Darcy Nguyen

Darcy Jordan Nguyen is the best parkour practitioner in SoCal. Parkour is a demanding sport, requiring her cunningness, balance, and agility to run from one point to another, overcoming obstacles, and avoiding potentially fatal falls. She first learned about the sport’s existence as an 8 year old playing a parkour flash game in the computer lab at school. She just had to try it herself. While in middle school and high school, Darcy played basketball, which trained her legs for jumping (her school lacked a gymnastics or parkour team). She began her pro career even before graduating, and soon found herself going to parkour clubs and competitions across the western US.

Darcy first caught headlines in June 2022, when at age 16, she parkoured from Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood to the RMS Queen Mary in Long Beach. This run was 26 miles long and crossed several freeways. 

The next year, Darcy flew to New York to participate in Five Boroughs, One Winner, a parkour race tournament across each of NYC’s five boroughs. Abbreviated 5B1W by parkour fans, its long distances combined with New York’s tall buildings and high traffic volumes make this one of the most challenging parkour events on the planet. After crossing Manhattan east to west in a qualifying round, Darcy went on to dominate all of the boroughs except Queens, in which she finished third. She won the tournament and a prize of $80,000. Despite the tournament’s name, the losing finalist won $20,000 and each semi-finalist won $5,000.

Darcy has also traveled to Chicago and Miami to participate in events or make POV videos. A lower priority goal of hers is to fly to her ancestral homeland of Vietnam and do parkour there. She is also one of the strongest advocates for parkour as a sport, and seeks to get it into high schools, colleges, and even the Olympics. 

Darcy is a Vietnamese-American girl with auburn-red hair that gets duller at the roots. Her eyes are a similar color to her hair roots. She wears a streamlined short-sleeve black and dull teal jumpsuit while practicing parkour. Her shoes are specially designed for parkour, with a layer of foam in the sole and straps instead of shoelaces that could get caught in something.

Besides parkour, Darcy also loves dancing at local clubs or events. Olive Garden is her favorite restaurant. She lives in her father’s basement in Victorville, the closest place to L.A. where he could afford a house. He immigrated from Vietnam to America in 1997, meeting Darcy’s future mother at a gas station in L.A. in 2001. Before Darcy was involved with parkour, her father had envisioned her being a screenwriter. Her mom moved to Florida in 2011 to care for her elderly parents, who had also immigrated from Vietnam to America as two of the Vietnamese boat people after the fall of Saigon.

Darcy has a pet ball python named Betsy. She is of a morph called bluetail sable concentric diamond. Darcy was inspired by the famous tennis player and influencer Lottie Vic to get some kind of reptile. She loves Betsy to the moon and back, but when she first got her, Betsy was mistrusting and cautious of her new owner. Eventually, the two formed a bond that extends beyond Darcy feeding and playing with her. Betsy’s favorite food is frozen pinkie rats, which Darcy keeps in a mini freezer under her enclosure. The enclosure is a fairly large one that takes up nearly half a wall in Darcy’s basement bedroom. She has even bought some costumes for Betsy. Darcy’s uncle has some experience with reptiles as well. He had kept a bearded dragon as a teen in Vietnam, but it died at only 6 years old from some kind of tumor or infection for which care wasn’t available in the impoverished country. Darcy knows enough Vietnamese to email him.

Using some of the prize money from winning the 2023 5B1W tournament, Darcy bought her dream car, a white Mazda Autozam AZ-1. This is an example of a kei car, a tiny car designed for Japan’s compact, crowded cities. Darcy understands how rare the Autozam AZ-1 is. Only a few thousand were ever sold, and only inside Japan. Darcy’s car has the California license plate “DARCY’S AZ”. 

She also bought a Bertram P-4990 boombox with her prize money. It is a very large boombox with a tablet-sized touchscreen, a 7-band equalizer, two turntables, a dual cassette deck, and a 10-disc changer. So big is this machine that to transport it, Darcy must put it sideways in the passenger seat of her Autozam, strap it down, and leave the gullwing door open the whole trip.