In a world where dinner plans became Zoom meetings, friend groups became WhatsApp threads, and “community” is curated by an algorithm, something has slipped: our shared sense of direction. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim called it anomie —a state of social drift, when common norms break down and nothing solid replaces them. (cc) Redd Francisco / Unsplash So here’s a question: somewhere between a bouldering session and a post-climb beer, could climbing gyms and crags be stitching some of that fabric back together? Picture the end of a workday. The subway’s packed. Your phone keeps lighting up. You’ve spent hours on Slack and Teams, double-tapping stories, reacting to memes. And then it hits you: you haven’t looked anyone in the eye for more than ten seconds all day. A few blocks away, a climbing gym is filling up. People walk in wearing chalk on their hands and rubber scuffs on their shoes. Someone passes a brush. Two strangers trade beta—route advice on how to solve a sequence. Someone sits down next to you on the pads. You nod. Next week, you’ll recognize their face. No one’s worried about whether it’s “professional” to be on a first-name basis. You’re just there. In a space where gravity is real, and so are the people around you. That contrast sits at the heart of a question Durkheim was already asking in the late 1800s, long before Instagram: what happens when the big collective structures—religion, extended family, village life, trade guilds—stop organizing daily life, and nothing stable replaces them? He called that in-between moment anomie . Hyperconnected modern life has only sped it up. We’ve never been more digitally linked. We’ve rarely felt more socially untethered. That “emptiness” people talk about isn’t just a mood. It has structure. And that’s where climbing becomes interesting—not just as recreation, but as a small-scale attempt to rebuild rules and relationships in a world that feels short on both. Welcome to Anomie For Durkheim, anomie wasn’t a rant about “kids these days.” It was a diagnosis. Societies go through phases where the norms that guide behavior weaken. The rules get blurry. The promises of modern life—progress, mobility, success—don’t match reality. The result? Frustration, isolation, rising depression, self-destructive behavior. In Suicide  (1897) , Durkheim described what happens when individual desire is left without collective guardrails. Sound familiar? Today, job insecurity is normal. Families are scattered. Cities keep losing free gathering spaces. Digital platforms organize our relationships through metrics and monetization. We’re told we’re free—but that freedom often feels like low-grade anxiety: Where do I fit? What am I worth? Who notices if I disappear? Anomie isn’t the absence of rules. It’s too many conflicting ones. Be productive but chill. Competitive but collaborative. Independent but always available. Authentic but polished. We play different roles in different settings and start to lose track of which one is supposed to be “us.” In that fragmentation, sports aren’t just hobbies. They’re spaces where ways of being together get replayed—and sometimes repaired. Climbing, with its tight-knit gym and crag communities, holds a particular place in that landscape. A Gym Is More Than a Gym A modern climbing gym is a strange hybrid: part fitness center, part café, part town square. People show up for the workout, sure. But they stay for something else. From a Durkheimian angle, it’s a small lab for social integration. First, there are rituals. Monday night sessions. Wednesday crew. Friday night under the lights. We don’t go to church like we used to, but we do have our weekly service at the wall. Same time. Same faces. Same chalky air. Second, there’s a recognizable community. The regulars. The setters—the crew who design the problems. The front desk staff you joke with. It’s not total anonymity like the subway. It’s partial anonymity that slowly fades as you keep running into each other in climbing shoes. Third, there are clear shared rules. Don’t walk under someone climbing. Don’t sprint across the pads. Check your partner before you lead—clip the rope into quickdraws as you climb up the wall. These aren’t just technical guidelines. They’re social glue. Following them means taking care of other people. Where anomie blurs expectations, the gym clarifies them. You know why you’re there. You know how to act. You know roughly what you can expect from others. It’s not a grand political vision. It’s a small daily compass. Sociologists talk about “third places”—spaces that aren’t home or work, but where people build belonging: cafés, bars, community centers. Climbing gyms have quietly become third places for a lot of urban adults. You might walk in alone. You rarely stay alone. In a world where so many interactions are screen-mediated, simply sharing air, watching someone work a project—an ongoing route or problem they’re trying to send—and sitting in silence before a crux, the hardest move on the route, matters more than we admit. A Promise That Holds For Durkheim, anomie also comes from a mismatch between desire and reality. A society that promises everything and delivers less breeds frustration. Climbing does the opposite. It promises very little—and delivers exactly that. A 5.10 (roughly French 6b) doesn’t claim to be a shortcut to success. It says: here’s a specific problem. There’s a