Last August, when he was 17 years old, Nye Newman, a gymnastics instructor from Guildford, bought a plane ticket to China. Newman planned to sightsee, but not as you or I might, via bus or map or tour guide. His preferred vantage point was up where the air is thin, perched on the precipice of a skyscraper rooftop. Newman, who with schoolfriend Rikke Brewer co-founded the parkour group Brewman (a portmanteau of their surnames), made more than a dozen of these trips in 2016 alone, spending almost all his earnings on plane tickets. He’d often neglect to book accommodation before he left, instead posting messages in online parkour groups, certain that someone would spare him a bed. In 2015, when Newman and a clutch of Brewmanites travelled to Munich, they walked into a hotel in the city centre and confidently strode past the woman at the front desk and into the lift. At the top of the hotel they found an unlocked skylight. They helped each other through, before setting up camp on the roof for the week, sleeping under the stars, between the humming satellite dishes.



China, however, was farther than Newman had travelled before. His anxious mother begged him not to go. “I didn’t disapprove, I just wanted him to wait a while longer,” Deborah Malone, a yoga teacher and singer, tells me. “But waiting wasn’t his thing.” She hid her son’s passport. The next day, Newman reported it stolen and ordered a replacement. Soon after landing in Guangzhou, he posted a photograph to Brewman’s popular Instagram account, showing his legs dangling from the edge of a stratospheric tower, the city a tapestry of lights far below. “I fully expected him to die,” his father Jake Newman, a 49-year-old musician, says. “He took enormous risks. I’d tell him, ‘Think about your mum, because if you die, she’ll be ruined.’ I thought maybe he might get away with it. One of the few things I’ve been able to say since it happened is that I don’t worry about him any more. The worst has happened.”

On New Year’s Eve, Newman, with his girlfriend Nicole and a group of other friends, boarded the Paris Métro. He unlocked a door linking two of the rattling carriages and stepped between them. He stuck his head out of the side of the train to line up a shot with his camera. A passing object struck his head. At the next stop, his friends called for help, but he subsequently died from the injury. After years spent climbing and leaping between perilously tall buildings and perfecting gymnastic stunts without the use of safety nets, Newman lost his life to a mundane accident a few feet from terra firma. “Nye coached young people, so he was very safety-conscious,” Jake says. “But he was impetuous, too. He’d take a chance in a split second. On that day, it proved a fatal error.”

The urge to reach higher ground is a fundamental human instinct. We climb mountains to survey nature. We ride elevators to the 100th floor to survey cities. With height, we gain a divine perspective, a kind of mastery of our environment. But there has always been another category of sky-scraping human, those who, like Newman, climb not merely to master the world, but to master themselves, their fear and maybe even death itself. Having learned to walk at a precocious nine months and climb at 10, the young Newman, his mother remembers, would always take the circuitous route, clambering across Manchester’s postboxes, benches, lamp-posts and bins when out walking. When the family moved to Aldershot in Hampshire, Newman joined a popular local gym where soldiers stationed in the town trained. There he learned techniques that he’d later take to the streets. “He was a firework, a free physical spirit,” Malone says. “He felt like a captive at school and was desperate to explore, to experience. He often told me he couldn’t live without parkour.”

Newman’s breed is ancient. The stylites were ascetic pillar-dwellers from the Byzantine empire who sat atop poles and columns in quiet contemplation. More recent specimens include Philippe Petit, the French acrobat who danced along a rope stretched between New York’s Twin Towers in 1974. Fifty years earlier, Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly, an orphan who ran away from home at 13, could be found similarly silhouetted on the New York skyline. He would sit atop flagpoles, often for days at a time, watching the city below. (At night, Kelly, who became a major celebrity, would insert his thumbs into a pair of holes on either side of his handmade seat. If he dozed off, the pain he felt in his thumbs when he began to teeter would cause him to right himself without waking.)

If you just looked at our posts, you might think we do crazy stuff all the time

Over time, those with a predilection for this kind of showboating athleticism have become circus performers, gymnasts and, with the advent of film, stunt people. In the 1980s, a new outlet opened up: l’art du déplacement, a French term coined by a group of Parisian schoolfriends to describe the art of moving freely, often using gymnastic techniques, to zip across urban furniture. A pithier label emerged in parkour, from the French word parcours, meaning route.

