Chapter 2 Angie Abdou Olympic Athletes Versus Parkour Artists Sport, Art, and the Critique of Celebrity Culture in Timothy Taylor’s The Blue Light Project

The Olympian

In The Blue Light Project, Eve Latour is desperate to escape mainstream society’s scripts and expectations. Eve’s society defines her solely as the Olympic Gold Medalist—an identity within which she feels very uncomfortable. People continually want to tell Eve where they were when she crossed the Olympic finish line: “Ah, let me tell you!” they say. “We were all cheering!” they say. “My gosh, that was something,” they say (Blue Light, 139). Eve remains mystified by the attention. She competed in biathlon (a combination of shooting and cross-country skiing) in an Olympics in Geneva and quickly became the media darling. She entered the race as an underdog, pitted against Austrian Giselle Von Kemper, a “slab-muscled woman from Innsbruck” (27). In the years since the Olympics, Eve has learned to tolerate and survive the “retellings” of her event, “the visuals and audio ramped up” (27), but these retellings make her distinctly anxious. Her discomfort arises because she knows the truths of the moment, visceral truths that those dramatic retellings miss, less heroic truths such as the “the paralyzing nerves [that] had threatened to overcome her” (27). The readers learn about the media version of the intense race: Eve’s fall, the commentator’s assumption that she could not possibly complete the race, her heroic finish against all odds (as the saying goes), her staggering across the end line in first place, and the final reveal that Eve’s fall had been more than a fall.

“Eve hadn’t stumbled,” we read, “because she was clumsy. She’d stumbled because something had hit her, just above the ankle of her left boot. Something small, hard and traveling at extremely high speed. Like a bullet, exactly” (30). We learn that Eve had been shot by “a crazed Belgian” wielding a slingshot “who decided a good way to get Eve’s attention would be to take her opponent out of the race. He’d been aiming for Von Kemper, he told police” (30). Eve skied her way to victory on what everyone would later discover was a broken ankle. These “heroics” (air quotes are Eve’s) grab the attention of media and audiences everywhere. Eve goes down in history as a “come-from-behind underdog with suffering and justice” (24). She does not thrive on this attention. The text’s first description of her reads: “People who spend their lives in the public eye develop a kind of radar. They feel the eyes, the longing, the volatile desire. Some love it, thrive on it. Others are smartly wary. Eve Latour was wary” (4). Despite her wariness, Eve’s fame takes on a life beyond her control. The journalist narrator tells us:

Forget about all those interviews and profiles after her gold-medal win in Geneva eight years before. The tide of curiosity as her athletic fame so quickly morphed into something bigger. The celebrity engagement to the French film director. The paparazzi outside her Paris hotel after he left her for the tennis player. Her high profile term as UNICEF Global Ambassador. She’d faced them all squarely, the photographers and the networks. She’d accommodated the local press on her return home from Europe, their loved daughter. Always gracious, never minding that they called her Evey like she wasn’t thirty-two years old but still a kid. It was true, that she had lived in the media, lived in our gaze. (5–6)

Living in the gaze is an existence Eve fights (in her internal monologues if not in her polite outward actions), but cannot ultimately escape. The disconnect between her reality as a thirty-two-year-old adult and the childish nickname the media uses for her points to a larger disconnect between Eve’s representation and her reality, highlighting the stultifying effect celebrity can have on personal growth. Eve becomes an image frozen in time rather than an evolving human being and autonomous adult with personal agency. Like the biblical Eve, the world defines this Eve-athlete by her fall. Where the biblical Eve falls out of grace, our biathlon Eve falls into the public’s grace. However, with the name parallel, Taylor emphasizes that in her move to celebrity, Eve Latour falls out of a purer, more desirable state. Through the story of Eve’s struggle (and failure) to escape the media’s diminishing gaze, Taylor depicts Eve’s athletic celebrity as a claustrophobic cell, not a glorifying or energizing state to be envied and sought after.

