The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  Jeff is proud of David, but worries about him. “This was a kid who refused any kind of system, who just wanted to live his life,” he says. “If he’s surrounded by the right people, he can do what he wants. Ordinary life really upsets him, though, because this world the rest of us live in is not where he finds his pleasure. He’s easily disturbed by ordinary things. But he’s also asking, ‘Why am I doing this parkour?’ All his family who did this physical stuff were doing it for a reason, but he’s asking, ‘Why am I doing this, what does it mean?’” Jeff added, “He’s simple in his purposes. He doesn’t like talking very much. He’s someone who is looking for his way.” I asked what sort of routines David observed in his training. Jeff shook his head. “He’s still eating Big Macs and drinking Coke,” Jeff said. “He likes chicken sandwiches. He trains when it comes to him. He’s usually sleeping in the morning. He’s really a night guy.”

  We arranged to meet with David the following day, in Lisses, where he was staying with his mother. When David is in France, he lives either with her or with Jeff. “He doesn’t really have a lot of money,” Jeff said, “although people think that he does.” He added that David was very easy to live with. “We don’t know about the inside of his head, but outside he’s very neat. His room is always in perfect shape.”

  The next day, I took a taxi with Susan Chace to Lisses, about half an hour south of Paris. When we were under way, the driver asked why we were going there. Chace said, “To see David Belle.” The driver nodded. Chace asked if he knew who Belle was, and the driver said, “Of course. ll est unique.” We left the highway and, following Jeff’s directions, went around a rotary and came to a collection of low, flat-roofed, two-story buildings, like shoeboxes, painted light brown. We stopped in front of Belle’s building. Chace knocked, the door opened, and the driver said, “That’s him!” Belle had his chin tucked slightly, like a man looking out from under the brim of a hat. He had dark hair cut short like a pelt and a thin, asymmetrical face, with a sharp chin and a hook nose. He was wearing a red fleece top and jeans. As I paid the driver, Jeff Belle drove up behind us. We went into the apartment. The kitchen was by the door, and there was a living room beyond it with a circular stairway leading up. In the living room was David’s girlfriend, Dorine Sane. David had his fleece top zipped to his chin—he had a sore throat—and he seemed subdued. He had just come back from three weeks in the Czech Republic, where he was making Babylon AD, which stars Vin Diesel, and is based on a French science-fiction novel. David plays the head of an Internet gang that does parkour, and he choreographed scenes for ten actors.

  Jeff and David spoke for a few moments, and then Chace said that David was going to rest, while Jeff took us to the Dam du Lac. Outside, we crossed a parking lot, then took an asphalt path through a park. Several hundred yards off, the Dam du Lac rose up against the side of a small lake. It was the color of sandstone and had the shape of an arch. “David was afraid of it in the beginning,” Jeff said. “Now he walks on it like it was solid ground.” The lac turned out to be made of concrete. As we walked along the edge, ducks paddled away from us. For some time now, a fence has enclosed the wall, but it was easy to climb around it. The wall was slightly concave, and the top was intersected by a horizontal slab, which had roughly the dimensions of a king-size mattress and was curled up at one edge. Here and there on the face of the wall were footholds and handholds in the form of slots the size of bricks. On one side was a rectangular box, open at one end, like a cave, which is called the cabana. Below, sticking straight out from the wall and about fifteen feet tall, was a form in the shape, more or less, of a hammer. Jeff said that the first maneuver David had done was a backflip from the cabana to the hammer. About twenty feet from the ground was a sign saying ESCALADE INTERDITE. On it were signatures. “The kids climb up and sign their names,” Jeff said. “David also went barefoot on it.” He pointed at the top. “And at night sometimes he slept up there.”

  For a few minutes, my mind screened images of David in videos I had seen—running up and down the wall, doing a hair-raising handstand at the top—then we began walking back toward the apartment. We passed a low building with picture windows—a nursery school—and Jeff said that when David and his friends were young “they jumped over the bushes beside it to the roof. That was their first trick.” While we were looking at a stairwell that appears as a prop in videos for a series of David’s cat leaps, Jeff’s cellphone rang, and it was David saying he was ready to talk.