In January this year, parkour was christened an official sport in the UK, the first country to recognise it as such. As a result, the debate about what is and isn’t authentic parkour, which many people take to mean anything from teetering along cranes to leaping through abandoned warehouses, has stiffened. “Parkour is a sport activity that should not be confused or misappropriated with any of these other unrelated activities,” Eugene Minogue, chief executive of Parkour UK, tells me. The new classification brings certain responsibilities, especially around safety and legality. If parkour is lumped in with more perilous activities that bring its status into question, its custodians may not be able to apply for National Lottery sports funding and other grants. Already the sport has vocal critics: “It’s pandering to the worst instincts in children, and is likely to produce and encourage delinquent behaviour,” Chris McGovern, chair of the Campaign for Real Education, a group that argues against “damaging changes in state education”, recently told a reporter.

While Minogue has worked closely with the police and local authorities to lend the sport a sheen of legitimacy and safety, many of parkour’s leading practitioners are, like Newman, attracted to it precisely because, as Malone puts it, they’re “put off by sports with rules and regulations”. Sébastien Foucan, one of parkour’s co-creators (best known for his performance in the Bond film Casino Royale, where he’s seen sprinting along a crane high above the Bahamas), has said that the formal definitions imposed on his creation became a prison. “It was very, ‘We shouldn’t do this, we shouldn’t do that’,” he told CNN. “That doesn’t work for me.” The rules are at odds with the sense of liberty that runs through free running, an activity that views the world as a playground, and civic boundaries as a senseless imposition.

“I’m not going to pretend that a lot of people who do free running don’t also enjoy free climbing.” Hector Pitt, a Brewman member who was with Newman on the night he died, stretches a long arm behind his back on a mild February Sunday morning. “But there’s a big difference. If a parent looks up ‘parkour’ and the first thing they see is a video of someone hanging off a building, they’re going to go, ‘I don’t want my kid to do that.’”

Pitt is standing on the edge of a 2ft-high ledge in a churchyard in central Guildford, where Brewman’s Surrey-based contingent – now just eight strong, all of whom are in their late teens and some of whom work at the gym where Newman worked – often practise their moves and techniques. Pitt and his friends are flawlessly polite (“We just try to be symbiotic with the rest of the community wherever we are”). The churchwarden once left a note for them to say that everyone was happy for them to practise here, just so long as they mind the flowers.

All of a sudden, Pitt falls quiet. His body tenses. In a sudden jerking movement, he flicks his head back and his back arches exquisitely, following the trajectory set by his floppy fringe. His legs chase his head as his body pinwheels around his centre of gravity. The grass is dewy, so when Pitt lands, his black Nikes skid back a few inches. He steadies himself with an “Oof” and then a smile. My iPhone catches only a blur.

It’s an arresting move, especially when performed away from the echoing gym and the regulation tights and leotard; Pitt and his friends wear loose trousers and complicated haircuts. But it is, Pitt says, all for show. “A backflip’s such an easy manoeuvre,” he says. “It’s one of the first things you learn when you start free running, but it’s the thing that everyone asks to see. They never ask you to stick a jump to a rail with really nice foot placement.”

Mustang scaled a Moscow skyscraper and raised the Ukrainian flag, a stunt that put him on the Interpol wanted list

Performance has always been fundamental to parkour and the more reckless-related activities of urban exploration, crane walking, roof topping and pole sitting. In the 1920s, crowds would gather to watch Kelly. Newspapers regularly ran photographs of him brushing his teeth, shaving or luxuriously enjoying a cigarette against the clouds. The resulting notoriety earned him a shower of endorsements, books and speaking engagements. Today, social media is the means by which free runners and climbers showboat, usually through vertigo-inducing photographs or slickly produced videos filmed on a GoPro. “It’s part of the free-running culture to film and show it to others,” Pitt explains. “So if you’ve got a new challenge you’ve achieved in a spot or a new move, you film it and show it to your friends.”

It was the online adulation that greeted their early videos that helped to give the Brewman team – whose core members met at school – a sense of shared identity and vision. “We showed videos to people and they would get so hyped up,” Pitt says. “It used to be us just going around and messing about and not really taking it too seriously. And then, suddenly, we were compared to other videos that people were making worldwide.”

