
38. From Street to Sport – The Business of Parkour with Robbie Corbett, Parkour Exec and Entrepreneur
Summary
Episode 38 - In this episode of the Farrell Sports Business podcast, the host Matt Farrell talks with
Robbie Corbett, co-owner and director of the World Freerunning Parkour Federation and Creative Director of Integrated Obstacles. Corbett shares his journey into the world of parkour, discussing his transition from a small town in Florida to Los Angeles, where he became involved in the film industry and the establishment of the World Freerunning Parkour Federation. He highlights the challenges of creating a competitive structure for parkour, the cultural tensions between parkour as an art form versus a sport, and the production aspects of parkour events. Robbie also discusses participant demographics, the business landscape of parkour, and how individuals can get involved in this growing sport.
About the Farrell Sports Business Podcast
Interviews with news makers from sports business to talk leadership, entrepreneurship, industry news and their unique career paths. Hosted by Matt Farrell, President of Farrell Sports and former Golf Channel, USOPC, USA Swimming and Warner Bros.
Watch it on YouTube - www.youtube.com/@farrellsportsww
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Matt Farrell (00:00)
Today we're going to talk about a sport that is driven by YouTube culture, social media culture, video game culture, and that's parkour. We've seen it. We've seen it on social. We've seen it on YouTube, but there's an entire sport infrastructure and ecosystem behind it. And I find this to be a really interesting conversation with a person who is a former stunt person.
a stunt coordinator and parkour instructor. And we're going to just talk about the overall sport and the business of being in parkour. So this is the Farrell Sports Business Podcast. I'm the host, Matt Farrell, and this week's guest is the co-owner of the world free running parkour federation, Robbie Corbett.
Matt Farrell (01:05)
Robbie, welcome. So great to meet you.
Robbie Corbett (01:08)
Great to meet you as well, Matt. Thank you so much for having me.
Matt Farrell (01:11)
this is such an exciting topic just to really, A, learn about a sport that many of us have seen in different forms and maybe social media and B, just the inner workings of it and you and the background of parkour. I just think it's a fascinating topic.
Robbie Corbett (01:31)
Awesome, yeah, hope it stays as fascinating to you once we start digging into it. It doesn't get boring.
Matt Farrell (01:35)
Well,
Robbie, let's let's set it up with I want to talk about you and your background, a little bit of the sport of parkour in general, and then we'll get into the business side of it. But you're a co owner, co owner of the World Free Running Parkour Federation. You're doing a lot of things. As an athlete, as a business entrepreneur, what's a little bit of your background in a snapshot?
Robbie Corbett (02:03)
In a snapshot I moved from a small town in Florida in 2008 to across the country to Los Angeles to be in film and television with parkour because at that time it just came on my radar maybe a year or two before as an official sport because it was in a movie called District B13 a very successful French film not so successful here in the US and then
everybody knows the James Bond movie hit. So for me, I saw it in that first film and I was like, that's cool. And then by the time it was in James Bond's second film, like, all right, this thing's coming. And that's apparently where it is. Because I didn't know all the time that James Bond's made in the UK. I thought everything was made in Hollywood. So I came to Hollywood, realized they don't make James Bond movies here at all. But the point was, you know, everybody in Hollywood was talking about it like.
how do we get parkour in our movie and how do we get it on our televisions or how do we get it in our commercials? So I wanted to be here for that. Right away got more involved in stunts, which I realized really fast was not doing parkour. Like in parkour, I like to land on my feet and like dissipate the impact and like not hurt myself. Where in stunts, you never land on your feet and it's way more challenging to dissipate the impact and they want it to look like you just got hurt.
That was like a whole nother discipline that I had to learn pretty quick. And in that time, I started, yeah, just getting gigs as a free runner or as a stunt man, an actor who could also free run or just an actor. So I started just diving into that industry. In about two years of doing that, I got approached by my agent.
Matt Farrell (03:27)
It's a tough balance.