In her post-Olympic life, Eve redirects the intense physical energy that she once dedicated to training. She runs the street at night. We might read these running passages as a typical image of the ex-Olympian turned recreational runner, but Eve is not running recreationally. In fact, we can interpret these late-night outings as less recreational than her Olympic training. Eve dons her running shoes in the dark to look for her brother, the street artist / parkour practitioner / drug addict / freestealer who has vanished. Here, Eve has given her athleticism a real-world purpose, one with unambiguous meaning and import. Significantly, she undertakes this activity at night, does it unknown, stays where she can be anonymous. These vigorous late-night outings stand as the antithesis of her Olympic athletic career. Where she cannot quite attach meaning to her Olympic race—cannot find the sense in it, cannot identify with the media’s image of her—the dark runs hold great meaning for her. The Olympic Gold Medalist runs at night both to escape the unwanted limelight and to find her lost street-artist brother. “She had never had a single hero,” the text tells us, “other than [her brother] Ali. Ali, the smart, the brave, the fast. Ali of no fear” (139). In the protagonist’s mind, the hero of this story is Ali, the missing freestealer who lives completely outside the fame-cage she knows so well. Ali who has managed to escape from mainstream society’s scripts, expectations, and imposed identities. Ali and his sister function as opposites through most of the narrative: the brother who has disappeared and the overly visible sister who cannot disappear.

Early in the novel, a company called Double Vision presents Eve with an opportunity to cash in on her celebrity. This company specializes in packaging and selling the lives of former athletes. They want her story. “We’ve worked with many top former athletes,” the representative of Double Vision explains to her, “and I can tell you there is always an appetite for the right sort of former athlete. It’s recession proof. It really is. It’s like a hunger that doesn’t go away. And your story . . . Eve, let me tell you, it’s one in a million. It gives us tremendous material to work with” (22). In an interview marking the novel’s release, Timothy Taylor explained that he sees a certain class of celebrity who evokes our admiration but not our envy. “These are people who have done something so singular and so unimpeachably good that we cannot either imagine ourselves doing the same or resent them for their accomplishment. . . . Eve is that kind of celebrity. People do not measure themselves against her” (quoted in Sherlock 2011). This undiluted form of fame accounts for Taylor choosing an athlete for his celebrity protagonist, and it is the exact kind of fame that creates a consumer “hunger that does not go away,” drawing a company like Double Vision to pursue Eve the Olympic Gold Medalist.

Taylor illustrates the catastrophic downside of fame in a story that most reviewers see as the novel’s main plot. There, the cast of a reality TV show called KiddieFame has been taken hostage and a man (whose actions have made him instantly famous) holds several fame-seeking children at gunpoint. A Canadian Literature review that calls this storyline “the major plot arch” describes KiddieFame as “an insidious reality show where the audience votes celebrity-craving preteens off the program”; the review argues that the novel offers “an abstract interrogation of contemporary culture” and a portrayal of an artistic revolution “that overthrows greed, chaos, and corruption” (McFarlane 2012, 185–86). The main difference between the “art” of KiddieFame and the “art” of freesteal is that KiddieFame exists solely as a manifestation of the human obsession with celebrity, whereas freestealers define themselves predominantly by their eschewing of that celebrity. The dire conclusion of KiddieFame makes clear the novel’s unambiguous position on fame. The novel’s children-in-peril situation is the fault of “the machinery of yearning and dissatisfaction that delivered to people fame on the one hand and ruination on the other” (Blue Light, 233), the exact same machinery that shapes Eve’s life. The most direct critique of celebrity culture comes from freestealer Ali’s response to the hostage emergency: “How alive are those kids outside of their competitive desire to be famous? How alive are we letting them be? Telling them fame is everything?” (293). The novel repeatedly shows Eve to be right to fight against the pull of fame and applauds her desire to follow the alterative pull of artistic revolution represented by freesteal. In fact, The Blue Light Project aligns that artistic revolution with an essential life energy, one lacking in the novel’s representation of mainstream pursuits.