A clip of an extraordinary transition between buildings (or a wincingly painful fall) can attract millions of views on YouTube and likes on Facebook. When these clips attract advertising, the incentive to perform ever more outlandish stunts is stronger. “Social media is kind of a problem,” says Pitt, a professional videographer who produces short films for the gym where Newman worked. “If you just looked at our posts, you might think we do crazy stuff all the time. People don’t see you practising a hundred little jumps while working on a single technique. We’re not going to waste people’s time showing that.”

Aiden Knox, another Brewman member, points to a stubby pole a few metres away from the ledge on which he’s standing. “If I were just to watch someone jump from here to that rail and land on it and not move, I would be like, ‘Wow, that’s really impressive’,” he says. “That’s technically hard to do. But the audience of free runners able to understand what would be going on in that clip is limited. Everyone wants to watch someone hang off a crane. No one wants to watch someone drill a jump. You’ve got to adapt the content you’re making to appeal to a wide audience.”

Newman, an entrepreneur who once imported T-shirts to sell at a profit, was eager to turn Brewman into a business. For many young people, YouTube offers a potential route to becoming a semi-professional free runner, if not through advertising revenue, then at least by building their brand. And in the embryonic world of online stunt-making, no one has done this better than one young Ukrainian. His videos have been watched more than 30m times, a grass-roots popularity that has led to a string of commercial documentary and advertising contracts. He keeps his real name and age a secret, instead going by a moniker that implies muscle and notoriety: Mustang Wanted.

“They assume you’ll keep going upwards,” Wanted tells me, sagely, as we trudge through Kiev’s tenacious spring snow. “So they run up the flights of stairs, floor by floor, until they reach the top. But I usually stop on the first or second floor, hide and let them pass. Then I can stroll out quietly.”

Wanted knows a thing or two about being chased by the police. In August 2014, he travelled to Moscow and, with some friends, climbed the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building, a 577ft Stalinist skyscraper. When he reached the summit, he pulled a can of paint from his backpack and sprayed the building’s spire in blue before raising the Ukrainian flag – an act of nose-thumbing defiance to mark his country’s day of independence. Wanted’s collaborators were arrested (two are reportedly still serving prison sentences). He escaped. Pavlo Ushevets, as the infuriated Kremlin believe Wanted is really called (he vehemently denies this), is now on an Interpol wanted list, the nickname fully earned.

He enjoys a vivid, almost novelistic existence. His stories can be as tall as the structures he climbs. When Wanted was becoming famous, he tells me, a journalist from the Daily Mail emailed him some questions. “I told them I work a day job as a miner,” he says, delightedly. “I told them I smoke crack cocaine. They published it all.”

Truth is hard to distinguish from fiction when it comes to playful liars. A few years ago, Wanted tells me, he was invited into a secretive group of football hooligans who regularly meet up in forest clearings to fight each other, brutally and without rules. When I look doubtful, he opens his laptop and plays a video of one such fight: two groups of men, all either thick-set or rangy, wearing team colours, walk towards one another, as if shooting a scene for Braveheart, before slugging it out. Wanted is in the shot, using a handheld camera.

When he tells me he is passionate about classic literature, I know I look sceptical, but he pulls a Ukrainian copy of Lord Of The Flies from his rucksack. He tells me he has a Siamese cat called Slavic, whom he won’t allow to be photographed, in case someone kills it. I look down and notice the cat hairs on his black hoodie.

If we as a species didn’t have that spirit, we’d never have gone to the moon

When he returned from Moscow, Wanted received so many death threats on Facebook from angry Russians that Ukraine’s interior minister, Arsen Avakov, offered him a security detail. He declined, asking instead for a pistol, as a joke. But Avakov obliged. During the official presentation, Wanted, wearing an Adidas tracksuit, brandished the gun like a young thug while Avakov draped an arm around his shoulders, his thumb raised in cheery defiance. He shows me the photo on his phone.

Over the course of a day, it becomes clear that Wanted plays up his role of reckless maverick. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t eat meat. His rigorous training means he carries himself with the taut expectancy of a wound spring. He may have dangled by his fingertips from many of the world’s most imposing structures, from Vienna’s 325ft Votive church to Dubai’s 1,356ft Princess Tower, but Wanted is, by an order of magnitudes, far healthier than the average British cabinet minister.

