Word: event
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...event also brought some gripes that free running should not be holding a competition because it was based on something more, well, spiritual. Free runners' "movements would no longer be a reflection of them as much as it would be competing for the judges," wrote one chat room user on a free-running website recently. "Free and competition just seem to not go together well." And free running's flamboyance and flair don't impress everyone; hard-core parkour fans instead prize efficiency and speed in their movement...
...organizers, though, such events are crucial to free running's survival. There are plenty of brands - from Adidas to Hewlett-Packard - keen to feature free running in their advertising at the moment, but that interest is "going to die out at some point," reckons Paul Corkery, a 34-year-old Londoner in charge of Urban Freeflow, the team of free running teachers and performers behind the London event. Prolonging the sport's life requires taking the initiative...
...mention sponsor's cash. Billboards for Barclaycard and Sony Ericsson, just two of the event's sponsors, lined the London venue. Keen to tap the sport's broad audience - pinstripe suits and polka-dot dresses figured among the sweat pants and sneakers in the crowd - Dan Mathieson, head of sponsorship at Barclaycard, even claimed "the fluidity and freedom of movement associated with free running mirror the key needs of Barclaycard customers." To fans of the free-spirited sport, that's a tough sell: Mathieson's presence on the stage at the end of competition drew loud jeers from the crowd...
...that hasn't stopped others looking to cash in on the pursuit's rising profile. "This is where skateboarding was 30 years ago," says Laura Sanders, global sales director for U.S.-based climbing shoe maker Five Ten, who flew in from California to watch the event. Confident in the sport's potential, the firm has designed shoes for free runners, and is even looking into sponsoring top athletes. Free running "needs to be treated like a sport," agrees Gabriel "Jaywalker" Nunez, the 25-year-old from Los Angeles whose flips and twists eventually earned him the inaugural title of world...
...flooded a special farmers' market set up by Slow Food Nation in San Francisco's grand Civic Center. But the gourmands who showed up eager to fill their baskets with dry-farmed Early Girl tomatoes and muslin-wrapped Cheddar cheeses might have been surprised to find that the first event of the conference wasn't a seminar on artisan bread but an earnest panel on the global crisis of rising food prices. Slow Food--the anti-fast-food, anti-industrial-agriculture movement launched in 1986 by a left-wing Italian journalist--too often has tilted more toward high-class gastronomy...