Despite Eve’s “one in a million story,” she resists Double Vision’s pitch that she feed her own life to the insatiably hungry beast. Her live-in partner Nick, however, does not. Nick is a kind of celebrity himself, a former Gerber baby, his “face on a million bottles of pureed peas, tomatoes and rice, chicken and pasta” (25). Fame is intrinsically woven into his earliest sense of himself and his own worth. Nick embraces an unquestioning, uncritical desire for celebrity; he wants Eve to cash in on her own fame, and he does everything he can to persuade her to do so. Eve, however, remains unconvinced: “I guess I’m having a mixed reaction. Licensing. Buying the rights to part of my life story, to copy and reproduce. To sell. Is it just me or is that weird?” (33). The athletic life as commodity is, unfortunately, more commonplace than weird. A simple Google search produces a wealth of sports articles with headings like “Stop Treating Athletes Like Commodities,” “Athletes Are Just Commodities These Days,” “When People Become Commodities,” “Inside the Game You Are Still a Commodity,” “The Commodification of Sport” “Student Athlete or Commodity?” and “How Do Athletes Commodify their Personal Brand.” The best way to eke out a post-competitive living is for the sports heroes to sell their image—and the physical excellence they represent—while their story and prowess are still fresh in the public’s mind.

Taylor foregrounds this notion of athlete-as-brand (and Eve’s resistance to it) when, in the novel’s first section, journalist Thom Pegg expresses surprise at Eve shaking his hand: “Strange thing, that. They don’t really touch in my experience. I mean the really big stars. The name brands. The people of iconic wealth and wellness. The people who could surely envy only God. It’s less a germ issue than it is a matter of observing the sacred separation between you and them” (4–5). In the face of Eve’s refusal to be packed and sold as a brand, Nick continues to encourage her to cooperate with Double Vision to do exactly that, saying “work is work” (38). She rejects the idea of “peddling [her] former self” (38) and cringes at the Stalinist ring of the Double Vision phrase “personal story management” (39). Through the character of Eve—her lack of contentment, her discomfort with the media’s image of her, her unwillingness to exchange her personal story for monetary profit, her sense of disconnect between Eve the person and Eve the media darling, and her continued search for authenticity and meaning—Taylor strips Olympic celebrity of allure. Readers are left to look to the other end of the sport spectrum—to the novel’s freestealers—for representation of a more authentic, hopeful existence.

Flow and Edgework

When scholars discuss the relationship between sport and authenticity, they almost always draw on Victor Turner’s concept of flow. According to Turner, flow “denotes the holistic sensation present when we act with total involvement” (1982, 55), a sensation in which we have no sense of time or place and no self-consciousness, but are instead completely immersed in the task at hand. In other words, we experience this state “as a unified flowing from one moment to the next in which we feel in control of our actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment; between stimulus and response; or between past, present, and future” (56). The athlete in flow state is completely unaware of an audience, or of the performance such an audience requires. Eve Latour’s athletic career is not operating within this ideal flow state or allowing her to access a more authentic existence and unselfconscious self. Run as she might, she cannot escape society’s attempts to impose a script upon her. In fact, the script—the intensified and dramatized version of her Olympic story, the clichéd and worn notions of courage and heroism—has become more real to society and to the media than Eve herself, a now thirty-two-year-old woman who would like to move on from her moment of Olympic glory. Eve’s celebrity has eclipsed any flow she might have achieved in those far-off moments of her physical acts as a biathlete, “loping down the groomed tracks. Popping off the targets. She had a resting heart rate of forty-nine. She loved the feel of rifle in her hands” (Blue Light, 107). In The Blue Light Project, Taylor captures her immersion in flow state in only this one small moment in her narrative, and it is not the aspect of sport that interests those determined to monetize her existence. Whatever flow Eve may have achieved has now been eclipsed by her celebrity.