start, a middle, an end. You’ll need time. You’ll fall. You’ll try again. That’s it. The scale is clear. Your body is the metric—not your résumé, not your salary, not your follower count. After a day of abstract tasks and endless emails, climbing is blunt. Grab the hold. Push through your feet. Manage the pump—that forearm burn from hanging on too long. Fall. Get back on. You’re not optimizing your life. You’re trying to link three more moves. You could call that escape. Sometimes it is. But it’s also coherence. The question shifts from “Am I winning at life?” to “Have I improved on this style since last season?” Progress is local. Feedback is immediate. That kind of clarity works as a counterweight to social drift. It doesn’t solve structural issues—inequality, loneliness, precarity—but it creates a field where effort makes sense and results are visible. And then there’s falling. Falling is part of the deal. You learn to trust the pads. The rope. The belayer—the person holding your rope and managing your safety. Risk isn’t abstract. It’s human-sized. You face it. Together. Vertical Communities Durkheim insisted that what holds us up isn’t just psychology. It’s collective structure. Climbing clubs—public or private, indoor or outdoor—function like mini-institutions. There are authority figures: setters, coaches, the strong locals. There are rites of passage: your first lead, your first 5.11 (around French 6c), your first multi-pitch. There are shared stories: “Remember that winter project?” There’s informal solidarity: carpooling to the crag, lending gear, advice after yet another tweaked pulley. For many, this fills or supplements forms of belonging that have eroded elsewhere. Maybe you’re not joining a political party or a church. But you’re deeply invested in a climbing community—with its quiet values: help each other out. Stay humble in front of the rock. Don’t humiliate beginners. Falling is allowed. It would be naïve to paint climbing as conflict-free. Gender dynamics, class, race, and power show up in gyms and at crags, too. Not everyone feels instantly welcome. The codes can be intimidating. Still, compared to many social spaces, the symbolic barrier to entry is relatively low. Shorts, a T-shirt, a pair of shoes—and soon you’re on the same wall as a surgeon, a server, a college student, a city worker. Worlds that rarely overlap elsewhere share the same problem and the same gravity. That co-presence is a partial antidote to anomie. It rebuilds fragments of common society in a time when neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces are increasingly siloed. Even the most “solo” send has a crowd behind it: setters, belayers, friends who yelled “You’ve got it!” at the right moment. Clear Limits in a Blurry World One of anomie’s quiet effects is the feeling that everything is negotiable, that standards don’t hold. Climbing isn’t negotiable. The wall doesn’t care about your LinkedIn profile. If the hold’s too far, it’s too far. If you don’t know how to clip, you don’t lead. You can fake it in a meeting. Not on a 45-degree overhang. That clarity shapes more than muscle. It teaches patience—progress is slow. Responsibility—your mistake affects your partner. Self-awareness—today might not be the day for that project. Durkheim talked about the moral function of the collective—not moralizing, but orienting. Climbing offers a small, concrete code: don’t text while belaying. Don’t toss your crash pad wherever. Share the wall. Respect the crag. In a time when big ideological compasses feel worn down, these embodied micro-ethics matter. They provide direction, even if it’s temporary. Cure or Commodity? There’s an uncomfortable question here: does climbing heal anomie—or sometimes package and sell it back to us? Private gyms aren’t monasteries. They’re businesses. They need members, retention, “community.” Belonging is real—but it’s also monetized. Social media complicates things further. What felt like refuge can become a stage. Posting sends. Sharing trip footage. Building digital clout. The offline emptiness can creep back online as comparison and pressure: Am I strong enough? Cool enough? Doing enough? Again, Durkheim’s lens helps. Any community that doesn’t reflect on its own norms can slide into its own form of drift: unspoken expectations to be strong, stylish, fun. Silence around burnout or mental health. No real space to talk about harassment, sexism, racism, or labor conditions inside gyms. The question isn’t whether climbing is “good” or “bad” for contemporary emptiness. It’s under what conditions it truly builds connection rather than just simulates it. Do we welcome newcomers? Do we address what’s broken? Or do we stop at the Instagram-friendly version of “after-work send sessions”? Durkheim wrote that society isn’t just a backdrop. It’s a force that shapes us—and sometimes crushes us. Anomie names the moments when that force misfires and leaves individuals adrift. Climbing won’t fix deindustrialization, urban loneliness, mass precarity, or climate crisis. But it offers a practical space to try something other than drift: concrete ties, explicit norms, mutual commitment. In a moment when many people feel like they “have no hold” on their lives, climbing doesn’t promise salvation. It offers something smaller—and in its own way, powerful: real holds to grab, real bodies breathing next to you, real communities you can choose to belong to.

