Sport Parkour League 4 took place in Vancouver, Canada, over the bank holiday weekend. Across three action-packed days, top athletes from around the globe went head-to-head in the skill, speed, and style categories, each chasing the SPL championship title in their division. The stands in Vancouver were packed, while online, fans around the world stayed up late—or woke up early—to catch the livestream before Instagram could spoil the results. But what truly sets SPL apart? Why does it stand out from competitions like the FIG World Cup?
SPL is designed to put the sport itself first. The style category is split into lines, combos, and single tricks, directly reflecting how parkour is actually trained. Skill challenges evolve every year, mirroring trends in the community, while the speed rounds make use of the entire gym, pushing athletes to combine a wide range of techniques at pace and at height. This diversity of formats and rules means athletes can play to their strengths across multiple disciplines — which is why most top competitors enter at least two of the three. The result is a culture of constant innovation and genuine excitement: in SPL, it’s anyone’s game. Hit the right niche in the right year, and you could walk away a double champ. Focus solely on one big trick, though, and you’ll likely fall in the prelims. Unlike the linear, heavily codified approach of FIG competitions, SPL’s format rewards mastery of the sport in its truest form. As an adjacent point — SPL has spearheaded the distinction between sport parkour (as a competitive format) and parkour (as a practice). SPL’s skill, speed, and style formats have been adopted by organisations across the world — SPL was the first to define and refine what competitive parkour should look like.
The breadth of SPL’s format gives athletes the freedom to carve out their own niche and achieve consistent success within it. Tim Champion, for example, is a five-time men’s skill champion, while Elis Torhall has secured three men’s style titles. But what really sets SPL apart is what happens beyond the top spot. Kevin Franzen, an undisputed master of the sport, landed podiums in both skill and style this year; Ed Scott has done the same across speed and style in previous seasons. And perhaps most telling of all: the most decorated athlete in SPL history isn’t a one-man-army dominating a single category — it’s Renae Dambly. Competing in the women’s division, Renae has earned podium finishes across all three formats, year after year, proving herself the most dominant competitor in SPL history. This is what makes SPL special: its format doesn’t just crown specialists, it creates space for athletes to showcase complete mastery of the sport. For me, the true mark of greatness isn’t who wins a single title, but who can step onto multiple podiums, year after year.
Grassroots competitions like SPL aren’t imposed from the outside — they’re born from within the sport. The organisers, judges, and even the competition formats are drawn directly from the parkour community, ensuring that the values of the discipline remain intact. That means skill challenges are designed by people who actually train, judging criteria reflect what practitioners respect, and the overall structure grows and shifts alongside the culture itself. There’s no outside governing body trying to sanitise parkour into a TV-friendly product or force it into rigid scoring systems. Instead, SPL reflects what the community values most: creativity, risk-taking, mastery, and fun. Supporting grassroots events isn’t just about supporting competitions — it’s about supporting the athletes and practitioners who get to define their own sport, on their own terms.
Grassroots competitions don’t just showcase the best of the best — they create space for the next generation to rise. With formats that reward creativity and adaptability, younger or lesser-known athletes can make a name for themselves without needing a federation behind them or years of political ladder-climbing. SPL has a history of breakout performances where underdogs have waves in the community after being relatively unknown, simply by bringing their unique style and strengths to the floor (Brandon Hooper and Max Antal, for example, came in as relative unknowns and took the top spot in Mens skill and style — then held that title for multiple years). With the eyes of the global parkour community on SPL, these athletes can gain recognition on a world stage. That kind of opportunity doesn’t exist in rigidly codified formats, where viewership is lower and only a narrow set of skills are rewarded. By keeping the door open, grassroots events ensure the sport stays fresh, accessible, and inspiring for anyone watching — whether you’re a kid just starting out in your local gym, or a veteran looking to test yourself against the best.
At its heart, SPL shows what grassroots parkour competitions can achieve when the sport—not bureaucracy—sets the rules. By creating formats that reflect how athletes actually train, celebrating greatness across multiple disciplines, and giving space for true masters of the sport to shine, SPL has built something authentic, exciting, and deeply representative of parkour culture. These are the kinds of stages where innovation is born, where future generations are inspired, and where the community gets to see its values reflected back at the highest level. That’s why supporting grassroots competitions matters: they preserve the integrity of the sport, they push athletes to new heights, and they ensure that parkour grows on its own terms.
