by Criterion Staff
For those who did not know, there is currently an online video editing competition going on, featured around the art of parkour. The event is called “Run the City,” and it is being put on by Red Bull as a way of getting parkour athletes some recognition across the country.
There are nine teams competing in this competition, including a team stationed right here in Grand Junction.
“When Red Bull contacted me they just wanted to put together a team,” Vinnie Coryell said. “It was kind of a select whoever you want. But actually all of the people that are a part of my team I have known the for years.”
Coryell’s team consists of himself and three other athletes that he has worked with in the past. The first is Victor Karp, who is one of Coryell’s head instructors at his parkour gym Move to Inspire. Then there is Isah Mckenzie, who is a graduate from CMU and was an active athlete with the Move to Inspire gym. Then there is Chadwick Platt-Kuhn, who is the only athlete on the team that is not from Grand Junction, but from Montana.
The competition is an online voting event where each team puts out a new video for four consecutive weeks, and whichever team gets the most votes on their videos by Dec. 5 is the winner of the competition. Each of the four videos were given a specific topic that the video had to be based around.
“Given the themes of each of the videos it was pretty vague,” Coryell said. “So we just kind of went about it how we would film our training videos. It was really interesting because seeing the other videos that came out they were pretty heavily edited and some people did voice overs and some had other equipment and stuff like that. We kept it pretty consistent with how the parkour community posts videos.”
The first video topic’s theme was point of view.
“The first video we did every shot was in first person,” Coryell said. “So we actually had the GoPro and we turned it upside down and we all had mouth guards that attached to the GoPros.”
The second was going off the grid, or places that only a parkour athlete can go.
“The second video we decided that we would go only where parkour athletes could go,” Coryell said. “So we went up to the monument and the white rocks, which is really a part of Grand Junction, and it is one of those main things that people come to Grand Junction to see but not a lot of people get to see from our perspective.”
The third video won’t be released until Nov. 21, but it’s called Rush Hour. So the team created a video that focusses on a lot of quick runs and routes that they normally do while training in Grand Junction. The final video is called Soul of the City, and that one will be the final video that each team releases for the competition.
“[The final one] we just wanted to go out and train together,” Coryell said. “We wanted to play off of each other’s strengths and weaknesses and just see what we could come up with. And it was actually pretty cool because we were able to push each other to do things that we haven’t been able to do or things that we haven’t seen in the areas that we normally train at.”
However, when watching the videos, it is important to note that these are trained athletes and they have spent countless hours in the gym analyzing and perfecting the jumps and flips that they do.
“Parkour has this element to it that people think that it is really extreme and dangerous and really unapproachable,” Coryell said. “But something that is really important to us as parkour athletes is that it is something that is very calculated and practiced multiple times. What you don’t see outside of the videos is the amount of times we have practiced the jumps and that it is practiced and it is something that we put a lot of effort into that is not just dangerous and crazy. That is why we opened up the gym. If someone wants to learn it in a safe environment we have the tools to be able to teach people.”
The Grand Junction team currently sits in eighth place, in front of Orlando, but behind Los Angeles, Dallas, Sacramento, Boston, Denver, Salt Lake City and Greenville. Being the smallest city on the list of participants they need more votes to come from people in the Grand Junction area to get into the top of the competition. To do that go to runthecity.redbull.com and vote. You can vote for each week’s video once an hour all the way up until the Dec. 5 deadline.