  When we got back to the apartment, David sat on a couch with Dorine, and I sat next to them. Jeff made coffee. For the most part, David sat quite still, like a machine at rest. The only part of him in motion was his right hand, which moved from Dorine’s hand, to her knee, to her lap, and so on. I asked how he knew whether a movement was too dangerous. “It’s just intuitive,” he said, shrugging. “My body just knows if I can do something or not. It’s sort of an animal thing. In athletics, they have rules—you have to take your distance and stop and jump, everything has a procedure—but I never did it that way. I don’t take a risk, though, that I know I can’t do. I like life too much.”

  He said that parkour hadn’t changed much, since he started it, but his intention had become more specific. “When I was younger, I was playing, the way kids play at parkour, but now I ask the question ‘Is this going to be useful for me to get to the other side?’ The movement is simple. I don’t do anything special, because I want to get to the other side. What I’m interested in for parkour is the utilitarian thing of getting to the other end, whether as a task or a challenge, but in film they like a little entertainment, so I do that, too, but it’s not what I’m interested in.

  “You always have to get through the first obstacle that says, ‘I can’t do it,’ whether in your mind or for real, and be able to adapt to anything that’s put in your path. It’s a method for learning how to move in the world. For finding the liberty men used to have.”

  I asked David why he had gone to India, and he said that he had friends there.

  “How did you pass the time?”

  “I just kept training,” he said. “I was training in the trees.” Jeff handed me a scrapbook with a photograph of David leaping from the limb of one tree to another. He was stretched flat out, horizontal to the ground, like Superman.

  “I was at a waterfall one day,” David went on, “and there were huge trees all around, and in the trees were monkeys. There were fences and barriers around them, so they couldn’t get out, but I went around the barriers and played with the monkeys. After that, I watched them all the time, learning how they climbed. All the techniques in parkour are from watching the monkeys.”

  He then showed us, on a computer, a documentary called Warriors of the Monkey God. It was about a tribe of monkeys who live on the rooftops of Jodhpur. The people regard the monkeys as holy. We watched them leaping from rooftop to rooftop and through the trees. The scene that made David smile was one in which numbers of them leaped onto, then off, a piece of corrugated tin that was loosely attached as a roof to some stakes. Their landings made the tin shake. Some of the monkeys were leaping from the ground, turning on their sides in the air, landing on the stakes and shoving off from them—a tic-tac.

  Watching the movie, which was about forty-five minutes long, took only about fifteen minutes, because David kept advancing it to scenes of the monkeys in flight, looking exactly like traceurs. When it was finished, he said that after coming home he had just continued perfecting what he had learned from the monkeys. He had plans, he said, to make a movie with them.

  I asked about the fall on the Internet, the one that the American traceurs always talk about. David gave a little smile. “I was a bit tired,” he said. “It was the end of the day. I was just doing stuff with a bunch of kids. I fall all the time—I fall like the monkeys—but it never shows up on film, because they just want the spectacular stuff.”

  I thought of Nikita with his bleeding hands and said, “You never wear gloves?”


  He said that he wanted to be able to feel the surfaces he was grabbing. He held his palms out for me to feel, and they were as hard and slick as linoleum.

  I told him that I had been to see people do parkour in Colorado, and that they had imagined themselves as preparing to use it for an escape, and he said, “That’s good. If you’re really thinking about how to defend yourself, how to be useful, then that’s a very different mind-set from just doing things to look good.”

  Last fall, David said, he had discussions with Sam Raimi, the director of Spider-Man, about playing the role of Spider-Man’s double, but he decided he wasn’t interested. “That was a childhood dream, to be in a Spider-Man costume,” he said. “Now I’d rather appear on a poster with my own name, not as a character, saying, ‘This is me performing.’” He was planning to tour the world doing parkour, he said. A French film company partly owned by the director Luc Besson paid his expenses to perform last winter in Madagascar, and David had also given exhibitions in Italy, Germany, and Portugal.

