Laura Pineau: “I Decided to Stop Showing People a Perfect Version of Me”
- Matthieu Amaré
- 15 hours ago
- 9 min read
At 25, Laura Pineau has climbed her way into the sport’s top tier with a string of huge performances over the last 12 months. It’s the product of relentless work from a climber who has never left much to chance, and who has recently decided to own the parts of herself that don’t look polished. A portrait of “Mademoiselle Fissure.”
You have to see her to get it. In front of hundreds of people onstage at the Grand Rex in Paris, she just stops giving the mic back. She hypes the crowd, translates, jumps in with follow-ups, answers her own questions, invites the film crew onto the stage. After 15 minutes of Q&A, Laura Pineau has quite simply taken over the event. Cyril Salomon, whose job is supposedly to manage the conversation, has to admit it: “Next time, you’re MCing the whole night.” That’s just how it goes. The co-founder of Montagne en Scène has just met Laura Pineau in person. And he got steamrolled.
The Crown
The Paris crowd has just watched the premiere of The Queen Swing, one of the night’s films, which tells the story of the feat Pineau pulled off with American climber Kate Kelleghan. Between June 6 and 7, 2025, the two women completed the legendary Triple Crown of Yosemite — El Capitan, Mount Watkins, and Half Dome — in less than 24 hours. Those are three of the most iconic walls in Yosemite National Park, in California. Altogether, it meant 2,200 meters of climbing and 30 kilometers of hiking, finished in 23 hours and 36 minutes.
The audience had spent much of the film holding its breath, wondering whether the pair would actually pull it off. When the credits rolled, The Queen Swing got a thunderous ovation. The performance warranted it. No all-women team had ever completed that linkup in under a day.
“I’ve loved improv since I was little. I love getting people around me on board”
Laura Pineau
The next morning, sitting in a café across from the Grand Rex, you would almost have to guess that the person in front of you is one of the best climbers on the planet. Technical shell, jeans, approach shoes, big round glasses — Laura Pineau doesn’t exactly look like a showgirl. You have to wait until she starts talking to feel the energy filling the room at what seems like 280 beats per minute.
“I’ve always been like this, super extroverted,” she says over a cappuccino that’s literally shaking. “I’ve loved improv since I was little. I love getting people around me on board. And last night, all my close friends were there.”
Fired up and emotional, the 25-year-old had no trouble stepping into the spotlight. Partly because it was her first real brush with this kind of public attention. But also because she wanted to balance out what the film sometimes suggests: that she was just some “unknown French climber” answering Kate Kelleghan’s Instagram call. In that version, Kelleghan — an American speed climber — takes the French climber under her wing, coaches her, and teaches her the basics of big wall climbing, meaning long routes on huge rock faces, at record speed.
“And you didn’t even see the first cut of the film,” Pineau says. “In that version, I really came off like a beginner. We changed the story a little, because by the end I was the one moving faster on every route, and I was the one carrying the team too.”
By then, Pineau already had major climbing achievements to her name. In climbing circles, she is “Mademoiselle Fissure,” one of the best crack specialists in the world, especially in trad, where climbers place their own protection as they go. Among other things, she had already put up a major repeat of an 8b/8b+ trad route — roughly 5.13d/5.14a — in Italy’s Valle dell’Orco. That kind of background would make her more and more comfortable in Yosemite, and over the film’s 53 minutes it becomes increasingly clear that she is the one carrying the Triple Crown project.
“I gave up everything to make this film,” she says, adjusting her glasses. “When we started, I told Kate, ‘You know I quit my job for this. We’ve got eight months of training ahead of us, and I’m going to be living in my van off my savings.’”
Once she committed, the French climber went all in. She brought in fellow Frenchman Thibaut Marot to shoot and direct the project. She paid for a large part of the production herself. She worked on the post-production with the technical team. She turned down help from a production company. She was also the one who contacted Montagne en Scène to get the film shown.
“I wanted us to control the story from start to finish,” she says. “I wanted the film to belong entirely to us.”
That makes sense for someone who, her whole life, has never wanted to leave much to chance.
Where Does All That Energy Come From?
Laura Pineau grew up in Toulon with a mother in sales and a father who ran his own business. By then, the two parents were starting to clash. In a home that she describes as “a little chaotic,” Pineau learned to move through life by holding on to certain phrases.
“I remember my parents saying to us all the time, ‘Go play, you’re free.’ And then right after that: ‘But don’t come back crying.’ So I basically never cry. I feel like if you’re given that kind of freedom, you can’t complain afterward.”
A top student and intensely athletic, she developed her own working method earlier than most people around her.
“Everyone was talking about prépa, the ultra-competitive French prep track,” she says. “But by the time I was 15, I already had a method that worked for me. I could sit at my desk for five hours and work with no problem. So I told my mom, ‘The second I graduate high school, I’m leaving home.’”
That is how, at 17 and a half, Pineau ended up in San Francisco for business school.
Before that, while boxing was more her sport at the time, she had discovered climbing almost by accident through a local climber named Fred, whom she never saw again.
“We were deep-water soloing — climbing above the sea without a rope. I loved it right away. There was something kind of mechanical about it. I’d fall, then start again.”
Once in the United States, Pineau got closer to the world of big walls, but first spent a lot of time in climbing gyms. She studied hard, adapted to a different culture, and leaned even harder into her workhorse personality. One story says a lot.
“The first time I walked into a classroom, everybody was taking notes on laptops. I had never seen that before. So I downloaded a game that taught me how to type as fast as possible without looking at the keys.”
Everything in Pineau’s life seems to run through a series of micro-goals: school, English, climbing.