Within the novel, freestealing would be a logical place to search for a more successful, sustained achievement of flow since scholars of extreme activities link the idea of authenticity in high-risk sport to Victor Turner’s flow state. Because the extreme athlete participates in an activity that takes maximum focus and attention, the rest of the world fades away and the athlete becomes fully in the moment, not aware of time, space, or audience. In this state, the athlete achieves an immediate sense of self rather than a performing self—because how can a person or person’s actions be performative if there is no awareness of audience and no distinction between self and environment? The selfhood an athlete achieves in that moment is more authentic for its lack of performativity. Edgework theorists draw a similar connection between extreme sports and authenticity. The term edgework, coined by Stephen Lyng, describes activities that push the safety-danger boundary and offer a temporary escape from “social conditions that produce stunted identities and offer few opportunities for personal transformation and character development” (2005, 6). From this perspective, extreme sports offer a space of social resistance and allow athletes to have an experience antithetical to fame-driven performance. Edgework theorists argue that extreme sports thereby offer a space of social resistance, allowing athletes to escape, momentarily at least, from scripted existence and have an experience antithetical to fame-driven performance. Elizabeth Creyer, William Ross, and Deborah Evers, in an article called “Risky Recreation,” posit three reasons for undertaking high-risk activity: normative (response to peer pressure), self-efficacy (need to feel competent), and hedonic (quest for a pleasurable or even spiritual experience) (2003, 242). Those who achieve the flow state fit within the third category marked by spirituality or transcendence. Rabbit lives exactly this way, performing his physical acts not for an audience but for the way they make him feel: “If I am to be truly alive, then this is what I must do whether you see it or not” (Blue Light, 64). This vitality through art and creative movement is what “sped his heartbeat and fired his imagination” (64). In connecting with Rabbit and searching for her brother Ali, Eve attempts to access the same vitality that they locate in freestealing. Eve’s literal search for her brother functions as a metaphor for her attempt to find the life energy, agency, and autonomy that sport celebrity has taken from her.

Jackie Kiewa highlights the subversive and authentic potential of extreme sports in her study of one small group of climbers in Queensland, Australia. “[C]limbing is depicted as a ‘free area’ in which climbers attempt to achieve relative freedom from this society,” she argues. In such areas “our identity, our true self, can best be discovered” by positioning ourselves outside of society, and participating in dangerous activities is one way to achieve this position (2002, 145–46). Lyng agrees, arguing that “playing with boundaries in acts of transgression and transcendence, exploiting limits, and crowding edges may be one of the few possibilities for human agency that can be found in the disciplinary society” (2005, 47). These dynamics are evident in Taylor’s novel in the act of freestealing. Rabbit undertakes death-defying jumps, playing along the inside edge of the in-control/out-of-control boundary, and his risky movement thus requires his full attention. In this activity, he not only finds the human agency emphasized by Lyng, but also experiences a pure pleasure that corresponds to Turner’s flow state. He thus achieves a kind of freedom and authenticity denied Eve. Ameel and Tani identify such freedom as the chief draw of parkour, connecting parkour with the idea of the ludic city and the playful use of space: “This idea of a playful attitude, ready to explore the possibilities of any given space on the basis of structure rather than for what it is intended, is central to the ludic character of parkour, but also to other loosening, playful and confrontational behavior in urban space” (2012, 26). Tellingly, the activity that allows Rabbit to achieve this freedom and playfulness also requires a kind of anonymity that is the antithesis of fame. Authenticity exists far outside the realm of celebrity. Throughout the novel, we read variations on the idea that “[c]elebrity is a con” with the sports fan as its mark (Blue Light, 2). But as Eve’s life makes clear, the fan is not the only one to suffer from the machinery of fame; the celebrity suffers, too.

In comparison to Eve, readers cannot help but envy Rabbit and Ali their vitality, freedom, authenticity, and “willingness to act,” to celebrate the moment of their passions (108). Eve envies them, too. More than this, she desires them: Rabbit as the love interest and Ali as the brother she wants to find. Jungians argue that when we long for another person, we have most often projected onto them something we miss in ourselves, some aspect of our life that needs developing. Both Ali and Rabbit have achieved the freedom and life energy that eludes Eve.