  He yawned and rubbed his throat, and I took it as a sign that he was at the end of his interest in talking. I thanked him and stood up. We shook hands. He seemed to think for a moment, then he said, “I’m still learning. I’m not sure of anything yet, I’m just trying to be as complete as I can.”

  I nodded.

  “What I do is not really something that can be explained,” he said. “It can just be practiced.” Then he went to call us a taxi.

  2007

  A STUD’S LIFE

  KEVIN CONLEY

  My first contact with the world’s No. 1 stud at his place of business—that would be Storm Cat, at the stallion complex on W. T. Young’s Overbrook Farm, in Lexington, Kentucky—came over the phone. “There’s his holler now,” Dr. Joe Yocum, the farm vet, said calmly, from his office in the breeding shed, above a noise that sounded like the fury of hell. “He just jumped on her. I’ll look out my window here and tell you when he’s finished…. Yup.” The doctor chuckled. “He wouldn’t be real popular with the women.”

  The Kentucky Derby is often called the most exciting two minutes in sports; Storm Cat is probably its most expensive thirty seconds. His stud fee for the 2000 season hit $300,000, nearly double that of his closest rival. It could easily have gone higher. A final pair of contracts offered at auction last November, before the farm shut his book for the season, brought in $415,000 and $430,000, respectively. Based on a conservative estimate of seventy guaranteed-live-foal contracts, Storm Cat will earn $21 million this year. If he played in the NBA, that figure would make him the league’s third-highest-paid player. As a stud, no one’s even close.

  Why would anyone pay that much for Storm Cat’s services? Last year, Storm Cat’s offspring earned more than $12 million at the track, almost $4 million more than anyone else’s. Furthermore, several Storm Cat colts who have recently launched their own stud careers—Storm Boot, Hennessy, Forest Wildcat—have begun siring stakes winners and high-priced yearlings, justifying hefty hikes in their stud fees. In other words, just thirty seconds with Storm Cat gives you a chance of landing your own franchise Thoroughbred.

  If he were any other breed—miniature, trotter, quarter horse, Standardbred, Lipizzan, Arabian, American warmblood—Storm Cat could just jump on a padded phantom breeding mount (like a pommel horse, but “natural, mare-like,” and equipped with a “side opening and quick release valve”) and his half of the bargain could be frozen and shipped Priority Overnight to any mare in the world. But Storm Cat will never suffer this indignity, because the Jockey Club, the official registry of Thoroughbred racing, forbids artificial insemination. Only registered horses can race on the Thoroughbred circuit, and the Jockey Club registers only horses conceived by what is delicately termed “natural cover.” Storm Cat’s job—and the most profitable sector of a high-stakes industry—is safe.

  Success at the track is merely a first step toward such profits. Take Cigar, who won sixteen races in a row and retired to stud in 1997, after earning a record $9.9 million. Not one of the eighty mares booked for his first and only season became pregnant, but his owners were lucky: Italy’s Assicurazioni Generali made good on Cigar’s $25 million infertility insurance policy. Far more common than infertility is mediocrity, and no policy covers the champion horse who fails to produce a winner. As Tom Wade, the groom to the 1977 Triple Crown winner, Seattle Slew, said, “Just because a horse wins a million dollars, that don’t make him no stud.”

  For a stallion, the eagerness of a teenager is considered the mark of a professional—breeders call it “great libido.” Although Storm Cat’s libido is spoken of mostly in economic terms, from time to time something else creeps in: awe, fear, relief. Breeding horses is dangerous—last March, Class Secret, a twelve-year-old son of Secretariat, the 1973 Triple Crown winner, had to be euthanized after a mare he was mounting broke his leg—so dawdling is not appreciated. It’s risky for the people involved, too. One stallion manager told me that sildenafil citrate—Viagra—had been tested on horses and rejected, largely because nobody who works in the breeding shed wants to fool around with a rearing half-ton, hormonally enraged animal trying to set a personal endurance record.