Like Newman, he began climbing young. “I was born on the edge of a skyscraper,” he tells me. He was 10 when he started climbing buildings in Kiev, where he grew up (“in a bad neighbourhood”); thanks to his twin talents of manoeuvrability and daring, he soon left his friends behind. While studying philosophy at college, he climbed ever taller structures. His friends began to film him and some of the videos made it online. “People started commenting and liking, but judging as well. That annoyed me, so I continued climbing and making my own videos. But I didn’t put them online.”

Wanted quit his studies in his third year to spend more time free climbing. He learned to live on just 20 hryvnias (around 60p) a week. “I was so happy,” he says. Despite his camera-shyness, videos of his climbs continued to appear online. A self-professed perfectionist, Wanted launched his own YouTube channel to take control. When Channel 4 approached him with an offer to make a documentary four years ago, he hired a manager to broker the deal. But he seems unmotivated by money, and claims to spend most of it on plane tickets to places he wants to climb (he travels on a fake passport).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mustang Wanted: ‘You shouldn’t do crazy things for attention.’ Photograph: Pete Kiehart for the Guardian

The risks Wanted takes are calculated. When, during our photo session in an abandoned open-air velodrome in central Kiev, the photographer asks if he could pose on a 3in-high railing for a shot, he mentions his unsuitable shoes and points to the ice, before proclaiming the idea “stupid”. The rashness paraded in his videos is, to a degree, a profitable facade. His safety net is laid by mental preparation. He listens to Mozart through headphones while he climbs, and tells me the feeling he has before a climb is like a “tremor of anticipation”. “There’s no adrenaline,” he once told his manager. “If there was, I’d fall.”

While Wanted has devoted little time to monetising his YouTube channel, the sheer number of views and likes his videos attract has provided an alluring example to young people, particularly in eastern Europe and Russia. Free running and free climbing are no longer just hobbies, but potentially lucrative professions. (In the 30s, Shipwreck Kelly had numerous copycats, too. He once told a reporter he had no fewer than 17 impersonators, all profiting from his name.) In the era of YouTube and Facebook, those looking to replicate Wanted’s numbers need not impersonate him, only replicate or surpass his derring-do.

Dozens have died trying. In March 2015, a 14-year-old Russian schoolboy fell from a railway bridge close to Sheremetyevo international airport in Moscow while making a video; he was electrocuted after grabbing an electricity cable to steady himself. Russian police released the video as a cautionary tale. Five months later, a 17-year-old Russian, Andrey Retrovesky, died after falling from the roof of a nine-storey building in the city of Vologda while trying to take a selfie. In November last year, the 20-year-old Russian chess champion Yuri Yeliseyev, a parkour fan, died after he fell from the 12th storey of an apartment block while attempting to climb from a window to a balcony. The same day, a friend posted a photograph of Yeliseyev hanging, Wanted-like, from a window ledge. Footage of deadly mistakes is almost as popular as super-heroics. A video that shows a man slip from the top of a crane, purportedly hundreds of feet above the streets of Kaliningrad, has been viewed more than a million times.

“Over the years, I’ve received many messages, especially from teenagers,” Wanted tells me. “I have been very patient with them, explaining that you shouldn’t do crazy things for attention. I don’t understand why someone would risk their life for a like on Facebook. That’s stupid.”

I am not always sure whether to trust this charming, sometimes menacing man, but when it comes to his motivation, his mischievousness and my misgivings are gone. “I never did this for likes or attention or an audience,” he says with earnest eyes. “I do it because it is my joy, my happiness.”

After Newman’s accident on the Paris Métro, Steve Savides, the father of one of Newman’s schoolfriends, invited some of those who were there to meet in his living room. Savides works as a trader in the City and as a part-time therapist. “What are you going to do after something like this: yell at them?” he says of the sit-down meetings, which Newman’s parents also attended. “They are going to live with that for the rest of their lives.” He took a different approach. “I said to them: don’t lose your spirit,” he recalls. “Old fuckers like me need young people like you to be courageous. If we as a species didn’t have that spirit, we would never have gone to the Arctic or the moon.”

