Alain Robert: Revenge of a Rock
- Matthieu Amaré
- 21 hours ago
- 9 min read
In the previous installment, a battered man — the survivor of two horrific accidents — proved he had an extraordinary ability to claw his way back. Stronger than ever, the climber from Valence was now about to stun his peers by rising to the very top of the climbing world. He didn’t know it yet, but the French Spider-Man was already starting to shed one skin for another, turning from rock climber into high-rise lizard. And into a legend.
In 1991, Laurent Belluard walked into the offices of Vertical for the first time. Founded in Grenoble in the early 1980s, the magazine had become the leading climbing publication of its era in France. As Belluard was getting his start at the paper, he had already heard of Alain Robert. He knew enough to understand that what Robert was doing was remarkable. So when the climber from Valence dropped by to see whether a journalist-photographer might want to join him on a new project, Belluard didn’t need much convincing.
Alain vs. Goliath
“We drove down to Buoux in his car,” Belluard recalls over the phone. “I still remember getting to the tollbooth. When it was time to pay, he poured the coins into his palm and struggled so much that half of them fell on the ground.”
The damage left by Robert’s disabilities set the tone right away. Because the project was insane: he wanted to free solo — climb without a rope — La Nuit du Lézard. An improbable line established by Jean-Baptiste Tribout in 1986. It starts with a bulge, then rolls into a slab so slick it might as well have been graphene: 5.13c (8a+), wildly insecure. Pretty much the definition of a route you do not free solo.
“When we got near the route, we saw a couple on it,” Belluard says. “A blond German guy, sculpted like a statue, climbing the route while his gorgeous girlfriend belayed him. As soon as we got there, Alain said, ‘Laurent, tell him to pull his rope. We can’t waste time — the sun’s about to swing around.’” In the heat, the friction would drop.
“When the German saw Alain show up, all twisted up and bouncing around like a broken toy, he looked at him like he was some bum off the street. Alain did one rehearsal lap, then launched on the route and climbed it beautifully. He struggled a little at the top, but he finished it. I looked down at the German. I’ve never seen anybody so crushed. He probably quit climbing that same day.”
“I think he had this ability to step outside the event itself, which almost made him better solo than with a rope”
Laurent Belluard
Behind the camera, Belluard never saw that Robert slipped twice off tiny dish holds and nearly died. It didn’t matter. The ascent was done, and one of the boldest free solos in climbing history had just gone down.
That year, Robert would put up eleven major free solos, including the world’s first two 5.13d (8b) free solos. He was at the absolute peak of his soloing career. He may have had the strongest head in the world, and plenty of people still struggle to explain it.
“I think he had this ability to step outside the event itself, which almost made him better solo than with a rope,” Belluard says now.
For Laurent Jacob, the explanation almost enters spiritual territory: “Those accidents only strengthened his goals and his determination, to the point of making him an absolute champion. It was his destiny. He fulfilled the plan that was already in the seed.”
Philippe Poulet, another Vertical journalist, has a more grounded take: “Alain simply trained more than everybody else and developed physical and mental abilities that were beyond those of his contemporaries.”
At the time, though, there wasn’t much debate. Alain Robert got filed under crazy. When other climbers heard he had soloed La Nuit du Lézard, the climber from the Drôme still looked to them like a reckless maniac in a damaged body.
“What he was doing was incredibly random,” says David Chambre. “It was right at the edge of what’s reasonable. He does La Nuit, and then two years later he does it again on Pour une poignée de Chamallow (5.13c/d, 8a/b). To me, that was his high point for commitment. It was the kind of thing he only pulled off maybe one out of three times even with a rope. I mean, in Russian roulette you’ve got better odds.”
Nobody took risks like he did. Even thirty years later, the biggest names in the discipline still bow to that level of boldness. Starting with Alex Honnold, who said in a 2023 interview: “Personally, I always try to leave a margin, to be several grades below my max with a rope, and I want to stay in that comfort zone. Alain was soloing 8b at a time when the max with a rope was 9a, and with very little margin. So he was really at the cutting edge of the sport, right at the limit of human potential at the time.”
