Where other pedestrians see obstacles, Anthony Francois sees opportunities.
The Flin Flon teen runs, jumps and flips off of anything that catches his eye, be it a rock ledge, a handrail or even a wall.
“I just run and jump around and sometimes I add a flip,” says Francois, 18. “I just usually visualize myself doing that thing and then I have a choice if I want to do it or not.”
Francois is a devotee of freerunning, a discipline in which individuals express themselves by moving fluidly through their environment.
He first got the idea for freerunning from watching his cousins well over a decade ago.
“I was looking at one of my cousins when I was just a little toddler and looking at them doing flips and backhand sprints,” Francois recalls. “I thought that was cool.”
Like any other rough-and-tumble boy, Francois spent his childhood running and jumping off of rocks, but when he was 11 he got into the basics of freerunning.
Mastered
A few years ago he had his nephew teach him how to do a black flip and he has since mastered his favourite move of all, a double backhand sprint.
“I got hurt a couple of times, but it was alright,” says Francois, a Grade 11 student at Hapnot Collegiate. “At first we tested it out on the trampoline a few times before we went on the ground.”
Since then, Francois has utilized any ledge, wall or structure he can to jump off of.
A badly sprained ankle, a potentially fractured bone in his foot and some scratches along the way haven’t deterred him from his hobby.
“It’s something to do. I feel like a ninja,” he says.
When up against a new challenge, like a flat-footed back flip off of a building wall, Francois says he assesses the obstacle and progresses from there.
“It would take me a couple of hours to get my head [around] it to think about it,” he says. “So I go and I start off short and then I build [up] to it.”
Small ledge
Francois started freerunning on a small rock ledge outside the Joe Brain Children’s Petting Zoo and a nearby sandpit. It’s still one of his favourite spots to try new flips.
“I go there and warm up, train and then take it elsewhere,” he says.
Though he started out with help from family, Francois now trains on his own and watches online videos for ideas and help.
He is now returning the favour by adding his own footage to YouTube.
“I just like to try and make these videos to school my friends who are trying to do it,” says Francois, who has a few friends interested in the discipline. “But they’re just getting into it.”
Francois doesn’t plan to make money from his passion – there are professional freerunners – though he admits that “would be a pretty cool job.”
For now he hopes to continue with freerunning as long as he can.
Francois says it would also be cool if there was a school club, but so far there isn’t much interest in the discipline at Hapnot.