Robbie Corbett (03:53)
to audition for show called MTV's Ultimate Parkour Challenge. I went, auditioned, and they said, you know, you're good. But we got tons of Caucasian, Europeans, Russians, Swedish, already coming. We're looking for Americans, but multicultural. I said, no problem. At the same time, a stunt coordinator called me and goes, hey, I'm going to be working on this parkour gig, and I think you could help assist, because you know parkour. I said, cool. I showed up for the parkour.
Stunt Coordinating gig and it was all the pre-production shooting for the MTV show that hadn't happened yet. So then all the people of MTV are like, what are you doing here? And I'm like, I'm assistant stunt coordinating. They thought I was like sneaking on and trying to force myself. And they're like, okay. So then as that show started going and they saw that like, I was very safe with the talent of like, you know, saying to the town, Hey, we're to put a mat down. And they're like, no, no, I don't go to mats. I'm like, well, you're going to cause
The camera's pointed up only at the sky. You're flipping from 10 feet to the ground. He's not gonna follow you. You're gonna go to a mat every time unless he pulls back and we see that ground. And the athlete was like, okay, if I have to. They did it when it was all over. By the end of the day, the athlete would come to me and goes, you know what, actually, thank you for doing that. So within a short time of me being on that set, they started realizing that I actually understood how to take this extreme sport that you do in the streets for YouTube.
and the internet and how to actually make it more cinematic but also safer for these multi-million dollar productions. As that show wrapped up, that's where I was introduced to the World Free Running Parkour Federation that was partnering with MTV on it and that's where the talks really started happening about how do we make this more of a sport? How do we actually, we did this huge MTV show and it was good.
But it really didn't help the grass roots and the ground swell or anything to provide longevity to the sport. And since I'd come from teaching gymnastics at that point for about six years because there was no parkour, I was like, well, I have an idea. And it went into certifications for coaches and judges. It went into making an equipment line for gyms so they don't have to use gymnastics equipment wrong. They actually would have equipment for it. And then it went into adding
competitions together at a low level. So we've developed that since then and that's now the World Freerunning Parkour Federation, which oversees the World Parkour Championship, which is the first ever World Parkour Championship that's happened, as well as Integrated Obstacles, which is the equipment, and then parkourcertification.com, which is all the education.
Matt Farrell (06:43)
you used to say it so casually of like, we started a sport and now there's a world championship. And anybody who works in any type of youth grassroots sport knows that there's a lot in that. If there's a world championship, there's got to be a way and a pathway for you to get there. So how challenging was it or how much
Robbie Corbett (06:51)
Yeah.
Matt Farrell (07:09)
infrastructure or foundation existed from the sport or did you literally have to be okay I'm an athlete in Colorado I've got to go to X competition then to Y then to Z people take that structure for granted but it sounds like you've started it from scratch almost
Robbie Corbett (07:31)
Yeah, I mean for me parkour as a you know, I'm 38 now, but at a real fast point I realized parkour was not just beneficial to me physically to like over you know climb over a wall or get on top of that roof and jump to another roof, know, it was also like what's Yeah, it was what's the mental obstacles that are stopping me from actually like the dream of parkour and I've always looked at people like Dana White of the UFC or Vince McMahon of
Matt Farrell (07:46)
Like we all do. Yeah, of course. Yeah.
Yeah.
Robbie Corbett (07:59)
WWE or WWF as it used to be. I've always looked at them as very interesting in the sports world, but more importantly how they've made sports entertainment as well as not following the typical sports governance guidelines that are more associated with things like the Olympics or the not-for-profit world that I'm sure you're aware of, of like the NBA where they have these like
these quotas they have to hit in order to become a certain thing to play. It's very cost effective and it takes a lot of time for certain communities to grow equally to other communities. So what we did instead was approach it from both angles. There's a not-for-profit international parkour federation that was already working with about 40 different countries in that sense of grassroots sports governance. What we basically did with the WFPF was buy
Matt Farrell (08:30)
Yeah.
Robbie Corbett (08:56)
world park where championship is a brand and said, we'll put on this event. We'll work with board of tourism and we'll work with this. We'll make this event. We just want IPF to sanction it. So it now is approved by sports governance, but you're just sanctioning it. weren't, you're just coming on and saying, okay, we approve what you're doing. And we then have the ability to kind of play outside the lines. And what I mean by that is.