8a.nu . Social Boulder. Private gym comps. Federation circuits. Competition has swallowed climbing whole. And yet everyone still says the same thing: I climb for myself.  So why the constant one-upmanship? And more to the point: what’s the psychological cost? Luka Potocar, dans le dur, lors de la Coupe du monde à Chamonix, été 2025 © Jan Virt / IFSC This is the third installment of Heavy Mental, our new series breaking down key psychological concepts in climbing under the weight of performance. It’s written by Léo Dechamboux , a mental performance coach and co-author (with Fred Vionnet) of the french reference book Le Mental du grimpeur . I’ve been around competition climbing for more than 20 years. From crags to gyms, from my work as a mental performance coach to my own days as “just another climber,” I’ve heard it—and I’ve said it myself: we climb “for the beauty of the movement.” Even in competition, we like to measure ourselves against ourselves, against the route. Not against anyone else. And yet: competition is everywhere now. Between major national and international federation events, friendly “for fun” comps at private gyms, big-name private events with international reach, and platforms like Social Boulder or 8a.nu , comparison feels baked into the walls. Wherever you are, the message is the same: faster. stronger. farther. So let’s ask the question plainly. If everyone insists they climb for themselves, why does competition feel unavoidable? That’s the point Mental performance coaching has two goals: help you get better, and help you stay balanced and well. Where those overlap, you find the stuff that actually makes a practice sustainable—psychological well-being, motivation, and goal-setting. We pointed out how neoliberal thinking has reshaped psychology by pushing a more individual, performance-driven view of people. Psychology ends up helping produce the “entrepreneur of the self”—someone focused on constant optimization. Key researchers like Edward Deci and Richard Ryan describe three basic needs that support long-term motivation: autonomy, social connection, and competence. That’s the foundation of self-determination theory. They also show how goal-setting shapes motivation, and they distinguish between two broad goal types: mastery goals and ego goals. Mastery goals are about your own progress—strategies, useful behaviors, collaboration. They tend to support intrinsic motivation. Ego goals are competitive by nature: comparing yourself, trying to “beat” someone, making sure nobody beats you. The problem with ramped-up external motivation—or goals that lean too hard on ego—is that they can drive anxiety, self-sabotage, avoidance, negative emotions, or quitting altogether. They’re also heavily shaped by your environment: the motivational “climate” created by the people around you, plus the broader social context that influences how you think, feel, behave, and relate to performance. And this is where competition can start to cut deep. Modern sport took shape in the 18th century alongside industrial capitalism. That shift came with the commodification of people, environments, health, and education. In From Ritual to Record , American historian Allen Guttmann argued back in 1978 that this period also brought standardized measurement: stopwatches, regulated distances, uniform rules—and with them, the concept of the record. For the first time, international comparison became straightforward. Performance became measurable, exchangeable, sellable. It also turned into something like personal capitalism: optimize your body, make it “pay,” celebrate the self-made man and the “good” athletic body—defined against the one that isn’t. Free climbing emerges in that world, and it quickly plugs into the same logic: performance as product, body as capital, your “project” as a narrative investment. Tick lists—lists of “sends,” the climbs you’ve done, your personal scorecard—mixed with social media, instant communication, and sponsors, turn the climber into a thing to be packaged and valued. British sociologist Nikolas Rose described this dynamic in 2008 with the idea of “biocapital”: training becomes a rational production plan. The body becomes a machine. Progress becomes a value. Earlier in Heavy Mental , we pointed out how neoliberal thinking has reshaped psychology by pushing a more individual, performance-driven view of people. Psychology ends up helping produce the “entrepreneur of the self”—someone focused on constant optimization. Sport doesn’t escape that. The pressure ramps up: performance becomes an economic value, and “mental strength” becomes something you’re expected to monetize. In 2024, a report titled “ Navigating Neoliberalism ,” published in the Journal of Sport for Development , described how some sport practices line up with efficiency logic and continuous evaluation. Mental performance coaching can slide into that same frame—sometimes aiming less at personal growth than at productivity-driven optimization, with athletes treated like performance units. When the setting shapes your head Last September, in an interview with Grimper , a journalist asked me a blunt question: isn’t my job, basically, helping climbers survive in a toxic environment—competition? It’s true that competition comes with real psychological constraints that can leave long-term marks. But what’s often more problematic is how  we approach performance and competition. Mental performance coaching should help climbers thrive in this world if they choose it—without it swallowing