where the goal is to jump to a precise stationary point, landing without bouncing off or overshooting it) with a punishing water hazard waiting to greet unsuccessful attempts.
True to their street creds, there are also the jam videos, which capture a loosely structured training session as the boys work on their technique, ticking off challenges and stringing together flowy lines in an endless variety of spots. Though less flashy than some of their other work, it’s these back-to-basics videos that truly underscore the transformative vision of the parkour athlete. In surveying the ledges, pipes, and enclaves of their urban environs, you or I might see a banal, even industrial world; they see Super Mario’s.
The dissonance between the magic that Storror briefly coaxes from these public and private spaces and those spaces’ intended use (or lack thereof) sometimes makes itself manifest via disgruntled neighbors, security guards, and cops. And while the boys are never outright disrespectful to their would-be evictors, they peacefully insist upon their right—anyone’s right—to see some creative potential in otherwise utilitarian architecture and attempt to realize it, among friends, for exercise and sport. Surprisingly, they’re able to convince their complainants almost as often as not—but even when they don’t, it’s inspiring to see them try.
There are far too many other Storror video styles to touch on here—the bike and canal tours of Greater London, the adventures to closed-down theme parks and half-sunken boats, the first-person POV runs across rooftops—but the breadth of content itself speaks to their understated, multifaceted ability as filmmakers. In terms of sheer volume, they’ve easily produced more hours of film than most of our masters of cinema, combined. And sure, sports vlogs don’t require the same amount of work hours or carry the same artistic heft as movies, but there’s a sneaky art to them all the same.
Shot by the team themselves (they’re rarely without a drone or a phone or a GoPro, even gripped between teeth as they take their turns at a jump) and mostly edited by Toby, Sacha, and a few outside hands, their videos are devoid of the desperate flashiness that the word “YouTuber” often evokes. Instead, their work is slick and understated; like the professional sports documentarians they are, they give us all the angles—the instant replays, the tasteful slow-mo—but it never feels forced, just like the best way to capture whatever they’ve just achieved. There are stylistic signatures that emerge—one way you can tell the umpteenth attempt at a particular move is about to succeed is when a skittering snare kicks in, teasing the musical drop that will align with a perfectly stuck landing—but the most consistent hallmark of their work is a casual, cohesive quality.
I didn’t realize the full extent of Storror’s skill as movie-makers (of a sort) and stars until I watched some other, not-to-be-named parkour groups. Immediately evident in the comparison is the relaxed skill that Storror plays off as ease, but is actually a deep comfort with being on, and speaking to, camera. Over hundreds of hours of almost constantly narrated footage, it’s rare that I’ve ever heard the boys repeat themselves. It’s so sly that you barely notice it at first, but each member of the group has the unique ability to voice their thoughts—on technique, on process, on breaking down the mental barriers between them and the next jump—in a clear, takeaway-able manner. The result is not just entertaining, but valuable; in watching and listening to these niche stuntmen think and move out loud, my own understanding of discipline and perseverance and brotherhood has grown along with my understanding of side flips and cat passes. They’re elite athletes and elite commentators, rolled into one.
Let us not gloss over “brotherhood,” either, since that’s what brought us here in the first place. Over a decade-plus of spending every week together, the ersatz family of Storror have coalesced as brothers just as much as athletes. You can feel their bond in the way they support each other through challenges, or champion each other’s unique strengths, or tease each other in brotherly love. Anyone lucky enough to have been collectively and mutually held by a tight-knit group of childhood friends will recognize the easy sturdiness of their friendship, strong enough to withstand run-ins with cops and 30-story jumps.
The interplay between how much they clearly love each other and how much that love would push them to do for each other is crucial to Storror’s appeal, and not unlike the sacrificial-supportive love that bonds Jackass’s gang of masochistic miscreants. If the thrill of Jackass was that each of them was willing to do almost anything to, for, or with their brothers despite having no skill at all, then the thrill of Storror is that they’re willing to do almost anything together with considerable skill. You could almost view Johnny Knoxville gleefully torturing his friends (knowing that he’ll later put his own body through an inevitably hotter hell for their enjoyment) as a funhouse mirror reflection of Storror, who cheer and encourage each other through mental and physical battles knowing that the aid they offer will come back to lift them to their own escalating heights.