Matt Farrell (09:10)
Mm-hmm.
Robbie Corbett (09:24)
Another time that we did a sports governance official like follow the playbook for Sport Accord to hopefully see and say, okay, cool. They followed this. There were so much red tape we had to go through and so many rules that you have to follow that just slow everything down as far as educating the athletes, the spectator, ourselves, the producers of it all.
And what I mean by that is like a simple one was we were just going to do an online one and it had to be brackets. And then every country had to have an equal representative number of male and females. And once those athletes are picked, they're the only ones in the competition. If they get injured, we're not allowed to sub somebody in. has to, know, that person is just out and how it works. And it was all this stuff that really hindered the final product and the experience for the athletes and the spectator.
So we've tried to find other ways to navigate around that, to help grow the sport, and not be stuck to that. If that helps.
Matt Farrell (10:23)
Yeah.
You're kind of
in an interesting situation and this is an oversimplification, there's so many, whether they're in the Olympics or not is somewhat irrelevant, but a lot of sports kind of start, you know, whether at a world championship or have a world championships, have an Olympics and they're starved for credibility and fandom. Parkour seems to me almost the opposite. You start with all the street
credibility and the organic authenticity of the activity that you got to turn into a sport. It's a fascinating route to me.
Robbie Corbett (11:12)
Yeah, easy one to compare it to would be something like breakdancing. saw, or your background of breakdancing since the 70s and mainly the 80s was huge on the streets and was this whole thing. It took till now that it finally got to the Olympics and that's because exactly what I think you're kind of getting at, which is every year the streets were kind of saying what they liked, what caught fire, what was impressive, what would grow.
Matt Farrell (11:19)
Yeah.
Robbie Corbett (11:41)
and they would find something new every single year. And it was really hard for a sport to capture that and say, how do we really set a criteria? How do we set a judge against this? And how do we keep it fresh? for me, I saw that as it's a street sport. And when it got to the Olympics, I knew it was going to be not what the Olympics wants and definitely not what break dancers want.
And I think that was, you know, that's what I think the main consensus was. Because you're taking this art form of the streets and of its people and of its culture and you're trying to put it in a place that kind of has like no culture. You know, the Olympics, it's very much we all look alike. We're all kind of doing the exact same thing in the exact same space. You know, like a big one, breakdance is the music they go to. They were given specific songs that weren't, you know, like.
Matt Farrell (12:27)
sterile in many ways.
Robbie Corbett (12:39)
they weren't feeling right away just because of whatever copyright issues or fairness, whatever. So for me, like with Parkour, we've been hearing about the Olympics. We've had talks with FIG, Federation International Gymnastica about could Parkour work with them. And then we've also had talks with Patathlon and how we could work with them because the core principles of Parkour is A to B, over, under, through, like your life's on the line coming from the French military.
So as its principles and founding, it works more with the patholone. Once you get into the acrobatic and the aesthetic and the art form of flipping and moving, maybe that's like gymnastics. But in my opinion, it's not. But how sports governance works, the IOC is like, well, the gymnastics makes us all this money. They're losing all these men. Maybe they should take parkour. Now they got men. We're still working with the gymnastics federation.
It's like it's a weird slope. So for us, we found ways to grow that way, but also keep it more authentic to the sport. So like our world championship was on a 800 year old mosque out in Turkey. And we built on top of the roof of the mosque, some equipment, but used the mosque itself. And then from that, we were able to have 22 countries representing. I believe we had about 125 athletes total.
And that's like how we wanted the first world championship to be, in a more using its environment, authentic, cool place compared to in an arena completely like manufactured.
Matt Farrell (14:21)
Well, you hit on it a little bit with that. I wanted to ask you of like break dancing. There are some sports that have, I would call it a cultural tension within them of, for lack of a better term, the activity versus the sport, break dancing, surf, snowboard, even like ultimate frisbee, like some of the
Robbie Corbett (14:48)
Yeah, yeah.
