This thread is for people to voice their opinions about competition. People are of course welcome to post views from either viewpoint, pro or anti - as is the case with all of APK, you are welcome to speak your mind, just try to be factual and DO be respectful.

If you somehow feel that APK doesn't represent your views, please bear in mind that "APK" can't, only you can represent your views, and if you do, they will be seen and have "equal airtime" to my views or anyone else that cares to post. Then, in fact, APK will present your views.

I have said before, and I am making an open invitation again, if someone wishes to write an article against competition, if it is well written and either factual or states that it is opinion based (in other words, it can't present opnions as facts or be unfactual) it will be posted on the homepage.

If 5 such people write articles and they are all anti-competition, they will all get posted, but please understand that they would not be posted in a row, APK content aims to be broader than that.

As much as I wish it wouldn't, the way I see it is someone at some point is going to create a competition out of it. However, if that someone is one of us, then we can at least steer it in the right direction and have some say in how it turns out.

busysplendidpie you raise some excellent points.

Everyone knows that I am not against competition, but I think that automaticlally people assign their worst fears to that and to me because of that.


I don't want to see a competition where people are out to "show off" at other's expense, or to only be there to try to beat someone else. There are plenty of competitions where the general feel of the athletes is "Let's put on a great show for the crowd" (Tony Hawk trying pull a new move until he gets it) - in those competitions, I don't think there is a "beat theother man down" sense, but a "support the other gyuy AND do my best" feeling.

Now, BSP, one of my favorite points that you raise is this

I couldn't agree more!!  Competition itself, to me, like almost everything else in the world is neither good or bad, it is the way PEOPLE makeit, the way people treat it that becomes good or bad.

I know there is a feeling that "Competition will attract bad people" ... well, maybe it will, but if everyone high fives the winner and hangs out and has a chill vibe, then I realy think that that is the attitude that will prevail.

The only point of yours that I would like to offer a counter-view to is this:


What about an obstacle course with time as the only factor? Isn't that truest to Parkour in the nature of "moving effectively through your environemnt"? I don't think that a "straight time" event fosters showing off at all, it favors the most direct athlete.



I'd like you to expand on a point if you would please, so that we can all work on keeping things positive ...


I don't think there is anyone who would disagree with you there!!  So, what is it that the media wants it to become? Withotu saying what you are afraid of, there is no way to steer it away from that. Also, WHY do you feel that's what the media wants, and who is the media, and what are their motivations.


I know it's a lot to ask for, but really it is at the very core of the problem, (In my opinion) media wants to exploit things to make money, how do they do that? They find something people like and they give them more of it and they package an ad with it ... but please give your thoughts on it!

I dont think that a little competition would be bad any orgonization of i would ruin parkour but i think an occasional race between training partners would be bad i think that it would in general be alot of fun. I dont think that it should be anymore than just a little fun. I would hate to see parkour become an orgonized sport. I don't want to confuse people about anything i don't want competition in parkour, because i dont want people to compete just have fun.There is a difference between a competition and just a fun race.

Tag or capture the flag with parkour is one of the funnest things i have every done especially tag. Tag is not competative and an incredible amount of fun. Tag doesn't measure your skills apposed to other people because it is most likley that everybody will tag everybody else at least once. Tag also makes you do very creative manuvers that are also as efficient as possible.

I got one ... "Catch" ... the game of catch refers to simply throwing a ball back and forth, no competitive element is implied.

To think of it I thought of roughly 20 other games that are competitive in some way or other.

What else can people think of?

Running is also pretty damn competitive by nature.  The faster caveman with more endurance brought home the food or survived.

I have to disagree with the idea that warfare and violent competition were not common in our paleolithic ancestors, I was an anthropology major and the issue is not clear but their is substantial reason to believe that the opposite is true. Chimpanzees our closest relatives are the only other species that has been shown to systematically attack and kill neighboring groups of their own species. Homocide rates in many hunter foragers have been reported as higher then almost all modern societies, and recently analysis of the of Hiwi Indians indicate that conspecific violence may have been significantly more common in our paleolithic ancestors. Personally I think this highly likely Napoleon chagnon other of the famous fierce people ethnography of the yanamamo indians has noted that the lowland tribes are much more violent then their highland neighbors because of higher population density, the same pattern is seen in chimpanzee's were the most violent groups are the ones with the largest group sizes. Modern hunter foragers live in the most marginal habitats left on the planet they are shorter, less robust and clearly not as well nourished as our paleolithic ancestor which indicates to me that the population density of paleolithic hunter foragers was likely significantly higher then modern hunter foragers and homicide, infanticide and warfare would have been proportionally higher as well. All this has nothing to do with parkour in my opinion, but anthropology was my first academic passion and can't help myself when such a discussion occurs.