Even when the boys compete amongst themselves, they do so with a deep, fondly competitive knowledge of one another’s strengths and weaknesses—a knowledge that fosters the kind of teasing that reads like love to me. Only my brother can tease me about things only my brother knows about, you know? It’s just that these brothers are teasing each other while pulling off feats of professional athleticism, giving off the same buzz of heightened relatability you might catch watching Tom Cruise banter with Jeremy Renner while suspended from the Burj Khalifa; they’re like us. They’re better, but they’re like us.
The same competitive respect that exists within Storror also powers their relationship with the wider world of parkour, a world for which they’ve become de facto figureheads and stewards. Not content to enjoy their status as the world’s most popular parkour group in isolation, they continually use their platform as a launchpad for athletes around the world. In their week-to-week videos, they regularly collab with already notable individuals (like the deservingly Instagram-famous Dom Tomato, Hazal Nehir, Joe Scandrett, Ed Scott, et al.) and younger, more upstart crews (like the London-based Team Phat, whose jaw-dropping athleticism inspires their elder statesmen rather than threatens them). Storror also activates the global network of parkour during their many international trips, often featuring or being hosted by whichever athletes they know in whichever country they’re visiting.
This organic manner of putting their audience onto other athletes gets formalized in the annual Storror Awards, a sort of makeshift Academy Awards for parkour that the Brighton boys fund and adjudicate themselves. This is usually their longest video of the year, and rather than running counter to official parkour competitions favoring gymnastics-heavy acrobatics or big trick-style street jams, the Storror Awards reflect the sport’s diaspora by rewarding individuals and groups for a wide variety of categories, including “Send It,” “One Man/Woman Army,” and “Mad Scientist.”
These awards and their larger community project speak to the boys’ desire for collective achievement just as much as they embody the unifying gravity of their sport. Across continental and skill divides, the force that brings Storror and friends to an excitingly un-stunted section of the UK is the same pull that brought me and my friends back to our picnic table, or that gives me a reason to text my 1000-miles-away brother anytime a new video drops. Parkour is a reason to gather, a reason to commune over a space that is technically, legally, bureaucratically “theirs,” but which a little movement and effort easily commandeers into “ours,” if only for a moment. A business park becomes a skate park, a schoolyard becomes a stadium; it’s probably corny to say that the world is parkour’s arena, but it’s probably true, too.
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If I’m going to speak to the love and unity of parkour, it’s only fair I should address its implicit dark side; the “deadly passion, [the] terrible joy” that Michael Mann’s Enzo Ferrari speaks of surely undergirds any sport with this level of daredevilry. Though they’ve relatively reined in their risk-taking with age, Storror are no strangers to death defiance. In their younger years, they even filmed an entire feature-length doc, Roof Culture Asia, chronicling their escapades on skyscrapers across Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Seoul. It’s one thing to watch them tackle jumps at ground level that could leave them with scraped elbows or broken ankles; it’s another thing entirely to watch them skywalk hundreds of feet over hungry pavement.
There’s one possible explanation: Storror are at least a little more incentivized to take these risks than you or me, given the amount of income they draw from YouTube views. When parkour pays your bills, it’s more justifiable to risk walking around in a cast for a few months, knowing that if you make that gamble and avoid injury, you could grow your paying audience. But that justification doesn’t add all the way up for me, at least once you walk it to the edge of a skyscraper.
As far as I can tell, all members of Storror (and most of the wider parkour culture) seem like happy people with good home lives; certainly, they’re emotionally healthy enough to maintain decades-long friendships. So how could they justify putting it all on the line? I ask like I don’t know—like it’s not obvious even watching through a screen that the satisfaction of landing a perfect jump at street level just can’t match the alien thrills you can hunt at height.
