Alain Robert: Revenge Under the Skin
- Matthieu Amaré
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
January 2025, Paris. Back in the corners of the Porte de Versailles expo center, a mixed crowd sits in manufactured shadow. As the crew builds the stage, spotlights keep landing on ordinary faces: an old man with a cane, a young woman clutching a tote bag, a kid parked on the floor. The room is packed. You hear throat clears, water bottles clinking. It’s the sound of people waiting, not quite sure what for. Then everything snaps on.
Flanked by two huge security guys, a wiry little man catches the low light and throws it back across the room. His outfit is so bright it practically blinds the front row. Cowboy boots. An alligator-skin suit. Long, gray hair hanging in thin strands. Alain Robert walks in like he brought his own sun.
Alain, the superhero.
At least that’s how the crowd sees him. To them, he’s “the French Spider-Man.” Never mind that at sixty-three, barely 110 pounds, he looks less like Peter Parker and more like a French rock singer who’s been on the road a long time. People came anyway—kids, retirees, everyone in between—to hear the flesh-and-blood version of a Marvel character: the guy known worldwide for soloing the tallest skyscrapers on Earth.
And to be clear: this is free solo—climbing without a rope or any protection, no harness, no gear, nothing between you and the ground. Robert claims 250 buildings climbed “bare-handed.” More recently, past sixty, he’s been on Hekla Tower, the TotalEnergies tower in La Défense, and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai—the tallest building in the world.
As the audience sits up straighter, Robert looks like a man who still isn’t sure why he’s here. The schedule promises a “non-conference.” He doesn’t really know what that’s supposed to mean, so he leans into it, half-awkward and half-amused, with that unmistakable southeast France accent: “A non-conference, for me, is mostly a conference that doesn’t pay.”
The room loses it.
And yet, for the last 24 hours, this sixty-something superhero has been given a real assignment: serve as patron for the first Paris edition of the Climbing Expo. He’s flown in from Bali, where he lives now. He takes it as a tribute—even if, in practice, it mostly means signing copies of his latest biography, Libre et sans attache (Laurent Belluard and David Chambre, Éditions du Mont-Blanc, 192 pages, €28.50). The rest of the time, he takes selfies, tells the same story thirty times, and wanders the aisles of Porte de Versailles with a crew that looks suspiciously like a personal security detail.
A Flyover
Ask what place Alain Robert holds in modern climbing history and you’ll keep getting the same answer: unique. Unmatched. Unclassifiable. People run out of adjectives for a man who’s already carved his name into the sport. Today he’s one of the rare “pro” climbers with millions of followers online—and, apparently, the only climber with a statue in China.
His latest book includes a foreword that pretty much suggests he might be the greatest free soloist of all time. It’s signed by someone named… Alex Honnold. The Alex Honnold—one of the most respected climbers on the planet, the guy whose 2017 documentary Free Solo put climbing on an Oscars stage.
Another strange little badge of honor: Robert is also the only climber to show up in a sports book that isn’t just about climbing—Les 100 meilleurs sportifs de tous les temps (René Taleman, Jourdan Éds, 315 pages, €134), a list that puts him next to Pelé, Muhammad Ali, Carl Lewis, and Roger Federer.
For Philippe Poulet, editor-in-chief of Vertical magazine and a friend of Robert’s, there’s no debate: “Alain is the best free soloist in history.” In his view, nobody has matched him—“not even Honnold, not even Alexander Huber,” the man credited with the hardest free solo on the planet, graded 8b+ (about 5.14a).
Robert’s biographers, David Chambre and Laurent Belluard, place him “at least in the world top three.” They point to solos like Polpot in Verdon (7c+, roughly 5.13a), La Nuit du Lézard in Buoux (8a+, about 5.13c), and Pour une poignée de Chamallows in Cornas (8a/b, around 5.13b/c). Chambre calls them “the most daring free solos in history.” The proof, he says, is simple: even today’s boldest high-wire walkers want nothing to do with those routes.
Honnold—again—once wrote that doing Polpot is like “rolling the dice.” Alea iacta est. The die is cast. That might be the cleanest way to sum up Alain Robert’s operating system: every time he stepped past his own Rubicon, 1,000 feet above the ground.
When we meet him the day after the expo, in a hotel room at the top of a Paris high-rise, Robert hasn’t changed outfits. Same reptile-skin suit. Same oversized back patch: “One word: badass.” Only the drink is different. Yesterday it was bottled water. Today it’s champagne—his favorite.
Between sips, the rock-star act drops into something sharper. “That ‘French Spider-Man’ nickname pisses me off,” he says right out of the gate. “The building stuff completely pushed my rock climbing career into the background.”
Is it the booze talking? Not really. This is a constant with him. Even with all the praise, even coming off an event that treated him like a legend, Alain Robert complains—like yesterday’s celebration gets instantly replaced by today’s frustration.
Hardly a day goes by without him posting on Facebook or going live on Instagram to remind people what he’s done. The sheer volume points to one obsession: getting his legitimacy back.
But which legitimacy?
“It takes two minutes to see Alain has a huge recognition problem,” Poulet says. “And sometimes—yeah—it’s true, he can sound like an old guy who won’t let it go.”
So how do you explain it? Maybe it’s the thirty years between his peak rock achievements and the present day. Maybe the media circus around the building climbs really did erase his life on stone. Maybe it’s the Alain Robert character itself—the odd duck of climbing, too alone, too reckless, too strong.
The answer probably lives somewhere in all of that at once. And to find it, you have to untangle the thread of a life that plays out almost like a comic-book plot: one revenge after another.
