Parkour Gathering Brings Hundreds to Westwood Gym

Nearly 400 parkour enthusiasts flocked to the New England Sports Academy in Westwood on Friday to flip on mats and jump over obstacles in one of the nation's largest gathering of the sport's participants. 

Parkour is a sport in which participants perform gymnastics in an urban environment, propelling themselves around obstacles in a creative way, Dylan Polin, an organizer of the event, said. 

Polin and other parkour instructors at New England Sports Academy attracted hundreds to the weekend-long event that brought athletes to parts of Boston and later to the New England Sports Academy to practice their sport on the facility's gymnastics equipment. 

"You get to meet a lot of people who parkour," Polin said. "It's a big community of people who are here to express themselves."