The Olympian Versus the Freestealer

Eventually Nick and Eve’s argument about selling her story to Double Vision winds down (as much as marital arguments ever wind down). To change the subject, Eve introduces Nick (and the reader) to the idea of parkour. “I saw the most incredible thing today,” she says (41). She refers to a parkour move she happened to see Rabbit execute, the first of the novel, a seemingly superhuman flight. In the world beyond the novel, athletes also tend to appeal to the superpower aspect of parkour when attempting to explain its allure: “Imagine having superhero abilities,” one anonymous athlete says, “able to leap from rooftop to rooftop as if nothing not even buildings could stop you. This is parkour, the anarchic new sport of freeruning” (quoted in Saville 2008, 892). Eve spots the novel’s superhero while she ignores the Double Vision pitch. She stares out the boardroom window and sees the stranger who reminds of her of Ali balanced on a roof’s edge.

He filled the empty space, his arms spread for balance, his legs tucked. And then, impossibly, he rolled at the top of his arc. He flipped in midair, which brought about a millisecond of complete silence and stillness in her. The whole movement was completely dangerous and completely harmonious. And it pinned her to the spot. (37–38)

The danger of the act is matched, for Eve, by the fact that he performs it without an audience: “Without a sound. Without a reason. No motive, nobody chasing him. No audience that he could have known of, since he hadn’t looked down to see that she was there” (38). Her reaction is unambiguous: “It was breathtaking. The most beautiful thing she’d seen in years” (38). Nowhere in the novel does Taylor undermine this sense of awe and reverence that Eve attributes to freestealing. Its freedom, anonymity, and originality work to make freesteal an ideal form of recreation (and re-creation) throughout The Blue Light Project.

Twenty pages later, readers revisit the same scene—the roof-leaping trick—from Rabbit’s perspective. It occurs in the first section that gives readers access to Rabbit’s point of view. The inspiration for the stunt begins in a moment of frustration:

After he broke the unit he’d been trying to install on top of the Peavey Block and banged up his hand in the process, Rabbit paced and swore and stared at the sky briefly as if it might offer an explanation for his own stupidity. And it was this irritation more than anything that inspired him to jump across the alley and onto the roof of the adjacent building. With a front flip, no less, which was insane on every level. Insane to risk being seen in the middle of the day. Insane . . . well, insane to risk dying. (59)

Frustration with the challenges of the everyday—with the aggravating consequences of working a regular job—provoke him to attempt the impossible, to push the limits of what humans can do, and thus achieve momentary escape, even at the risk of dying. He moves in “controlled strides with much reserved energy, like a jungle cat” (59), the animal imagery highlighting the way his action exists in contradistinction to the constraints of regular human society. Theorists emphasize that parkour does not get rid of constraints but finds freedom and originality within constraints. In the words of Bavinton, “the spatial practices of appropriation and creative reinterpretation central to Parkour identify it as a practice of resistance. Yet, the creative play characteristic of Parkour is not achieved by abolition of constraints, but by the reinterpretation and negotiated utilization of constraints” (2007, 400). Bavinton describes the athletes he studies as “non-conformist relationship to objects” and finds ways of “transforming obstacles into opportunities” (405)—descriptions that could just as easily describe Taylor’s Rabbit.

The transformation of fear into play is another way Rabbit achieves a kind of freedom currently unavailable to Eve. He is not immune to the fear felt by Eve—her visceral reaction as she watches him preparing for the jump—but unlike her, he acts despite the fear. John Saville refers to this as a “mobility of action” that parkour practitioners can access through their sport: “fear can become a familiar link to space, a riddle to solve. In parkour the answer is not to dispense with fear but is found in process, trying, testing, working out and becoming fluid” (2008, 910). Saville argues that the sport allows athletes to break from iterative performances of negative emotions through playfulness: “specifically, certain types of unpleasant fear can be supplanted, experimented with and reflected on, through practices like parkour that attempt to cultivate more ‘enjoyable’ kinds of fear” (910). Throughout the novel, Eve appears attracted to this playfulness—and seeming fearlessness—as it manifests in both Rabbit and Ali, especially in their practice of freesteal.

