parkour

For me it all comes back to this notion of parkour's artistic sensibility. In sociological terms, parkour fits neatly into the category of 'lifestyle sports'. Before I get lynched for calling it a sport, this is just a label to help people who don't do much exercise (academics) understand that there's training and physical activity involved. Other lifestyle sports include skating, wake-boarding, base-jumping, and a whole bunch of other activities that practitioners would dispute being a sport at all.

The thing that unifies these is this idea that it's a personal, lifestyle commitment and choice. These people chose these activities because they are not organised, commercial, group events (despite the efforts of some who seek to redefine them). Instead these are personal activities. People, generally, don't take too kindly to being told how to conduct personal activities and often rail against restrictions placed on them. "I don't do parkour so that I can follow rules."

Here's where things get tricky. The more I listen and read from David and Seb, the more it becomes clear that they share this same attitude. People are right insofar as parkour IS a personal developmental, life-style activity... what people fail to grasp is that it's a very SPECIFIC lifestyle activity developed by a specific person for a specific purpose. The confusion comes from the fact that people are using the term is a general way. "Look at me, I'm doing parkour and I'm doing it my own way, with flips and spins." This is like saying "Look at me, I'm soccer and I'm doing it my own way, with hoops and hand-throws." The first one isn't parkour, and the second one isn't soccer. There are only so many changes one can make to something before it stops being what you started off with.

Soooooooooo... I'd say there are two current views on what parkour is:
Parkour: That viral fad/emerging sport/training discipline/philosophy that involves the navigation of any environment using nothing but the human body.

Parkour: The training discipline/philosophy developed and defined by David Belle for his own distinctive purposes.

In the second version to say "I practice parkour" is the same as saying "I follow the path of David Belle". That kind of commitment doesn't really offer as much freedom as many people really want to have. Doesn't leave that much room for artistic sensibility.