The recent history of Sneakers & Parkour

As some of you know I am probably the only person in the world silly enough to do Parkour and collect sneakers. Now this is not a combination I recommend because your kicks are a certainty to get fucked sooner or later up if you do parkour in them and if you live parkour it’s hard to control these impulses. Though this does put me in a unique position to talk about the relationship between parkour and sneakers.

Parkour and sneakers have had an interesting recent history. In about the year 2002 I’m sure many of you might have remembered those legendary Nike Presto ads like ‘the Angry Chicken’ (
Le Poulet en Colere
) ad featuring Sebastien Foucan being chased by a chicken and using his parkour skills to evade it. It only becomes apparent that it is a Nike shoe ad right at the end when we see a close-up of the shoe followed by the presto logo and website address. That is still my single favourite ad of all time and the reason why I started Parkour. The Presto campaign also featured ads with some of the other french guys like the ‘Scary Cat’ ad and most notably the founder of parkour David Belle in ‘Young Love’ (Premier Amour).

Now the first small conflict in the relationship between sneakers and parkour arises. The Nike Presto shoe is hopeless for Parkour. As most of you could imagine being so light and simple it does not offer much support and durability for the high intensity rigors of parkour. While none of the featured traceurs or Nike ever said it was a shoe meant for practicing parkour in, the content of the ad was obviously still quite misleading. The Nike Presto will always be a significant shoe in sneaker culture because it was the predecessor that made the Nike Free and Moire possible, though significance in parkour culture is quite different.

The second part of Parkour and footwear’s interesting relationship emerged at the start of last year in what is referred to as the Urban Freeflow, Adidas Hyperride Debacle (click here for one of the most unusable flash sites ever made). Urban Freeflow is a prominent UK business of freerunners with the largest freerunning forum. Now, the Urban Freeflow team scored Adidas sponsorship and kept raving about how good this new parkour-specific shoe they were developing with Adidas was. When it finally got released, it was way over-hyped and over priced for what was just a fancy looking shoe with the Adidas A3 system sole. The outrage came when everyone realised that the shoe was not in anyway a parkour-specific shoe and in fact performed quite poorly compared to other available options. Made from that shiny silver material, the durability of the shoe was also questionable. Urban Freeflow copped some major flack after that and admitted that the whole thing was a big debacle and the Hyperride was not a parkour-specific shoe. The Hyperride became the HYPErride. They went into damage control and have now said they are developing a new shoe, which actually will be the world’s first parkour-specific shoe (more on this in the next post). Most traceurs seem to be quite weary this time around.

Before the Seidojin/Urban Freeflow team was outfitted by Adidas, they were sponsored by Merrell. Ez has since come out on the forums and said, “While I like Merrell as a company (our old sponsor), their shoes are absolutely rubbish for Parkour. They have great grip but are like wearing bricks on your feet ...way too heavy.” Sebastien Foucan supposedly told them that they were "rubbish" for parkour right from the start. So I won’t even bother to discuss how those shoes relate to parkour.

More recently David Belle the founder of parkour has been promoting Bont shoes. He is now sponsored by Bont, some unheard of Australian company, which is huge news. To put it in perspective this is for the Parkour community the equivalent of Michael Jordan being sponsored by Kangaroo shoes! Or Shaq being sponsored by some locally unheard of chinese companyThe shoe itself looks like heat-mouldable lifestyle shoe. Reports suggest that they have very poor shock absorption. Wiseno a Sydney traceur had a pair and doesn’t rate them at all and points to a design flaw in the one piece upper that stretches more than you would expect. Bont and Belle have since had a private falling out with Bont calling Belle a “crook” for supposedly not being able to fulfill his media commitments with them. Belle has been uncontactable on the matter.


The sport of Parkour is quite specialist and probably doesn’t have quite enough people in it to make it a valuable market for a large shoe company to release a parkour-specific shoe. Even though it is a very desirable sport to use in their advertising to sell their gear to the non-traceur market. If this were the case, it would not be the first time that an obscure sport shoe was adopted by the general public to be worn as a ‘lifestyle’ shoe. This has happened recently with shoes like the Adidas Tae Kwon Do and with many companies selling slightly modified shoes from sports and retros being as popular as they are, we can only hope that if an ‘aspirational’ parkour shoe is released, it is actually decent and functional.

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