It’s also not like parkour is the only instance of this fear-breaking phenomenon. I asked similar questions of motive while watching the Oscar-winning rock-climbing doc about Alex Honnold, Free Solo. Sure, he had the opportunity to advance human progress, but he also had a fiancée worrying herself to death at base camp. As inspiring as that movie is, it’s also heartbreaking to watch Honnold’s fiancée see a triumphant Honnold say that he’s done with free soloing—then to see the “unless…” start to glint in his eye.
Similarly, any movie with astronauts (but especially First Man) makes me wonder what could possibly be pushing these people moonward. Space exploration has more easily-argued scientific benefits than free soloing or parkour, but that still doesn’t rev my personal engines to the point of surely this ramshackle tin can will protect me from cosmic annihilation confidence.
Damien Chazelle’s movie posits that Neil Armstrong might’ve run to the farthest reaches of mankind’s dominion just to finally find enough quiet to make peace with his grief, which I love as an exploration of emotional extremes. But again, no one in Storror, to my knowledge, is battling the kinds of demons that might tempt you to the ledge. They’re also uncharacteristically reticent on the subject; to the extent that they talk about their motives, it’s usually to explain that they’re abundantly familiar with their own physical limits, and would never try something at height that they couldn’t easily clear under safer conditions.
And I believe them! It’s just that there’s no totally controlling for the loose piece of gravel, or the unexpected siren, or simply the millisecond’s lapse in focus that could spell their doom. I wonder if it’s something they would (or could) ever consciously acknowledge in these terms, but my semi-final assessment on the skeleton key that unlocks their particular brand of daredevilry is that they know these things could kill them—they’d just rather die than not know whether they can conquer them.
For all the philosophical hand-wringing the subject could invite, I have to say: their repeated headfirst dives into this paradox are intoxicating to watch, thrilling to vicariously experience, and maybe impossible to fully reconcile. And I’ll give them this: even if their sport isn’t furthering our knowledge of the galaxy, there’s something to be said for seeing someone do something you’ve never seen anyone do before, widening the scope of our collective imagination and blazing a new trail on the frontier of human achievement. Not bad for some YouTubers.
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Of all the parkour moves I’ve learned about or witnessed or cautiously tried at my neighborhood park, the most romantic by far is the “pre.” I’m as thrilled as the next guy to witness jumps so massive that the jumper can only hope to kiss the target with their feet as they go careening past, but there’s something to the wild geometry of a perfect stick that takes me even higher. At its best, a pre combines the reckless abandon of flinging yourself without certainty—that ubiquitous “leap of faith”—with the calculated artistry of a precise landing.
To watch someone jump or launch or even flip themselves off a ledge no self-preserving person would ever consider a launchpad is electrifying enough, but then to see them corral all that wayward kinetic energy into an elegant punctuation mark yards, streets, stories away is a shock of a different order. It’s not unlike a movie, or a poem, or a symphony, or any other artistic leap of faith that tosses its ideas skyward in seeming chaos, only to gracefully, poetically, impossibly land everything with an order that seems perfectly obvious in retrospect. We can see the full arc from the jump, we just can’t believe it until they make us.
The pre is also, as it happens, a pretty convenient metaphor for a far-flung collection of ideas and athletes and practices that mosaic into a single sport that is more than a sport. There may not be one all-encompassing definition of parkour, but whatever parkour encompasses, it can be found on Storror’s YouTube channel. Over more than ten years of practicing and documenting their sport with their friends and the world, these boys from Brighton have recorded a living history of a culture that could never be reduced to one competition, or video, or group—and yet somehow, there it all is: a perfect stick.
As individuals and as a unit, they’ve spread the gospel of a sport that can be as deadly as a skyscraper plunge or as carefree as heading into the backyard with your friends; that can bring people together from around the world or across a table; that can paint over urban blandness with a playful brush; or that can recalibrate our understanding of what it is to leap, of what it is to land.
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