Alain Robert’s Main Rock Free Solos
Buoux
Courage fuyons — 5.12a (7a+), 1990
La Chèvre et le chou — 5.12d (7c), 1990
Rêve de papillon — 5.13b (8a), 1990
Cauchemar de l’éléphant — 5.13b (8a), 1991
La Nuit du Lézard — 5.13c (8a+), 1991
La Nuit du cauchemar — 5.13c (8a+), 1991
Cornas
L’Abominable Homme des doigts — 5.12b/c (7b+)
Boukouni — 5.12d (7c), 1987
Au théâtre ce soir — 5.13b (8a), 1991
L’Abominafreux — 5.13b (8a), 1990
Pour une poignée de Chamallows — 5.13c/d (8a/b), 1993
Triptyque — 5.13d (8b)
Verdon
L’Ange en décomposition — 5.11d (7a)
Pol Pot — 5.13a (7c+), 1996
Crac boum hue — 5.13b (8a), 1991
“I Think I Really Am Crazy, Actually”
Watch him ask a waitress for another glass of Champagne with the eager look of a kid, and it’s hard to picture Alain Robert going head-to-head with gravity at its worst. And yet around the table in Paris, everyone says the same thing: they’ve lost count of the scares this 110-pound man has given them on cliffs.
For Claude, a friend of forty years, one of those moments came on Pol Pot in 1996, with Robert’s wife and three children there at the cliff.
“I wanted that 5.13a in the Verdon to be my farewell to extreme climbing, and Claude was photographing me,” Robert says. “I was 1,000 feet off the deck and got stuck at the crux because my reach came up short. After what felt like an eternity of hesitation, I pushed off the tip of my shoe to hit the saving hold — but honestly, it was like flipping a coin. I stuck the move, and right away I said to him, ‘Claude, I think I really am crazy, actually.’”
Robert stopped counting long ago the number of times he could have flown off. He calls them “white moments,” those instants when even memory sometimes drops out: “You remember the before and the after, but in between, time stops. It turns transparent.”
At 63, those mystical seconds have become the beads of a life philosophy he has never betrayed since childhood, when he first read a line from his idol, the Italian alpinist Reinhold Messner: “The greater the fear, the greater the joy.”
“It was the kind of thing he only pulled off maybe one out of three times even with a rope. I mean, in Russian roulette you’ve got better odds”
David Chambre
In the early 1990s, when he first appeared on the TF1 evening news, Alain Robert hesitated between presenting himself as a responsible adult and leaning into the image of a madman. In the end, he did both. One minute he stressed that he was a family man. The next, he was posing for photos suspended above sharpened knives.
The character was already mutating. After La Nuit du Lézard, Robert ditched the harlequin Lycra for a reptile look. He started imagining himself as an iguana, plastered to the rock in snake-print clothes that made him look a little like Crocodile Dundee. David Chambre sees a different pop-culture reference: “He reminded me of Gainsbarre.” It fits. Like Serge Gainsbourg’s darker alter ego, Robert seemed intent on giving birth to his own evil twin.
Robert, the Rascal
“My move into skyscrapers — and the snakeskin outfits — that was my way of telling all of them: screw you.”
Up on the top floor of his Paris hotel, Alain Robert is once again sitting in front of a full glass. The fizz of the Champagne mixes with a real trace of bitterness when he is asked to look back on his relationship with the climbing world in the early 1990s.
And yet by the end of 1991, he had earned a small measure of revenge. Thanks to a film aired on TF1, Passion vitale, which documented his La Nuit du Lézard ascent, Patrick Edlinger chose to present him with the Prix de la Performance Sportive. It was a kind of coronation, especially given the contrast between Edlinger — golden-boy angel of French climbing — and Robert, the outsider.
“Patrick gave me back my legitimacy because he knew I’d done something important,” Robert says. “He knew because he never managed to do La Nuit du Lézard with a rope.”
