Japan’s Kanazawa holds int’l ‘Ninja Parkour’ tournament online for 1st time

KANAZAWA — “Ninja Parkour,” this Sea of Japan coastal metropolis’s variant on the French acrobatic motion sport by which individuals run and vault over city terrain and obstacles, is at present holding its first ever on-line worldwide event.

About 150 individuals from 15 international locations entered the 2020 Ninja Parkour On-line World Championship, and native college college students and others had been concerned in judging the occasion.

“We need to use younger individuals’s power to revitalize a society compromised by the coronavirus disaster,” one organizer commented. Details about the game will be discovered at its official web site: https://ninja-parkour.org/

Parkour is a sport by which individuals prepare their our bodies by working, leaping and climbing. It was additionally briefly thought-about for inclusion on the 2024 Paris Olympic Video games as a brand new entry within the gymnastics discipline.

The event is hosted by sports activities docs and professors at universities within the prefecture. To present the occasion features combining parkour with an introduction to the Kanazawa space and its cultural panorama, the organizers named it “Ninja Parkour.” Since 2018, they’ve held a nationwide version of the event at Kanazawa Fortress Park, and the addition of a world occasion was deliberate for this 12 months, too, however the outbreak of the coronavirus compelled it on-line.

Video submissions of individuals performing parkour started arriving in late November, with entries from Japan, China, the US, Iran and elsewhere. Organizers additionally reported an enormous vary in entrants, from 5-year-old kids to world-class athletes.

The primary spherical of judging commenced on Dec. 20, with round 60 college students from Hokuriku College and Kanazawa Seiryo College assessing entrants’ accuracy, creativity and different standards as they watched movies of them effortlessly vaulting fences and handrails, and touchdown backflips.

The second judging part will go forward in January, and the ultimate spherical in February. Along with the rulings from judges, the variety of likes a efficiency will get on social media will reportedly additionally affect the outcomes.

Ninja parkour affiliation head Sachio Takeda, who can be a visiting professor at Hokuriku College, mentioned, “I might prefer it to turn into a possibility to grasp the range on this planet by seeing the performances of athletes from varied international locations, and a option to unfold Japanese tradition.”

(Japanese authentic by Hirotaka Abe, Hokuriku Common Bureau)