  With a horse like Storm Cat, however, the worrying doesn’t stop at the breeding shed. He’s only seventeen years old, comfortably mid-career for a stud (Mr. Prospector, the sire of this year’s Derby winner, Fusaichi Pegasus, was twenty-nine when he died last year). But even innocent conversations about him—what he likes to eat (bluegrass, oats, and sweet feed), where he sleeps (in a hilltop barn, near his winter paddock), what he does for fun (lies down in a big sandpile and rolls around)—tend to veer into elaborately imagined premonitions of his death and the state-of-the-art precautions taken to guard against it. One of his sandpiles, for example, is bounded by an unusual stretch of solid wood, because somebody worried that he might roll a foreleg under the standard fencing and break a bone as he tried to stand up. And if you want to meet the farm’s entire staff in the next forty seconds? Just light a cigarette near Storm Cat’s stall.

  On a sunny morning in May, halfway through the four-and-a-half-month breeding season, the sire looks vigorous. In his official photographs, Storm Cat can come across as smug and bullnecked and a little thick in the waist, but the camera must add a few pounds, because in person, prancing in his paddock, he has the hauteur and the low body fat of an underwear model. He’s a dark bay, but when he moves in the sunlight you can pick up flashes of a honey-gold color that comes from the chestnut horses on his mother’s side—Terlingua, Storm Cat’s dam (his mother), and his grandsire, Secretariat. He has white spats on his left legs, also from Terlingua, which give him a light-footed, high-stepping look, even when he’s just pacing over the grass.

  “I like his weight now,” Wes Lanter, who manages the ten stallions at Overbrook Farm, says. “Twelve hundred and sixty pounds. I think that’s a real good weight for him.” Lanter runs the operations in the breeding shed with the nimbleness of a linebacker coach, but everywhere else he moves with hound-dog-like deliberateness. To introduce me to the planet’s most valuable piece of horseflesh, for example, he folds his arms and says, “There he is.” At first, Storm Cat just rips at the grass, pretending he doesn’t see us, but after a while he edges over to the fence to investigate. He has a smoldering dark patch between his eyes with a white diamond on it, and a sharp crescent moon way over near his left nostril, a curious marking that makes him look moody and dangerously attractive. He ducks his head behind a board on the fence and gives me the once-over—more eye contact than his mares usually get—and I raise my hand to the little white line that runs down his muzzle. “Stand back,” Lanter says, since stallions bite. “He can fool you.” As soon as I touch him, Storm Cat ends the interview and walks away.

  Suddenly, he lights out for the end of his paddock. Through a break in the trees, he looks over the creek, past the horses nearer the breeding shed—it’s standard practice to place stallions with libidos lower than Storm Cat�
��s closer to the parade of action, a cheap sort of stimulant that cuts down on the time spent waiting for arousal—and roars convincingly. “A mare has arrived,” Lanter says. “Not yours, Stormy.” Undeterred, Storm Cat paces back and forth beside the fence—he has worn a path there—and roars again. Lanter seems pleased, in a proud and wistful prom-chaperone way. “He’s looking for dates,” he says.

  Storm Cat has 714 children at last count, but he has seen only three: Mountain Cat, who was recently shipped off to Turkey, and two fellow studs on the roster at Overbrook Farm—Tactical Cat, a pretty gray horse (whose dam was Terre Haute), and Tabasco Cat, the winner of the Preakness and the Belmont in 1994 (whose dam was Barbicue Sauce). They often pass each other on the way to or from the breeding shed and he cuts them every time—no nicker, no friendly whinny. Apart from a few pointed, work-related roars, Storm Cat is laconic, even for a horse. But it’s a menacing, eloquent sort of silence: it’s on purpose.

  Menace, apparently, is a job requirement for stallions. The senior managers at Overbrook, who generally live in picturesque houses tucked into the farm’s manicured hills, like to expound upon the equine instinct for violence. They’ll tell you how, in the wild, a lone stallion would command a roving harem-cum-nursery of broodmares and foals, until some other horse, probably one of his own sons, decided to bite, kick, and break his legs for it. Add to these instincts a few centuries of breeding specifically for aggressiveness—a trait Storm Cat is prized for and seems to be able to pass on to his foals—and you have the potential for some very volatile relationships.