Nicolas Jean: “I Often Have a Hard Time Calling Myself an Athlete”
- Pierre-Gaël Pasquiou
- 1 hour ago
- 5 min read
Fresh off a Piolet d’Or with Benjamin Védrines for their ascent of Jannu East, Nicolas Jean now belongs to the upper echelon of world alpinism. His new status also says something about a discipline still finding its way toward professionalization, even as performance advances faster than the profession itself.
The question seems simple enough: How do you describe yourself when you now spend much of your time pursuing the highest levels of alpinism? On September 3, the day before the 2026 Piolets d’Or winners were announced, Nicolas Jean was still unsure how to answer. Mountain guide, definitely. Professional athlete? That was harder. “It still feels a little strange,” he told us. The status is new, and he is still getting used to it. “Sometimes people have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that you can get paid just to do mountain sports. It seems strange that you could make a living doing that.”
Then he finally settled on an answer: “I often have a hard time saying I’m an athlete, so I usually say I’m a mountain guide.”
Twenty-four hours later, the word became a little harder to avoid. Jean and Benjamin Védrines were named among the 2026 Piolets d’Or recipients for their first ascent of Jannu East, completed in October 2025. At 27, Jean had received one of the highest honors in world alpinism. That leaves a much more practical question: What does it actually mean to be a professional alpinist?
Under the Radar
On paper, Jean now checks plenty of boxes. Born in 1998, trained as a carpenter, and also a ski instructor and mountain guide, he joined Simond’s athlete team in 2025. But that shift is recent. In September 2025, Alpine Mag published a profile of his “new status as an (almost) professional alpinist.” In January, Le Dauphiné Libéré described him as part of a generation “quietly moving toward professionalization.”
“For now, professional alpinists are still in a pretty precarious position”
A year after the first of those profiles, Jean remains more cautious. Ask him about strength and conditioning, nutrition, or recovery, and he eventually sums up the situation this way: “For now, professional alpinists are still in a pretty precarious position.” As far as he knows, none of them has a full team of dietitians, physical therapists, and other specialists around them like athletes do in some sports. “We’re not at cycling’s level yet,” he said. When we pointed out how makeshift the whole setup still sounded, he agreed: “It’s still very amateur, even if we’re trying to do things as well as we can.”
So “professional” means something particular in alpinism. There is no championship circuit where the best athletes can make a living directly from their results, and no professional teams modeled on team sports or cycling. The Piolets d’Or explicitly embrace a different philosophy. Their charter values style, exploration, commitment, self-reliance, technical difficulty, and “economy of means” rather than a simple ranking of results. Elite performance is very real. The profession meant to support it is far less standardized.
Making Do
Jean’s preparation for the first attempt on Jannu East in 2024 gives a concrete sense of that gap. Benjamin Védrines and Léo Billon each had a strength and conditioning coach. Jean did not. “They’d tell me a little about what they were doing, and then I’d kind of put together my own thing,” he said. “At the time, I was still working as a carpenter.” Skiing steep terrain all winter with Védrines became part of his training for the expedition.
“We’re still in the very early stages when it comes to training,” he said. “Right now, we’re more like the Tour de France in the 1950s”
That does not mean French alpinism has no structure behind it. The FFCAM’s Groupe Excellence Alpinisme National, or GEAN, has existed since the early 1990s. Every three years, it selects a group of young alpinists and supports them through a training cycle that includes several camps and a final expedition. Védrines and Billon are among those who have gone through the program. But while GEAN develops high-level alpinists, it is not a permanent professional environment with an employer, medical staff, and day-to-day support.
Jean knows the difference well. Asked whether ENSA, the French school where mountain guides are trained, also helps athletes pursue high-level performance, he answered immediately: “They train you to become a guide. That’s it. After that, you figure it out yourself.” In practice, figuring it out means looking for information online, in books, and from other climbers and alpinists.
A few minutes later, Jean offered a comparison. “We’re still in the very early stages when it comes to training,” he said. “Right now, we’re more like the Tour de France in the 1950s.” He immediately explained what he meant. Cyclists back then were already posting “really impressive average speeds,” he noted, even though training methods and everything else that now surrounds athletic performance would go on to evolve dramatically. The comparison fits.
On July 8, Jean completed the Meije traverse from La Grave in 4 hours, 11 minutes, taking nearly 27 minutes off Benjamin Védrines’s previous benchmark. The performances are already extraordinarily advanced. The systems supporting them still have plenty of room to develop. Jean is convinced that matters. “I think that’s one of the reasons alpinism is going to keep evolving so much,” he said.
Getting the Word Out
Then there is the other side of becoming a professional: finding a way to pay for it. An interview Jean gave Outside in December 2025 echoed what he told us on September 3. In the mountains, he explained, an extraordinary performance is not always enough to attract sponsors. You also have to know how to tell the story. Jean used Rafael Nadal as an example. In his view, Nadal’s results alone would have been enough to establish his economic value even if the tennis star had barely communicated publicly. In alpinism, Jean said, “you have to.”
That is not a minor part of the job. Photos, films, social media, and interviews can help build the partnerships that then free up time to train and go on expeditions. That side of the profession does not seem to hold much appeal for Jean. In the same interview, the guide said he cared more about “recognition from [his] peers” than recognition from the general public, and expressed wariness about social media. He also said he admired alpinists who could do major things without necessarily telling everyone about them. The logic is straightforward. To spend more time in the mountains, you need time. To free up that time, you need to be able to make a living. And to make a living, a performance sometimes has to become visible beyond the small circle of people who fully understand what it means.
That is exactly the line Jean still seems to be learning how to navigate. Asked why he has trouble introducing himself as a professional athlete, he said the people around him every day have now gotten used to his new status. The awkwardness comes mostly with people he knows less well. “It doesn’t feel like a very natural way to introduce myself,” he said. “But I’ll get there.” The next day, a Piolet d’Or arrived. The word “athlete” will probably catch up soon enough.