Savides became aware of Newman’s more reckless stunts a few years ago. While his son is not a Brewman member, he questioned his own reaction to the videos. “As a father, you naturally think about the tension between legality and safety versus exploration and expression,” he says. “But, as with road safety, you teach them how to deal with danger in order to have freedom in the world.” For Savides, social media was not an accomplice in Newman’s death, even if it inspires young people to test boundaries. “If anything, it pushes them the other way. They think, ‘If we are going to film a difficult jump, we better fucking get it right.’ Yes, it helps to drive that spirited behaviour and encourages more people to do it, but you don’t jump off something unless you’re pretty damned sure you’re going to be OK.”

Do people who upload videos of dangerous stunts have a responsibility to warn viewers not to replicate them? Should online platforms host footage that involves obvious trespass? Facebook declined to comment, as did Google, which owns YouTube, referring me to its community guidelines on harmful or dangerous content: “We draw the line at content that… encourages dangerous or illegal activities that have an inherent risk of serious physical harm or death.” It’s a rule that leaves generous room for interpretation. A video posted on YouTube a month before Newman’s accident, showing some of the Brewman team members jumping on to the roof of a train in Paris and surfing to the next stop, has been viewed almost 400,000 times and remains online; Newman was seemingly not present.

His parents don’t blame social media. “Throughout history, we have talked about the way in which one thing or another, be it TV or radio or anything that progress offers us, affects our nature,” Jake says. “Humanity pretty much remains the same. We do the things we do. Roman soldiers were probably killed because they took risks that their fellow centurions wouldn’t have taken. I’m not sure social media has any responsibility to moderate this stuff. I’m not going to sit here and blame Facebook.”

Nye’s mother, who is planning to write a children’s book about the joys of parkour, says the audiences that YouTube and Facebook offer will inevitably tempt young people to push the boundaries. “Peacocks will always strut, but I instinctively feel censorship is wrong. I can’t bear the way society is wrapping children in cotton wool and stunting their growth, both mental and physical. Children need to express themselves through movement, especially boys.”

Savides tells me he envies the Brewman boys. “These guys are living experiences that we don’t,” he says. “Here I am, stuck in the corporate world. Most of us are looking at them thinking, I want to do that. We’re just all too shit-scared. I am a 45-year-old executive. What kind of example am I to my kids? I’m allowing myself to be cloistered by society.”

With its undertones of recklessness and trespass, real and imagined, parkour has become a source of anxiety for many parents. Savides is nonplussed by this position. “What a moron,” he says of Chris McGovern, the government adviser who recently pilloried parkour. “I want to shake him. He is the problem. Nye wasn’t a random kid jumping off stuff because he was a hooligan. He was an athlete. His mindset was that of any athlete: never let your fears stand in the way of your ambitions. Yes, the British public are worried. We get scared of what we don’t understand. They think martial arts will teach kids to fight. In fact, it teaches them to walk away from fights. Likewise, when you learn to move properly, you learn to move safely. I’d rather err on the side of adventure than caution.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Riley Macnair at a memorial for Nye Newman earlier this month. Photograph: Pete Kiehart/The Guardian

More than 300 people attended Newman’s two memorial services earlier this month. Many had travelled from overseas. In a few short years, Nye had made many friends. “There was something different about him,” Savides says. “He had this extraordinary freedom.” He was empathic, too. The funeral service included a short, filmed tribute sent in by a young acquaintance. In it, the boy, Rory, spoke about how he was that kid who had no friends and always felt isolated. Newman encouraged him to come along to parkour, he said. “Now I have friends,” he told the congregation.

After the ceremony ended, a group of Newman’s friends stood in a circle on the grass outside Guildford crematorium. One performed a “kick the moon”, a parkour move that involves taking a deep step before swinging your leading leg in an arc, like booting a football. The motion, however, does not stop where the ball should be, but continues, up, into the air. When combined with a forceful throwback of the arms, it creates a twirling backflip. In sequence, one after another, Nye’s friends performed a Mexican wave of backflips and kick the moons – all captured, naturally, on camera.

A few days after the service, Malone emailed me: “I would love my son to be remembered as loving and kind-hearted, driven and passionate – the one who hurled his body ever higher to kick the moon.” Ten minutes later, a follow-up thought: “You know, I’d have had more sleepless nights if my children didn’t follow their passions. I am at peace.”

Main photograph: Petar Cule