tracer is the name given to practitioners ofparkour.The word is of French origin and literally means “tracer”, or one who builds a path to be taken, one who traces a path to be followed. In this context is the central idea of parkour, where the practitioner transforms obstacles into challenges to be conquered in the most organic and fluid way possible.
The idealization of the movement of the le parkour is usually attributed to David Belle and the Sebastian Foucan, being defined by Belle as “the art of overcoming obstacles”. To traceur, urban obstacles are seen as possible means of locomotion in the urban environment, where free and creative movements are employed in the most natural way possible for the practitioner to be able to move around using the barriers in their displacement.
For traceurs, physical conditioning is extremely important, since the body is their main means of locomotion and is their tool for overcoming urban obstacles. A traceur's abilities are limited only by his creativity and physical ability, so the constant training, in addition to being necessary to avoid serious accidents, is essential in the life of a practitioner of
Parkour.
Free running is a parkour modality in which the beauty of the movements matters more than the fluidity
Parkour represents a contemporary ideological movement that seeks the culture of healthy body and mind and the resumption of the urban environment, now taken over by cars, by the human body, contesting the forms of construction of modern cities, in which streets are built with the purpose of housing only cars, motorcycles and other automobiles, to the detriment of natural human locomotion, of the pedestrian.
Traceur is an active member of the community of parkour practitioners, who seek, with their ideology of freedom and harmony with their own bodies and the urban environment, to overcome the physical and social barriers, as a group and subculture, contesting and, at the same time, adapting to the difficulties imposed by the modern configuration of the media urban areas.
by Lucas Oliveira
Graduated in Sociology
