Alain Robert: The Revenge of a Kid
- Matthieu Amaré
- il y a 3 jours
- 7 min de lecture
Legends sometimes start with almost nothing. Alain Robert’s begins with a forgotten set of keys. Everything that follows plays out between an apartment building in Valence, Zorro, Patrick Edlinger—and one brutal accident. Here’s episode two in the wild life of the man they’d later call Spider-Man.
Alain has had a rotten day. In the courtyard, the older kids made his life miserable again—name-calling, mocking, getting smacked around at recess. He’s seven. He’s small, skinny, and doesn’t exactly project “don’t mess with me.”
To top it off, he’s locked himself out. He’s standing in front of his apartment building in Valence. His parents aren’t home. It sucks. And it’s also the moment something in his head snaps into place.
Without thinking twice, he starts climbing—three stories up to his balcony. He treats the facade like a jungle gym, pulls himself level with the balcony, slides the door open.
Done.
Little Robert
“That day, something unlocked,” Alain Robert says, looking back fifty years later. “I was born a second time, with the feeling that I really could do things I’d always dreamed of doing.”
Back then, he wanted to be Zorro, d’Artagnan, Robin Hood. The problem was, he was scared of everything.
“I remember a car trip with my parents when we were going on vacation to Toulouse,” he says. “My dad decided to get off the highway and drive along the Gorges du Tarn. I curled up in the back seat. I was terrified of the exposure.”
Then an ordinary winter weekend lit the first fuse. Alain, almost seven, finally earns the right to watch the Sunday night movie. In 1969, the TV airs La Neige en deuil (The Mountain), Edward Dmytryk’s film based on Henri Troyat’s novel. Spencer Tracy and Robert Wagner are shown climbing Mont Blanc to rescue plane-crash victims.
“That was the first spark,” Robert says. “I’d never seen mountains before, and something happened to me that night.”
So it’s not really a surprise that a few months later, Alain does his first full solo—moving balcony to balcony on his own building. What is a coincidence: the building is named “Ailefroide,” after the famous Écrins massif in the French Alps.
One thing is certain: after his first “climb,” the kid basically quits using the stairs.
Watching from the front row, his little brother Thierry is both horrified and fascinated. “I remember we had a neighbor downstairs who worked as a projectionist,” Thierry says. “And the guy would watch my brother climbing and go, ‘What, the elevator’s broken?’ It cracked me up.”
These are the years Alain takes his little brother under his wing—dragging him out to climb around the area, and also into plenty of dumb kid trouble. “For my parents, I was supposed to go to soccer,” Thierry says. “But Alain would take me into these situations… Believe me, sometimes I would’ve preferred practice.”
By his own account, Thierry—now a filmmaker preparing a documentary series on his brother’s career—never saw Alain as insecure. “Honestly, it was the opposite. To me he was already a total daredevil. Seriously fearless.”
Not far from downtown Valence sits Château de Crussol, a fortress perched on a rocky outcrop above the Rhône Valley. It becomes young Alain Robert’s first real playground—the place where the kid who used to be afraid of heights starts posting up 200 meters above the ground.
The Roberts originally come from Saône-et-Loire. One of four kids, Alain doesn’t grow up with much. His mother stays home. His father leaves Digoin for Valence to take what Alain calls “a regular job in telecommunications.”
At home, everything is quiet—too quiet. “After his heart attack, my dad spent the rest of his life doing needlepoint,” Alain says. “We didn’t go out. We didn’t do anything.”
But once Alain starts climbing, he can’t sit still. So his parents send him to summer camp. There, he slips the counselors and goes off to climb five-meter boulders—naming them like they’re real routes: “The Rooster Rock,” “The Beige Glacier,” “The Finger of God.” Those are his first “ticks” (the little checkmarks climbers use to mark a route they’ve done), and eventually big brother starts backing off because the climbs are getting too hard.
That’s when Alain meets someone who matters: Pierre Jamet, a fellow scooter kid. Together they tackle their first serious projects, tying in around the waist and heading for sketchy climbs around Valence.
Little by little, they get better. The problem is, they have nobody to measure themselves against. “Back then, nobody around us climbed,” Robert says.