the rest of their lives. Competition isn’t inherently toxic. But it can become toxic if we ignore the mechanisms—and if mental coaching becomes nothing more than “helping you tough it out” instead of building a healthier, durable relationship with performance. The issue is that we rarely talk about the psychological “set” of competition—the environment that shapes how we feel: how important the result seems, how uncertain it feels, the anxiety it creates, the expectations (internal or external, real or imagined). In 2017, sport psychology researchers Christopher Mesagno and Jürgen Beckmann showed that “choking under pressure”—a drop in performance when the stakes feel high—shows up especially when athletes lock onto the outcome rather than the task. In climbing, that’s what happens when you’re climbing not to fall , not to disappoint, when every attempt turns into a performance for other people. Competitive demands amplify those patterns. Bigger events mean more distractions. Rankings push ego-oriented motivation. And once you’re stuck judging yourself through that lens, it can drag down emotions, thinking, and behavior. Flip the format—make it more about learning and exchange—and motivation tends to swing back toward mastery and competence. That’s the direction the broader research points to when it looks at instructions, motivational climate, and the framework around athletes. These aren’t abstract effects. They show up as less enjoyment, injuries driven by urgency, identity narrowing around “being a performer,” anxious chasing of results, overtraining, burnout. Competition isn’t inherently toxic. But it can become toxic if we ignore the mechanisms—and if mental coaching becomes nothing more than “helping you tough it out” instead of building a healthier, durable relationship with performance. Recognition, gamification, and micro-fame For a long time, the competition frame in climbing was simple: a date, a wall, a deadline. Now the ecosystem has grown into something sprawling. Between federation circuits, gym comps, hybrid events, and platforms like 8a.nu or Social Boulder, competition has fractured into endless micro-scenes—each with its rules, rewards, and visibility. That isn’t unique to climbing. A study by Rob Franken , Hidde Bekhuis, and Jochem Tolsma on digital sports culture shows how platforms—Strava especially—reshape sporting norms by creating what they call “spaces of constant evaluation.” You’re no longer trying to be seen as a person. You’re trying to match a valued image. Your worth starts to depend on being visible, validated, and ranked. Design matters here. Gamification—the use of game-style design in sports apps—often does increase engagement, motivation, and consistency . But it’s not cleanly positive. For people with lower self-control—meaning it’s harder to regulate behavior in response to social cues—gamification can also feed comparison and dependence on feedback. These digital spaces also create new social statuses: micro-celebrity in sport. Researcher Theresa Senft, writing about micro-celebrity culture, describes visibility itself as a resource. A noticed “send” logged on 8a.nu , a well-edited Instagram clip, a #1 spot on the monthly Social Boulder leaderboard, a cameo in a private comp aftermovie—these things can produce “micro-stars” whose recognition rests less on athletic value than on cumulative visibility: fast, consumable, and fleeting. That shift creates a new kind of competition: continuous, and often invisible. You’re not measuring yourself only at one event. You’re measuring yourself every day—through what you post, what you like, what you log, what you “send.” (To “send” is to complete a climb cleanly—your personal stamp of “done.”) That diffuse competition shapes how you train, how you compare, how you judge yourself. Competitiveness seeps into how you climb. And the broader context directly shapes how we approach climbing, progress, performance, and well-being. A competitive environment can satisfy those core needs and feel energizing. It can also frustrate them—by squeezing autonomy and competence under external control. So it’s reasonable to hypothesize that this always-on competitive climate—fed by a broader environment that commodifies bodies, progress, and performance—helps generate a psychological need that feels especially modern: recognition. We know recognition matters for self-esteem. But sociologist Axel Honneth argues that the pursuit of recognition hits a wall when it stops being support for self-worth and becomes a condition for legitimacy. It can creep into the core of our needs, reshaping them without us noticing. Philosopher Nancy Fraser adds another layer: when recognition becomes a kind of “social currency,” it stops being relational and becomes an expectation. You’re no longer trying to be seen as a person. You’re trying to match a valued image. Your worth starts to depend on being visible, validated, and ranked. In sport—and in climbing—that slide is easier to miss because performance is so easy to display, count, and compare. Psychological needs can get artificially “filled.” External rewards can feel like autonomy while quietly steering behavior. They can mimic competence while really just handing you approval. They can imitate connection while actually running on constant comparison. Recognition stops being just a human need. It becomes an identity requirement—a proof of existence, sometimes even a duty to perform. Another way to put it: competition, now everywhere, doesn’t exist without person-to-person evaluation, and that evaluation feeds the hunger for recognition. That hunger stops being one pillar of self-esteem and starts behaving like something closer to a basic need—warping autonomy, competence, and connection. You still hear the old lines in climbing spaces: I climb for myself—alone, facing a problem to solve.  Those lines keep echoing because they’re part of climbing’s symbolic culture. But the spaces have multiplied, and the environment has changed. When every move can be quantified, every climber can be ranked, every send can be filmed and uploaded, competition stops being an event. It becomes a condition. And it threads itself into our needs—turning recognition into an identity requirement that quietly redraws what it means to exist as a climber.

