One-legged parkour athlete Rubén Roldán Bustos wins Simon Cowell's Golden Buzzer
Rubén Roldán Bustos turned a one-legged parkour run into Simon Cowell’s final Golden Buzzer, pushing the sport onto prime-time.
Simon Cowell gave Rubén Roldán Bustos his final Golden Buzzer after the 23-year-old Spaniard delivered a one-legged parkour audition that drew a standing ovation on America’s Got Talent. The performance came during the fourth round of Season 21 auditions on June 23, in an episode that featured 15 acts and only two Golden Buzzers, making Bustos one of the night’s clearest breakouts.
Cowell called the routine “bloody fantastic” before slamming the buzzer, and the moment instantly shifted Bustos from a mystery act into a live-show contender. For parkour, the consequence was bigger than one TV lane filled by a sports-adjacent spectacle: a mainstream talent stage gave the discipline a prime-time validation rarely reserved for a movement sport that usually lives online, in competition clips, or in niche communities.
Bustos arrived with a backstory that made the execution matter even more. He lost his left leg in a tractor accident when he was nine years old, then began practicing parkour in 2014. Since then, he has built a record sheet that turns adaptive movement into measurable elite performance. Guinness World Records lists him with three titles, each tied to a specific result, place and date.
His most consecutive parkour retour jumps in the LA1 classification reached 13 in Milan, Italy, on February 21, 2024. He followed that with the farthest standing jump parkour dash in the same class at 2.76 meters in Almería, Spain, on November 4, 2024. On that same day in Almería, he also set the highest vertical leap with a running start at 1.30 meters. Guinness defines LA1 as a unilateral above-knee amputation classification, a structure designed to keep record attempts fair and accessible.
That record profile matters because the audition was not built on sentiment alone. NBC’s account of the performance emphasized how the routine fused technical difficulty with emotional impact, and the official AGT clip showed judges and crowd rising together for the finish. The image is the one likely to travel: a parkour athlete with three world records, one leg, and a live-TV moment strong enough to earn Simon Cowell’s last Golden Buzzer of the season. With that, Bustos moves from standout clip to a name the wider audience can follow into the live rounds.
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