After Eve explains Rabbit’s fear-defying feat to Nick, he responds: “You’re not saying that was courage, I hope. That’s just dare deviling” (41). Readers have already seen the way “courage” has attached itself to the narrative of Eve’s Olympic success. With the introduction of courage in this discussion of parkour-style movement, Taylor invites readers to compare the two athletic endeavors and think about which is courageous, which is heroic, and what these notions of heroism and courage even mean in contemporary society. The privacy and anonymity of Rabbit’s act put him in direct opposition to Eve who must constantly exist in the public and cannot escape the public versions of herself. This opposition between public and private comes up repeatedly in the novel with preference always given to private acts—ones that are not undertaken to achieve public recognition or celebrity. Rabbit’s existence is the opposite of Eve’s, whose history, having been caught up in fame, has been robbed of its life energy, of her true and visceral feelings and ambivalence in the moment, and then packaged and sold. But Rabbit understands his life outside of the framework of fame. Rabbit’s desire to live creatively (and for creation’s sake) is linked to DNA and presented as an unavoidable way of being. His mentor says: “We have archaic creative threads in our DNA, you and I. We’re the guys who would have been cave-painting, laying out rocks in lines, making circles in wheat fields. We’re creators, not destroyers, we reveal and don’t hide. We’re the people bringing the world those images it needs for survival” (124). From Werner Herzog, Rabbit takes the idea that if art does not innovate, art dies, and with it human civilization (95): “If we don’t find adequate images, we’ll go the way of the dinosaurs” (69). The novel makes it clear that Rabbit also applies Herzog’s concept about the necessity of innovation to movement.

The art Rabbit erects is unsigned and only exists as long as the installation lasts. In explaining why he does not use the word parkour to refer to his own athletic/artistic performance in the streets, he says as soon as parkour has a name it is not a rebellion any more—it is subsumed into the mainstream. Mainstream recognition is not the goal. The goal is to exist outside the named, outside the mainstream, outside fame-driven, celebrity-driven culture. Instead of fame, Rabbit’s aim is to achieve the kind of innovation encouraged by Herzog, to create adequate images, and thereby keep art alive—to work against humans going the way of the dinosaurs.

Innovation and Hope in Art and Sports

The Blue Light Project asks: Can we be saved from our superficial celebrity culture? Celebrity has, in Taylor’s vision, ruined much of what is good about sport and reduced athletic lives to commodities. Will art save us? Will the combination of art with creative movement save us? Will freesteal save us? According to Taylor’s imaginative offering, the individual choice to behave authentically is still available—though choosing it is an act of resistance, one that must be continually re-invented as the original resistance is exploited and drained of vital energy by marketers. Eve, the novel’s protagonist searching for an alternative to the deadening effect she feels from her own athletic fame, is drawn to the freedom of freesteal. She particularly admires the way Rabbit does not engage in freesteal for media attention or public accolades, the way it is “enough just to do it and keep on doing it” (201).

Conversely, Taylor highlights the way mainstream athletics can have a ruinous effect through the names he chooses for the novel’s two central freestealers, Rabbit and Ali. Anyone familiar with sport literature or with the contemporary novel will read Rabbit as a reference to the central character in John Updike’s novel Rabbit, Run. Updike’s Rabbit was a high school basketball player, so defined by his youthful prowess and early success that the rest of his life reeked of anticlimax. Taylor nods to this parallel late in the novel when Eve asks Rabbit if his name is an “Updike tribute” (204). Ali, as Eve explains, is named after Muhammad Ali because their father was a big fan (208). Despite being a boxing world-champion, Ali also experienced the (fatally) detrimental effects of sport, eventually getting brain damage from the long-term effects of too many blows to the head and arguably dying as a result (Eig 2017). Taylor reinvents Rabbit and Ali, attaching the iconic names to a new kind of athlete-artist who can find vitality through their sport well into middle age. The novel thus offers a more appealing alternative to mainstream athletic existence.

