2024 FIG Parkour World Championships

[Passion]

Parkour World Championships are happening now in Kitakyushu, Japan. Parkour under the FIG has two events each for men and women, speed and freestyle. Speed is a timed race through the course, no tricks, just free running and the fastest time wins. There is a qualification round, semi-final round, then the final round determines the medals.

Freestyle is like Artistic with a D and E score combining to give a total score based on the technical skills performed around the course. There is a qualification round and then final round.

So far the Women’s Speed competition and Men’s Freestyle for this Worlds are complete. These are the final results:

Women's Speed Final
1. MEX Ella Bucio - 38:26
2. USA Audrey Johnson - 38:62
3. SWE Miranda Tibbling - 39:55
4. NED Noa Man - 39:58
5. ARG Sara Banchoff - 40:19
6. ESP Marta Gutierrez 41:39

Men's Freestyle Final
1. SWE Elis Torhall - 32.7
2. JPN Mutsuhiro Shiohata - 30.9
3. NED Tangui van Schingen - 29.6
4. JPN Tomoya Suzuki - 28.3
5. ITA Lautaro Chialvo Bantle - 28.1
6. USA Shea Rudolph - 27.7
7. FRA Eloan Hitz - 26.0
8. CZE Antonin Kolenovsky - 25.5

Women’s Freestyle and Men’s Speed Finals are happening tonight (right now) at 1am EST. The finals are streaming live on Peacock in the US and on Eurovision everywhere else that isn’t geoblocked.

Event Website with full schedule and scores: https://live.gymnastics.sport/schedule.php?idevent=17824

Eurovision Stream:

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Olly Hogben is commentating.

 

[Passion]

Earlier this year Shang Chunsong became the National champion in Parkour Freestyle. Now she is here as part of the Chinese team competing against the World in the Freestyle event. This morning she finished in 1st place during qualifications.

 

[Passion]

The schedule of the competition had to be rearranged and pushed back more than once because of rain through the week. Tonight only three athletes competed in the freestyle final before it started raining again. After a two hour hold and a crew trying to dry off the course, they finally had to call it and cancel the rest of the competition.

The medals for Men’s Speed will be awarded based on the semi-final results and the medals for Women’s Freestyle will be awarded based on the qualification results.

So Shang Chunsong is the World Champion!

I stayed up all night for this lol.

 

[makam]

I'm sure she would rather have run the final but is is kinda awesome that ~10 years later she gets that gold. (Does she not do speed? It seemed like some of the other competitors did both?)

 

[Passion]

No she doesn’t compete in speed, just freestyle. On the stream they said a lot of the women compete in both but on the men’s side it’s more specialized with just doing one or the other. They said it’s a different type of cardio training for each.

Shang Chunsong was the oldest woman in the final at 28 years old, so her age may make it harder to do both? She also was still training and competing in Artistic up until last year, so a lack of time to train both. There’s also more carryover in terms of skills from Artistic to Freestyle. Speed is literally just a race over an obstacle course. I watched the men’s semi-final and they were literally long jumping from obstacle to obstacle. If you weren’t clever about how to get over or under something you fell behind fast. That’s not something she’s ever had experience in.

Winning this competition qualifies her to compete in The World Games this summer in Chengdu, China. They’re “a large multi sport event held every four years for sports not contested at the Olympics.” So I guess it’s like the Olympics for Parkour.

 

[ArnoldRimmer]

Wow, what a story!

 

[Passion]

Women’s Freestyle Final
1. CHN Shang Chunsong - 33.1
2. MEX Ella Bucio - 30.2
3. USA Audrey Johnson - 27.4
4. CZE Adela Merkova - 27.4
5. JPN Nene Nagai - 27.2
6. ARG Sara Banchoff - 23.1
7. CHN Zhou Jie - 22.9
8. ESP Stefanny Navarro - 21.7

Johnson won the tiebreak on execution for the bronze.

 

[RichardL]

This is making me so happy lol, I keep remembering her disappointment at being 4th AA and so close to the bronze in Rio. Good for her.