Their bible is Gaston Rébuffat’s Glace, Neige et Roc. “We read a ton of mountain stories,” he says. “As teenagers, we knew all the legends and all the tricks—Rébuffat, but also Desmaison, Terray, Bonatti…”
A Cliff-Dwelling Bum
“I must’ve been 25 and he was 18,” says Laurent Jacob. “It was in Buoux and I was trying to put up a pretty intense route called La Volière. I was alone and needed someone to belay me. That’s when I ran into this kid. It’s funny—I remember a guy with a bit of a gut, not exactly athletic. But he helped me out, and I freed the route.”
Jacob, in 1980, is the engine of French sport climbing—one of the pioneers of the era, and the guy credited with inventing the “Lolotte,” a knee-turning trick that buys you reach.
When Alain Robert watches him on La Volière, he’s seeing something new: seventh-grade climbing—hard and beautiful. In modern terms, that’s roughly the 5.12 range (French 7s), and it’s Alain’s first close-up look at truly high-level climbing.
It turns into an obsession.
The teenager pushes beyond his local Drôme crags. He basically moves to Buoux in the Luberon, throwing himself into both the rock and the golden age of French free climbing. He crosses paths with “the two Patricks”—Patrick Berhault and Patrick Edlinger—and with Jean-Pierre Bouvier, known as “La Mouche.”
He quickly realizes that if he wants to improve, he has to sleep there. “That’s when I gave up on my plans to become a guide,” Robert says, “and turned into a kind of cliff-dwelling bum.”
With a small crew, they shoplift from grocery stores, sleep in barns. Every morning, they wake up in Buoux—the mecca of French free climbing—and run laps on seventh-grade routes, often solo. For them, it’s pure joy.
“That’s really where I realized I might be among the best French climbers,” Robert says. “I was doing 7a, even 7b—while still being kind of chubby.”
So he heads to Sainte-Victoire, near Aix-en-Provence, full of confidence. It’s February 1982. Bouvier has freed a 7c there the year before—around 5.12d/5.13a (French 7c). Alain wants to test himself on that slab climbing, but first he sets up a top-rope (a rope run from above, so you can work the moves safely) to study the sequence.
And then he makes a beginner mistake that costs him.
He runs the rope through cord slings instead of a carabiner. The rope saws through. The slings snap clean. Alain drops twenty meters.
He lies on the ground unconscious for about thirty minutes before he’s taken care of. Hours later, at the hospital in Valence, it looks like a small miracle: a climber just took a huge fall and walks away with “only” a few fractures.
He leaves on crutches. A month later, he’s back on rock—with both arms in casts.
Smashed on the Ground
“What you have to understand is, this was a childhood dream,” Robert says. “I fell, sure. But I was alive, and I wasn’t that bad off. There was no way I was quitting.”
So Alain Robert shows up in Buis-les-Baronnies on crutches, hiking in on approaches where you basically need your hands. He puts on his harness and starts climbing 6b—around 5.10d—while his arms are still in plaster.
“People at the base thought I was out of my mind,” he says. “And honestly, I get it. But that was a fundamental period in my life—when I knew I’d never give up on my dreams. When I realized that if you have a goal, you can do some crazy things.”
It’s also when Alain Robert starts putting words to his view of climbing. Forty years later, it hasn’t changed.
“For me, it has to stay dangerous,” he says. “In the ’80s, a guy like Christian Guyomard”—the inventor of “banzaï climbing”—“when he put up routes, he’d place the first bolt at ten meters, and he’d make sure that if you fell before the second, you’d slam into the ground. That’s anti-conformist. Anti-FFME”—the French climbing federation. “That’s completely my view: climbing is, first and foremost, an adventure.”
Six months later, Alain Robert is chasing that “adventure” every day, back on his favorite crags—Buoux, the Verdon, Cornas. He’s twenty, hungry, ready to bite into rock with both teeth. He’s moved in with his wife, Nicole. But for one summer—1982—he becomes that “cliff bum” again and grinds day and night on a project at Cornas, L’Abominable homme des doigts—his cliff.
Two months all-in. Two months getting shut down at the crux, a few meters from the top. Three tries a day, and he can’t do it.
Then, at the end of September, while he’s finishing a training session at a nearby wall, he hears voices. It’s a group of beginners from Jeunesse et Sports, asking him to put up a rope by leading the route.
He’s experienced. He reaches the top quickly—fifteen meters up. He does his rope setup, then starts to lean back to descend in an alpine rappel (a fast rappel style), trying not to scrape up his knees. He throws one last joke down to the kids. One last look at the little stream of La Goule.
The rope goes tight.
And then it blows.
Immediately.
Alain Robert falls backward, headfirst.
And this time, when he hits, everything goes completely black.
