Bab Ezwar, Algiers – There are two steps to preparing to jump from the roof of one building to the roof of another. Step 1: Measure your distance and practice landing on solid ground. Step 2: Rehearse running to the edge.
Bilal Ahmedali trains with two friends and fellow parkour athletes on the roof of an abandoned shopping mall in the Bab Ezwar district of Algiers. The west wing of the shopping complex curves in the shape of a horseshoe, with a gap of 5 meters between the ends and a height of 9 meters to the red-tiled courtyard below.
A few months ago, while training with a large group on the same rooftop, Ahmedali ran up to the edge but couldn't jump. “I knew I could jump, but I was just scared. I tried to go to the edge 20 times and couldn't do it.”
This September night, without much thought, he decided to try again, and this time he succeeded. “I went, looked once and came back. I looked at the gap twice and came back. The third time I ran directly and boom.”
In a video uploaded to Facebook, Ahmedali can be seen hurtling through the air in a graceful arc, placing his feet neatly on the opposite railing.
Ahmed Belkahara, 30, who just finished filming a friend, said he was happy, but noted there was no “plan B” for such a jump. “It's fun and a risk at the same time. There's a saying in parkour: 'Think before you jump.' Just jump without thinking. That hesitation will kill you. ”
Ahmedali, a 24-year-old psychology student at the University of Algiers, says he finds peace in taking such extreme leaps. “I'm a person with intrusive thoughts. And when I go to do parkour, there's just me and the concrete, everything else is blurred out. That's me and that's what I am. This is the kind of run I want to do.”
sports with philosophy
Ahmedali and Belcara are members of a growing parkour community that provides an outlet for Algerian youth to make the city and the sport their own. In Algeria, where public funding for sports facilities is limited, this youth community is using social media to showcase their athletic abilities alongside Algiers' historic architecture. The city's urban topography reflects the country's past eras and lends itself to a unique kind of parkour, as athletes transform Ottoman kasbahs and French colonial boulevards into obstacle courses of their own design. I am.
Parkourists (or “tracers” to use the French term) can be found all over the country, but their ranks have been concentrated in the capital since the sport took hold in the early 2010s.
Sociologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Algiers, Khadijah Bousaid, explains that parkour offers young Algerians a way to appropriate public space and adapt the fabric of the city to their own purposes. “This is a way to take ownership of the city, similar to street artists playing tag.”
Scouting new training locations is an essential mission for tracers in Algiers. Sarah Latresh, 33, became interested in parkour while studying architecture at university.
“Most people think of buildings as places to live,” she says. “But for us [in parkour], it is the building we are interested in, the construction itself. ”
It's a philosophical sport, said Bobacker Nawi, a 21-year-old student who posts videos of herself jumping over concrete barriers on Instagram to the soundtrack of Radiohead and Phoebe Bridgers. “Overcoming obstacles gives you a certain sense of accomplishment,” he says. “It's the same in life.”
Route to parkour
Parkour emerged in the late 1980s on the outskirts of Paris, integrating elements of French military exercises with a new free running style. The term itself is a reworking of the French word “parkour” or “route.” Around the turn of the 2000s, the sport began to gain mainstream recognition, with blockbusters such as 2001's Yamakashi and his 2006 Bond film Casino Royale featuring the sport.
Sébastien Foucan, 49, is one of the founders of parkour, and he himself played a villain who used parkour to evade Daniel Craig's James Bond during a disturbance at a construction site. Parkour is often portrayed in movies as a clever way to outwit opponents, but Foucan insists the sport originated as a kind of joke. “What really made it possible was the imagination and the ability to play that we have at a certain age,” Foucan told Al Jazeera.
“You can take advantage of the urban environment to develop yourself and others can join in,” he says. “I think that’s how we started.”
Mahfoud Amara, a professor at Qatar University, said the global rise of parkour coincided with a period of political tension in Algeria as the country emerged from a decade of civil war in the 2000s. “During the tumultuous ‘Black Decades’ of political violence, when security threats severely restricted leisure and entertainment opportunities in the country, French channels, especially satellite television channels including Canal Plus, It became a valuable escape from harsh reality,'' he explains. These broadcasts, he says, exposed Algerian youth to new sports and subcultures such as parkour.
Imad Bouziani, 23, recalls the influence of films like Casino Royale, in which his on-screen pursuers outsmart and outwit their enemies, often emissaries of the French state. I thought it looked like that. Parkour was also abstract to him. “It's freedom, the freedom that comes with movement. Having the ability to go wherever you want to go.”
Parkour in the Casbah
Since the 2000s, the rise of social media has allowed parkourists to find each other. In 2017, Ahmedali and Bouziani founded his WhatsApp group to coordinate training in and around Algiers.
On Fridays, they woke up before sunrise and took the 6 a.m. bus to visit the Roman rock formations that dot Tipaza, and when they weren't in class, they tried flips on the concrete rooftops of the university campus. .
Some areas were even off-limits. At one point, Ahmedali recalled being chased by a security guard who “looked like the Hulk.”
But Busiani's favorite place for parkour has always been Algiers' historic Kasbah. Although he has family ties to the area, his main interest in training there was its diverse buildings and symbolic status as a bastion of resistance during the Algerian War of Independence.
Social media has also helped bring together tracers from across the country for the annual “Parkour Day,” which was first held in Algiers in 2014. People will go to extremes to participate. Ahmed Bendaho traveled some 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) by bus and train from Béchar in the Sahara Desert to reach Algiers Parkour Day in 2019.
Bobakker Nawi says: “Community is so important. It makes me feel like what I'm doing has meaning when other people are doing it too.”
It's a self-selected group, and that's part of what made their relationship strong. “You share what you love with the people who love it.”
La Sablette
Parkour is an extreme sport. Some tracers had to leave it behind when they moved to places such as Dubai or Canada for personal or professional reasons. For some, an injury was a turning point. Just before the pandemic lockdown, Busiani seriously injured his knee while attempting a double backflip.
Although he is in good spirits these days, he recalls the break in training as “soul-wrenching”, but added that the imposed break gave him time for self-reflection. “The injury was mainly due to poor health. So the conclusion was to get stronger.” Busiani is now focusing on long distance running instead.
But for 27-year-old Fares Belmadani, parkour is something he takes seriously professionally in Algeria. Now, as a certified parkour coach, he aims to promote the sport and raise its profile across the country.
He has already secured public funding to build an official parkour area on La Sablette, a sandbar that juts like a hook into the Mediterranean Sea from the Algiers coastline.
Sarah Latresh drew on her background in both architecture and parkour to create the blueprint for Sublette Training Park. Currently, her designs are being constructed in a warehouse in Algiers before being installed on the coast. Jungle gyms made of life-sized Tetris pieces are popping up among wood shavings and construction equipment. This is the building block of a space where future generations can train.
Belmadani estimates it is about 60% complete and hopes to have it completed before Ramadan this year. “Someone asked me if I was thinking of leaving Algeria,” he says. But he plans to stay, saying: “Algeria's youth are Algeria's potential.''