Swirling his glass, he wants to make one thing clear: “I always got along well with Patrick, with Berhault, Tribout, and the others. The people who didn’t like me were the mediocre climbers.”
Recognition from the best wasn’t enough. Unloved and increasingly sidelined by a sport that was becoming more standardized, Alain Robert kept carrying the image of a wounded, unwanted oddball. So when, in 1994, a watch brand offered to pay him to climb a skyscraper in Chicago, he didn’t hesitate. Even if it meant breaking for good with the climbing scene.
“That was the moment competition climbing was starting to emerge and really organize itself,” Belluard says. “In France, the fashionable climbers were François Legrand and Didier Raboutou. On rock, it was all about the race to 9a, to 5.14d. Once again, Alain was completely out of step with the times.”
For Belluard, it wasn’t even that the community rejected Robert. It was worse than that: it didn’t care.
“What he was doing was looked down on. For them, building climbing was just beside the point.”
And yet.
By crossing the Atlantic to satisfy watch companies and insurance firms, Alain Robert would change his life. In almost no time at all, the former Bado Sport salesman became a globally known superhero whose ascents were sometimes watched by hundreds of thousands of people gathered at the base of the towers.
The public, at last, connected with this lizard-skinned character who seemed as free as he was untouchable. They gave him a name — The French Spider-Man — and the media turned that name into a legend. They loved the climbs as much as the arrests, since every one of those ascents was illegal.
After climbing 250 structures around the world, the French Spider-Man also holds the record for the man who has seen the inside of the most different prisons. The stories sound almost made up: one-arm push-up contests with inmates on Staten Island; the king of Malaysia having him moved from his cell to the royal palace for dinner.
Most of all, the “buildings,” as Robert likes to call them, finally gave him a real way to make a living. All driven by commercial deals, those ascents could sometimes earn him as much as €250,000. Spider-Man was having the time of his life, treating his family as he hauled them all over the world, and making a name for himself — a much bigger one than François Legrand’s or Didier Raboutou’s.
“My move into skyscrapers — and the snakeskin outfits — that was my way of telling all of them: screw you.”
Alain Robert
For David Chambre, though, Alain Robert didn’t exactly invent building climbing.
“I think I even did my first building ascent before he did,” Chambre says. “Jean-Claude Droyer had already climbed the Montparnasse Tower, and Laurent Jacob had already done the Eiffel Tower.”
But for the climbing historian, Robert had a stroke of genius: “He invented a sport. Where the rest of us thought, ‘That’s kind of cool,’ he fully embraced the whole universe around it. That was his real masterstroke.”
And for the purists, Chambre insists Robert wasn’t just doing it for the cameras. Some of those tower ascents were genuine feats.
“Just like on rock, 90 percent of what he did has never been repeated. If you take the Sears Tower in Chicago or the Framatome Tower in La Défense — now the Areva Tower — I’d bet nobody’s ever going to put hands on those again.”
Chambre even urged Robert to come up with his own grading scale for buildings. The result was predictable: Alain Robert had climbed the hardest towers in the world.
At 64, that is now what the French Spider-Man is trying to defend. He understands perfectly well that he probably won’t succeed in rehabilitating his rock career. So he is trying instead to make people understand that his building climbs were not just media stunts.
Some people do get it. Alexis Landot, France’s leading young name in urban climbing, considers what Alain Robert did “real feats.” At the climbing expo where the two shared a roundtable, the 23-year-old kept praising his elder. The next day, though, in the middle of an interview, Robert just shrugged. Landot’s praise seemed to slide off his alligator suit like water off scales.
So is the Spider-Man frustrated?
“Oh no — I really don’t want to come off like some frustrated guy,” he says, jumping at the word the moment it’s left hanging. “My recognition? I went out and got it. And I got it.”
How? And from whom?
With Alain Robert, as always, the only way to find out is to go everywhere except by the standard route.
To be continued in the next and final installment…
