Most sports evolved gradually, their origins lost to argument. Parkour is unusual: it has a founder, with a name, a home town and a story. Everything about how the discipline looks and feels traces back to David Belle and the Parisian suburb of Lisses.
David Belle: key dates
- 1973 – born 29 April in Fécamp, Normandy
- Late 1980s – begins training seriously in Lisses and Évry, applying his father’s methods
- 1997 – the founding group takes the name Yamakasi
- Late 1990s – Belle’s strand of the practice becomes known as parkour
- 2002 – crosses London’s rooftops in the BBC One Rush Hour ident
- 2004 – stars in District 13, built around his abilities
- 2009 – returns in District 13: Ultimatum
- 2014 – co-stars with Paul Walker in the Hollywood remake, Brick Mansions
The father first
You can’t explain David Belle without Raymond Belle. Born in Vietnam and put through French military schooling there as a boy, Raymond built himself into an extraordinary athlete and later became a celebrated rescuer with the Paris fire brigade. He passed his training philosophy to his son not as a sport but as a survival ethic: be strong, be capable, be useful.
Lisses
As a teenager in Lisses in the late 1980s, David took that ethic to the town’s walls, rails and rooftops. With a close group of friends – who together became the Yamakasi – he trained obsessively: repeating jumps hundreds of times, testing every movement until it could be trusted with his life. The group called their practice l’art du déplacement; Belle’s version took its name from the military parcours du combattant and became parkour – a naming story we’ve told in full in parkour vs freerunning.
Parkour goes public
Belle’s movement reached the world through screens. First came his own home-made footage – the legendary Speed Air Man tape, passed around the early internet like contraband. Then the 2002 BBC One Rush Hour ident, in which he crosses London’s rooftops to get home for the telly. And in 2004, Luc Besson’s District 13 – an action film built almost entirely around what Belle could actually do, no wires, no doubles. Its opening chase remains the purest piece of parkour ever put in a feature film; here it is from Belle’s own channel:
Since then
Belle returned for District 13: Ultimatum (2009) and the Hollywood remake Brick Mansions (2014) opposite Paul Walker, and has worked since as an actor, stunt performer and fight-and-movement choreographer. He has also served in the discipline’s governance, chairing the international parkour committee within FIG, the world gymnastics federation – a sign of how far a practice invented by teenagers in Lisses has travelled. Wherever parkour goes next, Belle remains its reference point.
What Belle actually invented
Not the movements – humans have always run, jumped and climbed, and Georges Hébert had systematised natural movement a century earlier. What Belle created was the discipline: the idea that ordinary urban space is a training ground, that progress comes from patient repetition, and that the point is to become genuinely capable rather than to look impressive. That idea is exactly what we practise at our free sessions in Sheffield, twenty years after it first reached us – the whole story is in our short history of parkour.
Yes – Belle is credited as parkour’s founder, though he developed it collectively with the Yamakasi, building on his father Raymond’s training and Georges Hébert’s natural method. The word “parkour” describes Belle’s strand of the group’s shared practice.
His best-known roles are District 13 (2004), District 13: Ultimatum (2009) and Brick Mansions (2014). He has also worked widely as a stunt performer and movement choreographer.
Movement has remained his life’s work – through film, choreography and the discipline’s international governance. Parkour, as he’s often pointed out, isn’t something you retire from; it’s a way of carrying yourself through the world.