As she improved, she eventually ended up on a 150-meter route with an American friend.
“And it was trad too,” she says. “I was in 10th grade, carrying the big bag, and it was scraping in the crack the whole time. I thought I was going to die. It was awful.” Trad and Pineau had a pretty rough relationship at first.
“I decided to try leading — climbing first with the rope below me — on an easy route. I do not remember it fondly. I was terrified, and after that day I didn’t do it again.”
In 2020, a lot of young people spent their time staring at the ceiling and trying to imagine a future. Pineau, back in Toulon for a gap year, was dreaming about El Capitan, probably the most famous cliff in the world, rising roughly 1,000 meters. Her idols were Lynn Hill and Babsi Zangerl. By then, there was no real doubt anymore. The former boxer knew climbing would be part of her life, one way or another.
Back in the U.S., and maybe trying to force fate a little, Pineau embraced the full American climber lifestyle: she moved into a van. In the summer of 2022, after finishing school, she set up in Red River Gorge, one of the most iconic climbing areas in the U.S., in Kentucky.
Working remotely for a luggage company, she spent most of her free time outside climbing.
“And then one day all the dirtbags — climbers living cheap so they can climb all the time — told me I had to go to Ten Sleep, Wyoming, for a climbing festival,” she says. “I didn’t think twice. I just followed them.”
When she started the van, she had no idea that 1,700 miles later, a meeting would change her life.
A Gift, the Desert, and Bloody Hands
“I see this woman I don’t know at all. I have no idea who she is. But she’s speaking into a mic about her experience, and it hit me hard. She talks about setting routes in gyms with awful guys, about having to carve out space for herself. And about how she did that through crack climbing.”
Sitting in the screening room in Ten Sleep, Pineau felt something deep. And like every time she senses an opening, she decided not to let it pass.
“So I went up to her and asked if she wanted to climb together.”
The woman was Brittany Goris, one of the best trad climbers in the world, and not someone who was exactly used to another woman walking up with that kind of invitation. She said yes. A few months later, Pineau found herself in Moab, out in the Utah desert, relearning trad with an American star.
“She taught me so much,” Pineau says. “She let me use all her gear. She passed on her technique. She taught me how to manage fear. It was one of the most important encounters of my career.”
“I don’t think I’m the smartest person out there, but I work like crazy. Nobody will ever put as much pressure on me as I put on myself. Nobody”
Laura Pineau
Through Goris, Pineau rediscovered crack climbing and the grinding apprenticeship that comes with it.
“That’s what I loved most about it: starting over from zero,” she says. “It’s a magical gift to become a beginner again, to suddenly have a whole world to learn all over.” In cracks, Pineau also found something that felt almost elemental.
“It was made by nature. You can see that. When you climb it, it feels like the most obvious thing in the world.”
With bruises on her body and blood on her hands, she found in those crack systems a new way of asserting herself.
But crack climbing was not the only calling she found in Ten Sleep. The same day she heard Brittany Goris speak, she also watched a film that shook her: Pretty Strong.
“Four short films about women climbing hard projects together,” Pineau says. “It was just unbelievably inspiring. When it ended, I cried for ten minutes because it hit me so hard.”
When she walked out of that screening, she made herself a promise: do the same thing. In other words, climb truly hard projects with women partners.
Ultra-Climber
Since then, Laura Pineau’s career has moved between two tracks: film producer and pro climber. The Triple Crown allowed her to leave her sales job behind and pick up a few sponsors. That achievement, which she says “left a mark on Yosemite history,” changed her status. Pineau now has an agent, Marine Thévenet.
The recognition she had been waiting for?
“Maybe,” she says, searching for the answer in the last of her cappuccino. “I think work pays off eventually. I don’t think I’m the smartest person out there, but I work like crazy. Nobody will ever put as much pressure on me as I put on myself. Nobody.”
Built to perform — and to make sure it shows — Pineau is often described in the media as “a machine.” She has just finished another extreme project with Elsa Ponzo: climbing the 100 most beautiful routes in Provence. The numbers are massive. Nearly 18,000 vertical meters, 691 pitches, all in 43 days. Enough to plant a new concept in the world of high-end climbing performance: “ultra-climbing.”
It’s big. It’s impressive. But where does it lead?
Stirring the bottom of her cup with a spoon, Pineau has started thinking differently about constant performance. She no longer wants to come across as some kind of engine you just switch on and point at a wall.
“After the Triple Crown, I started working with a mental coach,” she says. “It was my grandmother who realized I couldn’t close the chapter, couldn’t move on.”
With that coach, “the machine” has been learning to apologize, to give herself a break, to accept vulnerability.
“I wanted to stop showing people a perfect version of Laura.”
Six months after the Triple Crown, in November 2025, Pineau climbed Wet Lycra Nightmare, one of Yosemite’s steepest big walls, graded 8b — about 5.13d. It was another female first. Another major feat. But this time, in the film she produced about it, the climber chose to show the doubts and the cracks too.
At the premiere last January at the Salon de l’Escalade, the woman who “never cries” broke down in tears after the screening.
“And you’re really not ready for the one about the 100 routes in Provence,” she says, laughing.
At 25, is this hyperactive athlete starting to settle down a little? Maybe. The energy is still spilling over, but now she wants to pass something on to the generation coming up behind her. Pineau is preparing to earn her French state diploma, the certification that allows her to teach professionally.
“To pass things on,” she says.
Her big ascents. Her technique. Her strength. But also her failures, and the questions that came with them.
After all, what could make more sense for “Mademoiselle Fissure” than finally letting the armor crack?