In the climbing world, “being engaged” is something you can now perform in a steady stream of Instagram stories and posts. But under that activist-looking gloss, there’s an uncomfortable question: when we say we’re committed, who’s actually taking a risk—and who’s settling for outrage that’s socially rewarding and professionally safe? Kelowna / Canada (cc) Jeremy Vejgman  on Unsplash Some nights, scrolling social media, you get this weird sense you’re watching a separate competition—a quiet little contest where the goal isn’t to hold a razor crimp, but to prove, post by post, that you’re on the right side of things. The holds aren’t bolted to the wall anymore; they’re bolted to words: “safe,” “inclusive,” “committed,” “feminist,” “eco-friendly.” Everyone takes their moral burn (a try where you give it a real go), some more dramatic than others, some supposedly higher-stakes than others. Except there’s a detail that starts to itch: in a lot of these cases, the risk is mostly rhetorical. Sure, you can “take a fall”—but it’s rarely the kind that breaks anything. Worst case, someone corrects you back, you lose a bit of standing in one circle, you eat a rough day in the comments. In other words: a cushioned fall. Let’s call it what it is: comfort activism. A way to be “on the right side,” loudly and visibly, at a low real cost. The kind of commitment that picks fights where the ground stays solid and the consequences stay manageable. What It Looks Like in Real Life The scene is almost ordinary. That’s exactly why it’s worth sitting with. It’s a climbing gym’s marketing campaign. The object of outrage? A poster that means well but botches something—an awkward phrase, a symbol, a word choice. Nothing scandalous, nothing involving victims, legal proceedings, or an actual power-abuse case. More like a misstep: debatable, fixable. And the gym itself? It generally has a good reputation. It pays its setters (the folks who “set” routes and problems) decently. It’s not known for macho-brutal management. It tries, genuinely, to do better on accessibility, mixity, prevention, welcoming people in. This isn’t some cartoon tyrant-owner situation. Not the kind of club that protects a violent coach. Not an institution sweeping serious cases under the rug. And yet: that’s where the lightning hits. Suddenly it’s story after story. Public call-outs. Subtweets. Screenshots. The message is simple: it’s not enough—and, most of all, it’s not “aligned.” Meanwhile, in the same ecosystem, everyone knows there are other stories. The ones that don’t fit into a story slide. The ones that involve power, and real blowback, and social cost. The ones where “speaking up” isn’t “correcting,” it’s putting yourself on the line. How Comfort Activism Picks Its Targets Comfort activism often works like this: it doesn’t start by asking, “Where is the worst harm?” It starts by asking, “Where can I hit hard without getting hurt?” Targets get chosen the way you choose a boulder problem: you look first at the commitment it’s going to demand. If the target doesn’t have much ability to retaliate—if it’s already “one of the good ones,” and therefore has to respond carefully—then it’s game on. If, on the other hand, the target is actually powerful—real influence, real network, real ability to shut doors—then everything goes very quiet, very fast. That dynamic is exactly what two American philosophers, Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, describe as moral grandstanding . In Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk  (2020), they lay out the moment when people use public moral language less to move an issue forward than to present themselves as especially virtuous. Climbing—already a culture that knows how to stage performance—doesn’t escape that logic when it turns toward its own demons. The mechanism is straightforward: I post, I denounce, I correct. And yes, I can be sincerely attached to the cause—nobody has to be faking it for this to be true. But part of the motivation is also what that post says about me. I’m not just a climber. I’m on the side of justice, safety, equality, ecology. I’m the person who “dares to say it.” But “daring to say it” doesn’t mean the same thing when you’re saying it to someone who can actually hit back… versus someone who can’t. In a lot of cases, the ego is fully protected. You’re not risking your job. You’re not jeopardizing your spot on a team. You’re not blowing up a major contract. You’re not confronting someone genuinely intimidating. You get mad at the level your social circle can absorb. You look brave—so long as bravery doesn’t get expensive. Low-Cost Outrage This kind of activism loves the gray zones between supposed allies. It’s easier—and sometimes more flattering—to