Matt Farrell (14:50)
The purists who started the sport don't, excuse me, started the activity or the street culture of those sports or the beach culture of those sports. They don't really want it to be a sport. Do you find that in parkour?
Robbie Corbett (15:04)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, 100%. For me, when I first joined WFPF, first off, MTV's Ultimate Parkour Challenge was the first ever competition to use the word parkour. There was probably five other competitions that happened before it at a much smaller scale, and they all stayed away from the word parkour because there was this thing within parkour that it's not a sport, it's not competitive.
It's a self-discipline, it's an art form, whatever. In my mind, I was like, well, I see it as both. I can go to the basketball court and just shoot hoops by myself. I could play horse with a friend. I could get a team together and we could go compete against another team. I could join the NBA. I like the fact that you have all those to choose from. And that was kinda how I kept presenting it to where go, well, if you have the NBA, you also get...
Matt Farrell (15:37)
Yeah.
Great comparison.
Robbie Corbett (16:03)
notice you get basketball parks all around the city, city funded. And then you also notice you get basketball in schools to keep kids in shape and fit. You also then potentially get college scholarships and things like that. And then you potentially have a whole industry of coaches, referees, athletes, all that stuff. You know, I go, so I look at it as parkour could be all of that as well. And if you don't want to compete, don't, you know,
But if there is this competitive circuit and there is this thing for the top, you know, five percent, that normally is what trickles down to the parks, the playgrounds, the schools, the education. If you don't have that, we see, especially in America, well, I'd say in all countries, if you don't have that, you don't get any of those other things, you know, without taking a lot of self-responsibility of being the first one to open something or...
going to the city hall and saying this city should be the first to have a parkour park. And those are much harder sells, you know, for the sport.
Matt Farrell (17:10)
Well, I checked out a good number of your YouTube videos from some of your competitions and I mean transitioning into the sports side of it. They're a pretty significant and I mean this in a very positive way, very impressive production of what the equipment looks like, what the obstacles look like. Maybe paint the picture a little bit that if I...
whether it's a national championship or a world championship, and I walk into that venue, what am I going to see?
Robbie Corbett (17:48)
Yeah, that's a great question. We're about to have our seventh annual national championship in Austin, Texas, February 28th through March 2nd. There you'll see one of the most impressive parkour courses that's ever been assembled where we'll have competitors from ages five and up, male and female. I believe we'll have about 300 total competitors from across the US. Some will be coming from winning qualifiers at their state or local area.
and others will be coming to participate at the on-site qualifier to get into that final championship. For our speed, we do a dueling course, so it's two athletes at a time running side by side, challenging the course at three different levels where they start at ground level and work all the way up to 17 feet high. And then for freestyle, same thing of using a three level course, but for that it'll be more the athletes showing a performance.
within that course of using all the apparatuses and things to collect more points in difficulty and versatility than the other.
Matt Farrell (18:56)
Well, and then I guess this is a little bit of a general question so you can maybe take it the way you want. Just the operations of it. What does the build look like? What does the setup look like? From a timing and resources and from a safety standpoint, what goes into the operations of one of your events?
Robbie Corbett (19:12)
Yeah.
For the local qualifiers, we work with some gyms that are under USA Parkour Insurance and we work with some that are under their own insurance provider. So we always tell them to just make sure they're following their guidelines. For us, our criteria was actually designed over five years for the insurance provider that we eventually locked into our certifications and competitions. So for us, the...
know, criteria, the equipment, the disciplines was all based off of how do we get this in a mass insurance provider to back this. So it was a bit of education to work with them and for them to understand us. But since that, we're now up to about 65 facilities with insurance in the US and about 10 in Canada. We did just get qualifications in...
Matt Farrell (20:01)
Yeah.
