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Free runner goes for gold
Rashid Razaq, Evening Standard8 Apr 2008
A college student is bidding to win gold for Britain in the urban sport of parkour.
Chima Akenzua Bowen, 17, from Muswell Hill, will head to Germany in June for the world championships.
In the sport athletes perform acrobatic feats making use of buildings, street furniture, cars and whatever else they find in the city environment.
Bowen will be part of a team of 10 who will battle it out with other athletes, leaping between rooftops and back-flipping off walls. The sports science student finished second in last year's inaugural competition in Berlin, and hopes to take top spot this time.
He specialises in free running, which evolved from parkour and places more emphasis on style. He said: "We're judged on how fast we can complete a 250-metre obstacle course and I'm hoping to cut my time this year. One of the trickiest obstacles is an old police van. You need to have endurance, agility, speed and strength."
Bowen, who broke his arm last October, added: "I've only recently got back into training and building up my strength.
"We do get injuries, mostly bumps and bruises, but it's part of it. We don't use padding when we're training as that goes against the spirit of being free to move."
Le parkour, or the art of movement, started life in the suburbs of Paris.
Its creator, David Belle, famously showed off his talents in a BBC TV trailer in which he was seen leaping between London rooftops. Bowen, who attends City and Islington College, said: "I first saw these guys, David Belle and Sebastian Foucan, on a TV documentary when I was 13.
"I was so impressed that I started somersaulting over the furniture. I started by watching and trying to imitate."
He is now a part of the Urban Freeflow collective, running workshops for children. Bowen has been asked to train Royal Marines and Met police officers as well as appear in music videos. He is currently involved in filming an American science fiction film.