scold the person who agrees with 90% of the diagnosis but “messed up” the last 10% than to take on a system that denies everything outright. It’s more comfortable to correct a visual than to support someone through a long, uncertain, exhausting process. More tempting to put a “mostly decent but imperfect” organization on trial than to go after the ones with real leverage: money, reputation, gatekeeping, hiring power, access. In that framework, outrage becomes a low-risk act with a high symbolic payoff. It produces results immediately: reactions, applause, belonging, recognition. And that’s where Tosi and Warmke help again, because moral grandstanding is also a status economy—a way to convert moral posture into social capital. The problem isn’t being visible. The problem is when visibility becomes the goal and actual impact becomes secondary—when the moral act is built to be seen, shared, praised, and above all, to not cost anything. The Collateral Damage This isn’t only a moral issue (“doing it for yourself more than for the cause”). It’s also political in the plain, practical sense: it reshapes the terrain. When you multiply low-stakes controversies that generate lots of noise, you get three ugly side effects. First: mental overload. When every wording choice and every small organizational detail becomes a dramatic public dispute, it gets harder to tell the difference between fixable sloppiness and structural harm. From far enough away, it all starts to sound the same: an awkward sentence and an organization protecting serious misconduct end up on the same volume level. Second: moral language gets cheaper. If everything is “unacceptable,” then nothing really is. If the same vocabulary is used to call out a clumsy design choice and to talk about assault, the words lose weight. Here again, moral grandstanding is a good lens: when you keep waving morality around like a trophy, you wear it out. Third: it undercuts the people who take real risks. Calling out a violent coach, an abusive boss, an organization that covers for people—that isn’t decorative outrage. That’s accepting concrete losses: partners, clients, friends, sometimes your mental health. For those people, watching the word “courage” get claimed by safe, consequence-free call-outs can feel brutal. Let’s be clear: the issue isn’t the causes themselves. Fighting sexist and sexual violence in climbing, looking honestly at power dynamics in gyms, taking the ecological stakes around crags seriously—those aren’t just legitimate. They’re necessary. Critiquing certain postures doesn’t mean you’re joining the people who want everyone to shut up. What’s exhausting isn’t the fight. It’s the comfortable version of the fight—the tendency to turn serious causes into ego workouts, into spaces where you prove you’re “one of the good ones” without ever going where it costs. Real Activism Means You Might Lose Something You could reduce all this to “hypocrisy,” but that’s too easy. Most people caught up in comfort activism aren’t waking up thinking, How can I use a cause to polish my image?  They really do care about justice, equality, respect. Some have lived through domination or violence themselves. They’re also, like everyone, trying to balance what they believe with what they’re willing to risk. That’s where the question gets interesting: when can you say you’re actually doing activism? In climbing, as elsewhere, the answer probably comes down to one simple thing: concrete risk. Not the risk of a bad day in the comments—that’s background noise now. The risk of losing something tangible: a relationship, a contract, a role, an opportunity, a sense of safety. Real activism isn’t picking the most compliant target. It’s accepting that the person or organization you’re calling out can genuinely harm you—and doing it anyway, because staying silent would feel worse. Sometimes it means turning down a deal. Writing an email you know could blow up. Sticking with someone all the way through a process that will drain everyone involved. Sitting down in an office where nobody asked you to be. And that’s where moral grandstanding becomes a tool for clarity: if your public statement brings you a lot and costs you nothing—if it makes you look good and never puts you in a difficult spot—then you at least have to consider that it might be more about positioning than commitment. Changing the Route So what do we do with that in the small, vertical world of climbing? Maybe it starts with a simple move: treat our activism with the same honesty we bring to training. Correcting a clumsy phrase, pushing a gym to adjust a visual, pointing out a bad turn of speech—call that what it is. It’s correction. It’s education. Sometimes it’s necessary cleanup. It can be healthy. But it isn’t, by itself, bravery. Supporting someone who speaks up. Standing up to toxic leadership. Refusing a sketchy partnership. Documenting structural patterns. Accepting that you might take real hits—that’s where real commitment begins. That’s not moral performance. That’s not just narrative. At bottom, comfort activism forces a question that’s unpleasant but necessary: who is this kind of “engagement” actually for? Is it mostly for other people—the victims, the most exposed, the ones without access to the mic—or is it mainly a way to secure a role, a place, a comfortable identity? We won’t change climbing culture with low-cost outrage. We’ll change it with people who sometimes commit without a clean exit, without applause, without instant payoff—and do it anyway.