In 2014, Taylor gave a live interview at the Fernie Heritage Library about The Blue Light Project. When the host introduced him to the library audience, she announced, “Art will save us! Books will save us!” and said that Taylor’s book proved as much. Taylor’s response indicated a more moderate view: “I don’t know if art will save us. But. . . .” Readers can be grateful for that but, on which the rest of his talk hinged. On the balance between hope and despair in relation to the creative process, Taylor claimed: “Without hope, why bother with anything, let alone novels? But there is hope, sure there is. My friend, the photographer Lincoln Clarkes, once said to me: ‘You know, the only way to explain street art is to think of it as a gift. It only makes sense as a response to some other value, outside ourselves, on some higher perch.’ Art still might not save us. But that higher value might, that capacity to give.” Parkour-style movement can, in the novel and in wider society, function as that same kind of gift.

The novel’s climax comes as just this kind of gift—a moment of anonymous art firing into existence, “a shimmering blue-light dance of hope” (Blue Light, 345). The Blue Light Project unites Rabbit and Eve, links creative moment and creative object, and provides an offering that is real and original and free, in contrast to the synthetic and commercial non-art offered by both Double Vision and KiddieFame. Two ideas are explicitly repeated throughout the novel. One is Herzog’s concept that if art does not innovate and find adequate images, humanity dies. The other is the command: “Keep up the good work, you beautiful, beautiful young artists” (218). The Blue Light Project asserts the life-saving value of art, when it can stay fresh and alive. For sport to remain vital and worthwhile, Taylor suggests, it too must innovate. It too must offer hope. Similarly, John Stephen Saville links innovation and hope to parkour: “The extended and serious practice of parkour is always a questing, a search for new and more elaborate imaginings, it is an opening out of possible, but necessarily attainable motilities” (Saville 2008, 892). Rabbit—and through him Eve—embraces this questing for new and more elaborate imaginings, including the way such creation can be manifested through movement. The novel does not, then, reject sport as a potential vehicle for self-discovery, creation, and vitality, but it does reject sport clichés. It rejects sport that commodifies athletes. It rejects sport that encourages obsession with fame. It rejects sport that robs athletes of agency. To stay alive, sport must innovate.

To those ensuring that it does, we can also say: Keep up the good work you beautiful, beautiful young athletes.

Works Cited

1. Ameel, Lieven, and Sirpa Tani. 2012. “Parkour: Creating Loose Spaces?” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 94 (1): 17–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0467.2012.00393.x.
2. Bavinton, Nathaniel. 2007. “From Obstacle to Opportunity: Parkour, Leisure, and the Reinterpretation of Constraints.” Annals of Leisure Research 10 (3–4): 391–412.
3. Creyer, Elizabeth, William Ross, and Deborah Evers. 2003. “Risky Recreation: An Exploration of Factors Influencing the Likelihood of Participation and the Effects of Experience.” Leisure Studies 22 (3): 239–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/026143603200068000.
4. Eig, Jonathan. 2017. Ali: A Life. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
5. Guss, Nathan. 2011. “Parkour and the Multitude: Politics of a Dangerous Art.” French Cultural Studies 22 (1): 73–85.
6. Kiewa, Jackie. 2002. “Traditional Climbing: Metaphor of Resistance or Metanarrative of Oppression?” Leisure Studies 21 (2): 145–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/02614360210158605.
7. Lyng, Stephen, ed. 2005. Edgework: The Sociology of Risk Taking. New York: Routledge.
8. McFarlane, Brandon. 2012. “Literary Thrills.” Canadian Literature 214 (Autumn): 185–86.
9. Saville, John Stephen. 2008. “Playing with Fear: Parkour and the Mobility of Emotion.” Social and Cultural Geography 9 (8): 891–914.
10. Sherlock, Tracy. 2011. “Timothy Taylor Shines Light on Inspiration for The Blue Light Project.” Vancouver Sun, May 5, 2011. https://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/timothy-taylor-shines-light-on-inspiration-for-the-blue-light-project.
11. Taylor, Timothy. 2011. The Blue Light Project. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada.
12. Taylor, Timothy. 2014. Interview at the Fernie Heritage Library Literary Reading Series, February 21, 2014.
13. Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications.
14. Updike, John. 1960. Rabbit, Run. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.