Fatemeh Akrami, 23 from Tehran, was a gymnastics champion, but she needed something more thrilling, so she took up jumping and diving, literally.
Now Fatemeh is one of the best-known female parkour practitioners in Iran. She is seen somersaulting across Tehran in one of the several YouTube videos displaying her poise and guile, attributes she dedicates to her childhood years spent grappling with gym equipment, MNA reported.
Parkour is a training discipline using movement that developed from military obstacle training course. Practitioners aim to get from point A to B in the most efficient way possible. This is done using only the human body and the surroundings for propulsion, with a focus on maintaining as much momentum as possible while still remaining safe.
It can include obstacle courses, running, climbing, swinging, vaulting, jumping, rolling, quadrupedal movement, and similar other movements depending on what is deemed most suitable for a given situation. It can be practiced alone or with others. Although it can be performed in any location, it is usually practiced in urban spaces.
Fatemeh’s favorite moves are the ‘kong’ vault (a movement for moving over an object and gaining distance) and the back flip (in which the body makes a 360 degree rotation, beginning in a standing position and landing in a standing position), which she uses to cross obstacles in Tehran’s crowded spaces.
Lifestyle
She does not regard parkour as a sport; rather she sees it as an art, a lifestyle that requires mental readiness. “It involves seeing your environment in a new way, and imagining the potentialities for navigation by movement around, across, through, over and under its features,” she adds.
Working as a gymnastics coach in Tehran, Fatemeh said, “I have been doing gymnastics since I was 5. Parkour and free-running is so close to gymnastics, and it was easy for me to start because I was a champion.”
The feeling she gets from parkour is freedom. “Showing the strong side of women is all I want to achieve,” she added.
But her adrenaline addiction has taken her to an even more extreme discipline, skydiving, for which she has to travel to Dubai.
For many people who want to experience an unusual thrilling sport, bungee jumping which is free falling from great heights followed by rebounds, is the best choice; however, jumping from a height of some hundred meters for Fatemeh is child’s play; she is only satisfied by skydiving from 4000-meter heights!
Flying Girl
Skydiving, or parachuting, is the action sport of exiting an aircraft and returning to Earth with the aid of gravity, then slowing down during the last part of the descent by using a parachute.
In summer 2012, she had her first course in Dubai which included theoretical and training sessions followed by eight jumping tests. “It is really arduous to get fully prepared for a free fall. And when you finally get into action, it needs great caution and concentration, so there is not much time to enjoy,” Fatemeh said.
Having dived over 20 times from the airplane has given her the title of ‘Iranian flying girl’. However, it’s a costly sport costing $10,000.
She hopes that she can inspire others to break free and follow her lead. “There are some extreme sports that women do not usually perform in Iran like parkour and skydiving,” Fatemeh noted adding, “I love these sports to be popular, and someday I will be the one to help girls who want to learn them.”
