Paris Youths Are Real-Life Spider-Men

P A R I S, June 2 -- Part of the magic of Spider-Man, his lasting appeal, is his ability to navigate the city without touching the ground. The special effects help.

Meet the real life version — David Belle, 28, leaping between buildings 23 feet apart and 65 feet up. He needed no special effects, no safety harnesses when he did it for a TV ad.

‘Obstacle Course’

Belle and his friends in Paris call what they do on- and off-camera urban exploration — or Le Parkour, French for "obstacle course."

"In this era, we've seen everything," says Belle, in French. "We've explored mountains, the oceans, everything. I explore a path no one has taken before."

He's talking about the inner city.

The movement Belle began eight years ago now includes other city kids, many in their teens, with energy to burn and nowhere to burn it, so they turn their city into a concrete gym. All of their hands are callused from grabbing walls and ledges. They look like skateboarders without the wheels, and move like breakdancers, with the rhythm dictated to them by the obstacles they encounter along the way.

The good news is it gets kids off the street. The not so good news is they're on the rooftop, jumping off stairwells and down alleys.

"We see the environment as a tool to develop the human body," says Sebastien Foucant, a member of Belle's group who hopes Le Parkour becomes in the cities what tai chi has become in the East.

"Each wall, each rock is an instrument," he adds. "Each obstacle overcome is a personal success."

Awake to the Environment

Belle was born and raised in the French countryside, in Normandy. He was used to an outdoor existence of forests and fields when he moved to Paris as a 14-year-old. He says Le Parkour was his way of adapting his rural existence to an urban environment.

When he speaks about Le Parkour, he does it in philosophical terms: When we see a bird on a wire, or a cat on a window sill or roof, we consider it natural, but when we see a human on a roof, we tell them to get down, he says. There's no real reason for that, according to his thinking.