Robbie Corbett (20:19)
UK under SIMSA, so we're looking to roll that out as far as our certification being recognized. And then as far as how goes into competitions that are exactly at the national level is it's 100 % on our integrated obstacles that is backed by our insurance provider as well as DGS has a great insurance policy for any equipment malfunction, which we've never had to use in the 10 years of working with John. So we've been doing pretty good with that.
as well as the reason we do our equipment is we're able to set a particular course for five and six year olds to go and within minutes make some adjustments and then the seven, eight year olds can go. And then within minutes make some adjustments, nine to 11 year olds. And then 12 to 15, 16 plus. So that's why we choose the kind of equipment we do and why. And that was all designed also for gyms with the idea that at least
once a month, if not a lot of our gyms do it every other week, completely change up the layout. their athletes are always feeling challenged, new and fresh. Unlike some other sports where you show up and it's the same equipment and the same layout and the same format. So that was like our kind of goal with equipment was how we can advance the competition, but also the gyms and the interest. A lot of our production is actually
done with free runners. have a gentleman working right now for us that's going to be releasing a small documentary, of, it's four free runners by free runners. And it's going to show how USA Parkour National Cup is ran by about 70 % free runners. So our live feed media guy comes from Parkour. The structural advisor graduated college in Wisconsin as a structural engineer and
took our parkour certification while doing that and now advises us on the equipment side. The hosts of it are all former free runners who have now gotten to emceeing and hosting. And all the judges were either athletes or coaches from successful parkour communities. And it's pretty much like really grassroots as far as the production, as far as the event team and everything like that.
Matt Farrell (22:44)
So what are you seeing from a participant standpoint? Any common themes of age or gender? How are people coming into the sport?
Robbie Corbett (22:57)
Yeah, majority as far as gender is male, I would say we're about 90-10. And my insight into that is parkour has been taken a lot from gymnastics, break dancing, skateboarding, because those things aren't flourishing as much these days with social media posts and ability. Those things tend to cost more that I just mentioned. Parkour is pretty accessible anywhere you live.
You know, you can go find something to play on and learn from and post it and stuff like that. And then in females, it hasn't grown as much because it seems like with the female demographic mainly is they also have other avenues. So there's gymnastics, cheerleading, and those are really where we see the majority of female athletes in our space. Because obviously, of course, there's like softball, baseball, volleyball, but those I don't think are like, you know.
complementary sports in the same kind of world or bracket. As far as ages, know, like I said, we have a good turnout in our gyms from as young as five to fifteen. Those are the bigger numbers than the sixteen and up. But the biggest one seems to be the seven eights and the twelve to fifteen. That seems to be like our kind of bigger numbers as far as participants and energy and stuff like that.
Matt Farrell (24:24)
Well, earlier you mentioned John of DGS. He was a guest recently on here, John Deere of Deere Gymnastics Supply. And you seem to be on a very parallel path with Ninja in some ways. What's going on with the growth of, I think you said the 65 facilities with Parkour?
If you were going to look at it a little bit of a macro level with parkour, what is the business and club and facility landscape look like right now?
Robbie Corbett (25:02)
Yeah, so across the US, mainly, I would say that there's probably maybe three parkour gyms on average per state, and there's some states that have more and some have less. And that's like parkour-specific gyms, I mean there. The bigger, more common thing that you'll see is a ninja gym. They'll kind of use that word or that tag.
Matt Farrell (25:20)
Yeah.
Robbie Corbett (25:31)
And there'll be some ninja warrior obstacles within the facility, but the main thing that keeps people coming to classes and growing and stuff is when they start teaching parkour. Cause they'll bring them to the big ninja apparatus, they'll swing a little bit, their hands get tired, they get bored. Cause that's 90 % of ninjas, like hand hanging stuff. So what they'll start doing is let's go over these vault boxes over here. Let's go over and play on this wall over here.
Matt Farrell (25:58)
interesting. I didn't
see that coming. Yeah.
Robbie Corbett (25:59)
Do you want to learn how to backflip?
I can show you how to backflip. And it starts going that route. There are definitely gyms that are ninja that stay away from parkour also. And they do their competitive thing and they do that. So those exist also. And then another big one is gymnastics gyms. Reaching out to us and saying, we basically lost all of our boys. We have 2,000 square feet. Is that enough to start a parkour program?
