Every few years, the parkour community produces a new wave of talented athletes who push the level of the sport. They show up at SPL and take podiums. They drop video projects that shift the culture. They train in a way that resets what we think is possible, and then—almost as quickly as they arrived—they vanish. A new generation replaces them, the scene moves on, and the cycle continues. You could say that this looks like the talent turnover of any sport: people grow up, priorities change, bodies break down. But parkour’s churn is unusually fast. It’s not that athletes always stop loving the sport and gain other priorities. It’s that the sport rarely gives our elite athletes a reason—or the ability—to stay.
Here’s a clean example, look at the SPL style podium.
Max Antal competed in a handful of SPL events, dominated, and basically set the level for big trick for years… then disappeared when the next wave (Ed Scott, Jared Luty, Evan Storm) arrived. And even then, only one of those three names is still meaningfully active in the sport today while Elis dominates the format.
So what’s going on — and why does elite parkour feel like a revolving door? And why does even massive talent struggle to remain inside the sport long enough to build a long-term career?
Let’s start with the obvious one; while parkour is an incredibly accessible (and importantly, free) sport, elite parkour is expensive, and the sport itself doesn’t pay. Our “elite athletes” are amateurs in the original sense of the word: they practise the sport out of love. As of 2025, there are very few professional parkour athletes in the same way there are professional footballers or basketball players. There are no teams generating consistent revenue, no central league, no ticket money, no broadcast deals, and very little incentive for major brands to invest long-term. Most athletes make money around parkour—then spend that money just to participate. Even competition is usually self-funded. Prize money rarely covers travel, and what you would have spent on travel rarely covers everything else. So, the ability to compete internationally becomes less about being the best athlete… and more about who can afford to keep showing up.
Here’s another concrete example:
In 2018 I competed at SPL and placed 4th, which prequalified me for the next year. Then SPL 2019 rolled around. I was invited back and had to turn it down. Vancouver was on the other side of the planet, and although the east-coast companies, Woodward and Beast Coast covered my trip to New York in exchange for attending another event, I’d have had to get myself the rest of the way and somehow survive financially for the run-up to the competition (which was just less than a month later). Even with a team, even with sponsors, even with a prequalified place, the cost-benefit didn’t make sense. Not because I wasn’t motivated but because motivation doesn’t pay for international travel.
And that’s the point: if participating at the highest level requires consistent self-funding, then the sport will always churn talent. Only a small number of athletes can keep up for long, and those athletes won’t necessarily be the most talented, but rather the most financially resilient.
On that topic: how do you actually make money with parkour? The honest answer is that you usually don’t. You can make money adjacent to parkour—coaching, content, stunts, brand deals—but most of those careers require you to spend less time doing parkour, not more. Stunts is the obvious example. It looks like the dream outcome: big productions, cool sets, serious pay. And it can be.
But there’s a hidden trade-off that doesn’t get talked about enough:
If you injure yourself, you’ll lose out on opportunities to make money, so you start training more carefully. You reduce risk. You keep yourself intact for the next job. Then you haven’t trained properly in weeks, but your money from the last job is thinning, and the sport quietly slips down your priority list—again, not because you stopped loving it, but because you’re trying to scrounge some sense of stability from the sport.
Even when opportunities do come up, they often don’t ask for parkour. They ask for whatever the stunt director thinks parkour is. Sometimes that means dressing up like a cat and crawling around a set. Sometimes it means doing a handstand next to a bowl of Weetabix. The limited stunt work I did left me with a clear impression: you’re not really being hired to do parkour, and you’re not really doing parkour in case you get hired. So, the net time spent doing parkour goes down in exchange for stability (albeit limited).
My point is that parkour already produces world-class athletes — but then either fails to support them long-term or exports them to industries that can actually pay them. But interest from film, TV, advertising, and stunts provide proof of value. They’ve built stable professional pathways, so the best athletes follow them. The point is that parkour creates elite talent, but it doesn’t have the infrastructure to retain it. There is investment in parkour, but that investment goes straight to the athletes who can sell a product.
Parkour needs to move away from relying on external pathways and toward building internal ones. We need brands to stop funding individual careers around the sport and start investing in the sport itself. Start funding the infrastructure, the events, the circuits, and the development of the sport. My vision for parkour is fewer short-term IG story deals and quick stints in film and TV, and more in-person events, properly funded and properly supported.
