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Interview: Parkour UK has officially been recognised as a sport by the UK sports councils and the government

Parkour UK has officially been recognised as a sport by the UK sports councils and the government. Matthew Campelli speaks to chief executive Eugene Minogue to find out what this means for the dynamic organisation

by Matthew Campelli | Published in Sports Management Mar Apr 2017 issue 130
Eugene Minogue, founder and CEO of Parkour UK
Eugene Minogue, founder and CEO of Parkour UK

It’s not everyday that you get the chance to see a serious politician hanging from a climbing frame with a dozen schoolchildren. In fact, you’d probably be hard pushed to think of a scenario where that was possible.

But there we are, gazing up at sports minister Tracey Crouch, surrounded by enthusiastic grins during a ceremony in which parkour has officially been recognised as a sport by the UK government.

Joining her and the children on the special parkour apparatus found within the grounds of West London’s Westminster Academy is Sebastien Foucan, the founder of the sport. Cameras flash, people smile and the attention is totally fixed on this scene.

However, on the ground, away from the hullaballoo, stands Eugene Minogue – the founder of Parkour UK, the national governing body that has just been recognised. After launching the body in 2009, Minogue spent several long, hard years, trying to get to this stage.

Despite the attention on others, no one else in the country has had a bigger hand in the achievement, but Minogue appears keen to shun the limelight, content in the knowledge that his hard work has been recognised, but driven enough to know that there is still more to come to grow the sport further.

But parkour is more than a sport, says Minogue. It’s a way of life. It encourages the human instinct to move and be free – an urge that has been quelled for far too long.

Humanistic instinct
“Unfortunately, society and social norms have drummed it into us that we shouldn’t be jumping, climbing or swinging,” he tells Sports Management. “I take my children to the playground and most of the other parents taking their children will sit down and read the paper as soon as they get through the gates. Why aren’t they playing?

“Parkour reminds you as a human being that you have an obligation to play. It’s human instinct for us to move and interact with our environment. Parkour is the nudge to go and do it. People ask, ‘how do I start?’ I ask them, ‘when did you stop?’”

Parkour UK, says Minogue, was “born out of frustration” at the restriction of public space and the “no ball games culture”. He was working on using sport to tackle anti-social behaviour and crime when he found the Channel 4 documentary, Jump London.

“It really inspired me,” he explains, “and the great thing about parkour was that all you needed was a pair of trainers and imagination and that was it.

“We really started pioneering parkour from that perspective, and made a documentary called Jump Westminster as part of that. It rapidly grew as we were filming it over six months. Then we were getting requests from various other parts of the country for us to do the same thing in those areas, so we decided to set up a national governing body.”

But how do you go about launching a new national governing body when you don’t have a traditional sporting offer?

“Where do you start? Nobody had any idea,” Minogue chuckles. “It was definitely a scratch your head moment.

“We set up Parkour UK at the back end of 2008, incorporated it in July 2009 and developed it from there.”

According to Minogue, establishing the body kicked off a “very long process” of working with national partners, awarding bodies, schools, colleges, universities, police constabularies and local authorities to spread the word about the sport.

Following that, Minogue decided to start the process of achieving recognition for Parkour UK from the British sports councils such as Sport England, Sport Wales, sportscotland and Sport Northern Ireland.

Resistance
That began in 2010, and six years later the dream was realised. Although Minogue admits it wasn’t always smooth sailing.

“We learnt a lot of lessons about how rigid the sector was and what it perceived sport to be. They are set in their traditional ways, and it was difficult to get people to understand a lifestyle sport such as parkour,” Minogue says.

“A lot of the time there was some resistance to it. Sometimes it felt people were confused by it, sometimes they didn’t understand it. It had to be a patient process – getting people to understand just what parkour is and to value it.”

During the ceremony, Crouch stresses the value of parkour, particularly in relation to her and the government’s vision of sport and its desired outcomes. The correlation between physical activity and positive mental health and social cohesion is widely recognised, and the sports minister suggests that parkour ticks a lot of boxes.

Indeed, Parkour UK has been proactive in its approach of targeting hard-to-reach communities and disadvantaged people, with the aim of engaging them and adding more purpose to their lives.

Parkour UK was one of the first bodies to publish a Mental Health Action Plan as part of the Sport and Recreation Alliance’s Mental Health Charter, creating one of its flagship pieces of work.

Affiliated foundation Free Your Instinct was also the first parkour for mental health charity established in the UK.

Mental health
“If you’re not mentally tuned in to what you’re doing physically you’re not doing parkour,” Minogue says. “You’re just moving.

“Parkour is very much understanding the purpose and the intention behind your move. Sometimes people move to be physically active, sometimes because they want to improve technique. Others simply want to express themselves.”

Additionally, Parkour UK has initiatives such as Parkour Dance, which helps elderly people move, and Parle Voi Parkour, which has been designed to teach the French language through the sport.

Projects that focus on people with Parkinson’s disease, family parkour and physical literacy for under-fours have all been developed over the last few years.

Minogue adds: “Parkour is not just about activity, it’s about the community. And the parkour community is very rich and diverse.”

Future growth
That broad offer is sure to stand Parkour UK in good stead if the body wishes to bid for government funding – one of the luxuries allowed to recognised national governing bodies. Sport England, for example, will use a significant chunk of its funding pot to finance schemes which engage the inactive, the elderly and young children.

So where does Minogue want to see growth and development in the future now that Parkour UK’s first stage is complete?

“I want to use the recognition to amplify what we’ve already been doing,” he says. “We want to bring parkour to the masses.

“It is really important for our member organisations to be able to access funding in the same way and on the same level playing field that other sports do. It will give them an opportunity to expand the good work they’re doing, to reach more young people, reach more old people, more families and more women and girls to give them all the chance to participate in sport and physical activity.”

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