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Vincent has spent ten years honing his parkour skills and now travels his native New York by running across the skyline from building to building.
A lifeguard who scales 20-storey buildings, jumping between rooftops without a safety harness in the US skyscraper capital New York, claims to be living out his childhood dream of being a real life Spider-Man.
Avoiding unwelcome attention by rising before sunrise, “urban mountaineer” Vincent Vinciguerra, 23, gets a bird’s eye view of the granite city by leaping across rooftops, from drainpipes and fire-escape ladders.
Phobic about heights as a child, Vincent overcame his fear, so he could follow in his hero Spider-Man’s footsteps – devoting a decade to training in parkour, an athletic discipline used to move between buildings, developed from military obstacle course training.
A life-long fan, with a collection of 20 classic Spider-Man comics, he said: “New York’s Manhattan skyscrapers are like a man-made mountain range and, as with real mountains, people will always have this impulse to climb them.
“I have always been a big Spider-Man fan and climbing across the city is really like living out my childhood fantasy.
“Often, when I’m out on the rooftops, people will see me from the window of their apartments and shout something like, ‘Hey Spidey!’ For me, this is, basically, the most flattering thing I could ever hope to hear. It’s really an honour.”
An athletic youngster, Vincent used to watch online videos of French parkourists – known as ‘traceurs’ – wishing he could overcome his terror of heights, to follow in their footsteps.
Eventually, the lure of learning to be like web-spinning superhero Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, was so enticing, he buried his fear and, aged 12, tried the discipline for the first time when he did a 12ft jump from the roof of his school to a shipping container.
Exhilarated, he then started scouting out locations around his family home on Long Island, New York, USA – emulating his cartoon hero by practising jumps on ground level, before moving up to higher and more dangerous training grounds.
“I started out just watching the videos and finding places where I could try similar moves,” said Vincent. “I’d begin on the ground, but pretty soon started taking on low-level buildings.
“It was pretty basic, but I knew as soon as I started that it was something I really loved and wanted to get good at.”
Vincent’s parents, were less thrilled about their son’s new hobby, especially when, aged 13, he cracked his head open trying to land on a railing outside his hair stylist mum’s office, coming to covered in blood.
“She was pretty upset about that,” he recalled. “But she never really tried to stop me, because she recognised that this was something I really loved.”
Continuing to train and practise his parkour several times a week around his neighbourhood, he longed to gain the confidence and skill to take on Manhattan’s skyscrapers – fantasising about earning a living from his hobby, through sponsorship or promotion deals like his traceur idol David Belle.
But his ambitions were delayed by two years in the Navy, after leaving school – a career that did not suit him.
He continued: “I pretty quickly realised that I was totally unsuited to the job, as I’m an independent person.
“But it taught me discipline and that was really helpful in getting me to understand how important rigorous training was if I was ever going to make it as a parkourist.”
On leaving the military in August 2016, Vincent threw himself into mastering the art of parkour, showing such diligence and determination that within weeks he was practising alongside a group of New York-based traceurs.
Viewing parkour as a martial art that requires repetition and immense discipline, by early 2017 he began regularly visiting the rooftops, jumping from the buildings around Times Square and midtown as well some of the city’s most iconic bridges like the Williamsburg bridge.
“It puts things in perspective when you’re up that high. It’s a humbling experience that lets you know how little you are in the grand scheme of things,” he said.
Now he is more experienced as a parkourist, Vincent prefers certain areas of Manhattan to others, when it comes to urban mountaineering.
He explained: “I usually go out either as is the sun is going down or coming up, because sometimes people can get a little annoyed if they find you climbing up their building, so it’s best to do it when no one is around.
“I like midtown the best, because the buildings are crammed together.
“It’s a completely different world up there and there’s so much that you see that you never see on the ground.”
He continued: “I take pride in not getting caught though. My friends say that I have a sixth sense because quite often I’ll get a premonition and tell us all to get off the rooftops and it’ll be just in time before the police come.”
Despite his love of flying across the rooftops, Vincent is well aware of the dangers of his hair-raising stunts, having last year lost a friend and fellow parkourist, who miscalculated a jump in Manhattan and broke his neck.
“Obviously I’m aware of the dangers and I know that any wrong step could mean me plummeting to my death,” said Vincent, who says his model girlfriend, Danae Stokes, 23, has come to terms with his perilous pastime.
He continued: “I weigh up the risk and the reward, and the euphoria and sense of calm I get from discovering the city from above street level makes it all worth it.”
He admits, however, that he has also had several brushes with death, while perfecting his craft, once tripping over his heel as he ran across a narrow strip of metal 20 storeys up – managing to save himself at the last minute by catching onto a three-foot wide ledge.
“The fear is obviously there sometimes,” said Vincent, who has tendonitis – when a tendon swells up and becomes painful after an injury – in his knee from overuse, along with a displaced bone in his shoulder from a heavy landing. “But I do think the fear can be a self fulfilling prophecy, meaning that if you imagine yourself falling, you’re more likely to.”
His confidence, sadly, does little to reassure his girlfriend, Danae, who has hard time knowing that he is out on the rooftops each night.
Vincent admitted: “I know she is scared that one day she’ll text and I won’t respond because I’m in the Emergency Room.
“But this is what I was made to do and she fell in love not with the boy on the ground but with the boy on top of the roofs.”