Camila Back on the Streets, New Kicks Who Dis, Thoughts From Chile

Howdy friends! Better late than never, right? 

Sean and I just wrapped another weekend shooting in San Diego for our upcoming project with Davis Vasconcellos so I may have missed some stuff happening around the global community…we also didn’t have time to get an athlete interview done for this week’s newsletter, so instead we’ll be featuring two athlete profiles toward the bottom of the post (as usual). That having been said, I’m excited to share some of the fun developments I did catch with you all!

Camila Back on the Streets

There’s nothing better than new Camila clips, especially when they’re outdoors. This week, Camila shared a few flowy lines from her first trip down to Brighton. It’s been awesome to see how her style has developed as she’s continued to recover from a succession of ankle surgeries over the past two years. It seems like the flow lab happening at Hal 5, with input from athletes like Matt McCreary, Nico Vanhole, and Rachel Gough, is creating a ton of unique new options for interacting obstacles in a low-impact but technically demanding way. If Camila’s clips have you fiending for more, give Urban Being by Betclic Portugal a watch - it’s one of my favorite productions we’ve had recently in parkour and seems to have flown kind of under the radar. 

Pasha Breaking Gravity

I’m gonna keep this one short - go watch Pasha’s newest posts. He’s always had one of the most creative visions for movement within the parkour community, but after moving to LA and stopping his competitive career he did go through a period of more social media-oriented training/posting. Over the last year, it seems like discovering the gospel of the Cork Zero has reignited his passion to bring freakily creative movement back to the streets/sand(s of Time). The last few posts in particular have been so cool to watch. He’s started using flatspins and untwisting to start or stop momentum seemingly at will. It feels like he’s starting to scratch the surface on an entirely new way to build lines and pilot his body…I can’t wait to see where it goes. 

New Kicks Who Dis

Over the past month, we’ve seen two drops from two of the biggest producers of parkour shoes in the game - Ollo and Strike Mvmnt. While they aren’t being shipped yet, Ollo opened up pre-orders for their newest model the Sapien X. I have never worn Ollos - not out of any issue with the company but more out of love for my Strikes and a lukewarm feeling about Ollo’s designs - but that might change with the Sapien X. They look pretty sleek and the profile/tread feel like a solid middle ground between Strike Haze’s and a shoe like the classic Onitsuka Tiger. 

On Strike’s end of things, the new Transit street trainer has big Vans UltraRange energy…although with what looks like a lot more durability and (hopefully) better rubber for soft surfaces like wood and rails. The skate shoe profile has really taken over a lot of folks’ aesthetic so it’s cool to see a skate shoe made by a company that’s supported parkour for over a decade and simultaneously understands the stress parkour athletes will be putting shoes under. 

Harmonious Swiss Machines 

Golden Goal by Continental Movement was a surprisingly fun piece that dropped a few weeks ago and has flown a bit under the radar. It’s from a Swiss/Italian group and gets off to a slow start but has some real bangers and once it gets going keeps its momentum really well. The standout athletes for me were Gabriele Guzzetti who drops some of my favorite one-off style challenges (sidefull pre excuse me) and Tobia Macchi who gives off big 19-year old Mich Todorovic vibes with some insanely powerful NBD’s. Also, personally I am really glad they didn’t go with the single athlete part features inside of the video. It’s the only complaint I ever have about videos from Kipa/Gefam…and it was awesome to watch the video all the way through and feel like I was constantly getting diverse movement. Surprise is the key (for me) to a good parkour video and it goes a long way to not get too comfortable with a single athlete’s style. 

Our second piece of this double feature is Harmonious from Sam Ultima. I’ve been meaning to include this one pretty much every week and somehow keep getting sidetracked…Sam is one of the most well-rounded athletes in our sport and brings his unique blend of power, vision, stamina, and control to this piece. It’s the little things that make this video for me. You see it from the beginning, when he casually pulls a one arm lache around a thick pole into a rail pre. Throughout the video, you’ll find tons of awkward steps, corner tacs, and narrow runups that he manages to use to his advantage. He’s the kind of athlete that makes the awkward stuff somehow look good. We also get some great little features from other athletes, including a corner flyaway reverse pre(??) from Marc Busch about halfway through. Movement choices, color, and music were all so spot on for this video and I have a feeling it’ll be one I play on a lot of slow summer mornings to help get me motivated and moving. 

Athlete Feature: Diego Rasse and Sagar Freerun

Diego is a Chilean parkour coach and practitioner. I got to meet him in London at the Parkour Generations Rendezvous event in either 2018 or 2019 and had the immediate sense he was a big ‘ole parkour nerd like me…but didn’t get too much of a chance to chat. I missed out, but we’re all lucky because in the meantime he has started sharing tons of short, well-edited pieces on parkour training, philosophy, and culture through his Instagram (@diegorasse12). If you’re a Spanish speaker, or someone with just enough comprehension to understand the gist of what’s going on like me, definitely give his page a follow for some deep thoughts on training and what it means to do parkour. 

Our second athlete feature is @sagarfreerun. Sagar Londhe was the first Indian parkour athlete I know of to head out to London and hit some classics at Imax, and that style of classic power parkour seems to be what he’s about. I’ve seen some really technically sound athletes from India, but I’m not sure I’ve seen many with the combination of power and technique that Sagar has! Aside from some gnarly parkour park lines, Sagar has been posting from some awesome spots for training that look straight out of central Europe. I’m looking forward to seeing how his style and technique continue to grow as the Indian scene develops more! 

That’s it for this week’s newsletter. Sorry for the delay, I’d love to say it won’t happen again but I won’t play myself like that…it will. The nice thing is, there’s always plenty of fun athletes and developments in the sport to cover even if we do roll things out a day or two late. On the Point A front, in addition to more shooting with Davis we’re almost done with post-production on Embrace Challenge, our piece on The Movement Creative and the MoveNYC rooftop parkour jam. We’re really happy with how it’s come out and can’t wait to share it with you all so stay tuned! 

Have a great week y’all,

Max & Sean

Point A