So we get a lot of that as well. The other kind big park takeaway, but it's something we don't have visibility into, would be the trampoline parks. Those get a lot of people coming in and out and people just playing that might come to one of our gyms and actually learn parkour specifically. But a lot of people go there to just kind of play parkour in a free, low-cost, big space. But no instructions going on.
Matt Farrell (26:58)
So it's just really interesting of just how this is developing because now the topic of gymnastics is a whole topic for another podcast, but you nailed it of how it's primarily female driven and sometimes a gym or facility. You know, the men's gymnastics needs a swap out of equipment and that might mean whatever 10,000 more square feet.
Ninja and parkour are really filling an interesting niche and void of this boys activity, I think. Are you seeing it similarly?
Robbie Corbett (27:39)
Yeah, 100%. I was just on a different call today with some people in sports Wales. Because in the UK, they're having a similar problem that we've had in the US for a while, which is child obesity. And they're basically saying, we can't get them to play football. We can't get them to play basketball. We can't get them to do this. But if we say the word parkour, they want to do it. And I go, OK. And they're like, what do you think that is? And I go, well,
why we see that at a lot of our gyms and our spaces, our competitions and stuff over the years. mean, just coming up, seeing a random kid show up to the national from someplace in Florida or someplace in Idaho, and they do really well. And I'll always go up to them and the parents and just be like, what other sports is he doing? And the more common one I'm hearing now is none. It used to be, he plays soccer. He plays basketball, baseball. This is his off season.
That was the more commons. Now it's the more common is nothing. He does this. And it's like, okay. And the more I kind of talked to him, it's like he was playing video games and we asked, we just kind of said, you need to do some kind of sport. What do you want to do? And they would say parkour. And the more we looked into it, you find out it's parkours in Minecraft. It's in Assassin's Creed. It's in like all these video games and movies and television shows. And that's where that kind of introvert
Matt Farrell (28:43)
wow.
Robbie Corbett (29:08)
is kind of looking and says, well, I'll do that because these people, know, the superhero I like does that or does that. And they don't have that commitment of having to join a whole football team and everybody's relying on them to play their part and stuff like that. It's more come in. We're going to start you at a low level. We'll work you up. What do you want to do? Do you want to do speed? Do you want to climb over walls? Do you want to flip? Do you want to post stuff on social media? Do you just want to get in better shape? You know, there's so many more kind of like,
to start people on with parkour than the average sport. And I think like a lot of people are attracted to that.
Matt Farrell (29:42)
Yeah, it's
really incredible. I mean, I think of it as a YouTube-driven sport, and it probably is, then a social media-driven sport, and now a video game-driven sport. It's rooted, it goes back to the earlier topic, is like really rooted in authenticity, and I think it's a cool way to grow a sport and get people interested in it.
Well, let me ask you this. If I'm someone who wants to get involved in parkour, how do they find you? How do they find more? I call this the shameless plug part, Robbie. How do people get involved and help grow this with you?
Robbie Corbett (30:28)
Yeah,
yeah, the easiest way would be to shoot, you know, to follow USA Parkour underscore official on Instagram. From there we check our messages all the time and we try to post about what's going on. So that'd probably be the easiest one. And then from there we can direct you to, you know, is it education? Do you want to find a gym near you? Do you want to get into competition? Are you just interested in finding good places just to watch free running? You know, all those kind of things. So that's probably the...
simplest direct line.
Matt Farrell (31:00)
And open-ended one for you. Anything that I didn't ask about parkour and the business of parkour that I didn't ask that maybe I should have that you wanted to add.
Robbie Corbett (31:10)
No, no, think you did awesome. Yeah, I surprised. Because, like, yeah, just, we just started talking like less than, what, 48 hours ago, and this has already come to be. And I'm surprised how much you've already been able to research and dive in and prepare. So, no, I think this has been awesome.
Matt Farrell (31:26)
Well, Robbie, great to meet you. some of these things just click and come together and like-minded people. So it's been great meeting you. So I appreciate you joining.
Robbie Corbett (31:38)
Yeah, same here. Thank you for having me,
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