Parkour has gotten big.
Not football big. Nobody’s getting transferred to Storror for £80 million yet. But big enough that, somewhere in the world, something worth paying attention to is happening almost every weekend. Competitions, jams, films, new crews, old crews coming back from the dead. Athletes are doing things that would have broken the internet ten years ago, only for the clip to disappear into an Instagram feed by Tuesday.
That’s the strange thing about parkour right now. There’s probably more happening than ever before, but somehow it’s become harder to actually know what’s happening.
The culture is spread across Instagram stories, YouTube channels, Discord servers, event pages, group chats and whatever platform we all collectively decide to abandon next. An athlete can win a major competition, a crew can release the best video of the year, or a legendary spot can disappear forever, and unless you were online at exactly the right moment, there’s a decent chance you missed it.
For The Jumps exists to give some of that a home.
The idea isn’t to sanitise parkour or organise it into some neat little box. It definitely isn’t to decide what parkour is supposed to be. Parkour has spent the best part of two decades resisting people trying to do that, and it seems to be doing just fine.
The goal is simpler: document the culture, connect the community and, where it makes sense, keep score.
That means covering the people, crews, places, films and ideas shaping parkour right now. It means having somewhere you can see what competitions are coming up, who competed, who won and how athletes are performing across a season, because a result probably deserves to exist somewhere longer than a 24-hour story post.
It also means keeping track of the stuff that doesn’t fit neatly onto a results sheet.
The films we keep coming back to. The spots everyone recognises from a single wall. The crews that changed how people dressed, moved or filmed. The athletes pushing things in strange new directions. The arguments people have after training that somehow turn into two-hour conversations about what parkour even is.
There’ll be interviews, stories, opinion, competition coverage, rankings, photography, films and probably a fair bit of stuff that doesn’t fit into any obvious category yet. Some of it will be important. Some of it will be completely unnecessary.
Both feel pretty accurate to parkour.
Most importantly, For The Jumps is being made for people already inside the culture.
Athletes, filmmakers, photographers, coaches, organisers, old heads, new kids, people who remember downloading parkour videos in six separate parts and people who discovered the sport last Thursday. We don’t need to explain what a kong is every time someone does one.
We’d rather talk about why some twelve-minute video filmed on a MiniDV camera in 2008 still makes you want to put your shoes on and go training.
Because parkour deserves independent media that treats it like a culture, not just an endless supply of content.
It should have somewhere with a memory. Somewhere that records the big moments without forgetting all the weird little things happening around them. Somewhere competition results can sit next to a photo essay, a long interview, an old video and an argument about whether a particular wall was actually better before they rebuilt it.
That’s what For The Jumps is trying to become.
Not the authority on parkour.
Just somewhere worth checking if you care about it.
People - Places - Stories - Jumps.
See you out there.