LITTLETON, Colo. (KDVR) — A Denver-area man has been invited to compete at the highest level of his sport, parkour, and he needs some help getting there.
You may have heard of it from YouYube or the hit show “The Office,” but for Sean Higgins, it’s his whole life and he’s ready to show off his craft at the 2023 Parkour World Cup in France.
Higgins is in some elite company when it comes to the sport, being only one of four Americans chosen to compete. He has been competing internationally for around seven years and training in parkour for 15 years.
FOX31 visited the gym where he coaches parkour in Littleton, Path Movement, where he showed his skills and explained the process.
“Whatever obstacle is in front of you, you gotta get through it. If it’s a wall, you gotta climb up and over it. If it’s a bar, you can either vault over it, swing under it or possibly jump on top of it and stride over it. So there are many options, and mostly the fastest athletes will take the highest, most risky, and you just gotta go as fast as you can.”
Parkour is also about style
He said he found the sport on YouYube years ago and knew it was something he wanted to try — and he ended up being pretty good at it.
“I had a pretty athletic upbringing and so I was already pretty athletic. And so when I jumped into parkour, I kind of already had a really good base of jumping and a good strength element as well, and so I think I was able to excel faster at it and I was passionate about it,” Higgins said.
But it’s not all about speed. The second part of the competition involves style.
“Style is more like skateboarding, where you have basically like 45 seconds on the clock to do as many cool tricks and creative moves as you can. It’s judged on difficulty, execution, flow, which is your overall composition of the line and how it connects together.”
Higgins is competing in both the style and speed categories at the Parkour World Cup. He’s submitted two times before and didn’t make this cut, so being one of four chosen this year is a big deal to him.
His trip to France is not funded by the federation, so he set up a GoFundMe to help live out this dream.
“From now on, it’s just train, train, train. I’m just gonna work every day to kind of perfect my craft and hopefully do as well as I can in the competition,” Higgins said.