At 23, Jean Rouaux is the kind of Chamonix local you could walk past without noticing: a climbing instructor, low-key, not exactly chasing the spotlight. And yet last summer, he went after a pretty radical traverse—riding a bike from Chamonix to Nepal to get to Ama Dablam, no shortcuts, driven by an almost private obsession: not to “cheat.” Jean Rouaux © Simond Behind the plan is a temperament. A way of living in the mountains, of looking at performance, of describing the world from road level. “Okay. Whoa—here we go,” he says, like he opened a door too fast, then laughs and slows down. He talks fast in that way people do when they’re not in a hurry to finish, they’re in a hurry to be in it. In Chamonix, we catch him between two appointments, during that in-between moment when the valley settles back into itself—no summit scene, no polished adventure pitch, just a guy talking the way he lives, without trying to impress you. He doesn’t have that big, press-kit adventurer tone. He’s got dry humor—the kind you pick up after a lot of hours outside—and the clear-eyed sense that a whole project can hinge on a badly handled flat, a visa that falls through, or food poisoning. When he talks about what he did, he’s not selling “a performance.” He keeps dragging it back to the real stuff: the fragile stuff, the daily stuff. He circles the same words like they’re both a habit and a compass—road, bivy, fatigue, “the crux” (climbing slang for the hardest, most decisive section), and that fixed idea: hold the line. Jean Rouaux, 23, a climbing instructor in Chamonix, left the valley by bike on August 10 to reach Nepal and try Ama Dablam. He made it to Kathmandu in 58 days, after roughly 12,000 kilometers. On the way, he had to fly a short stretch—about 500 kilometers—because of an administrative blockage, a bend in the rules he describes like a break in the story. Then, in the Khumbu, the project ended abruptly: an infection, a hospital in Lukla, and a forced stop at 4,100 meters. A Kid From Here Before all that, Jean is first a local kid. “I grew up here, in Chamonix. I fell into it when I was little—climbing, mountain culture.” A bit of club climbing, a bit of competition, then injuries as a teenager that made him ease off. Around 16, he came back and set a clear goal: get his French state certification—the diploma that lets you guide and coach professionally. By 18, he had it. “I brought a hangboard, my climbing shoes, and chalk.” Jean Rouaux Why so early? “It was passion. I’ve always loved climbing. And I’ve always liked teaching.” He says it without posing, with a kind of straightforward candor that keeps coming back with him: “I didn’t really know what I was getting into. Turns out, I love what I do.” To get there, he sped everything up, even bending school a bit—finishing his last year of high school remotely. “I was in a rush. And I didn’t want to be stuck in high school anymore.” The Bike as a Tool The bike didn’t show up because he’s a cycling guy. It showed up because of friction. Jean tried a detour into school, moved to Lyon, got interested in journalism… and ran into a feeling he puts bluntly: “City life, after growing up here—I really can’t get used to it.” Then a classroom friendship opened a door. A classmate, chess games, geography games on Google Maps, and a story told almost like a family joke: the classmate’s grandfather had ridden a bike to the North Cape multiple times. The classmate said he might do it “in ten years or so.” Jean cut in: “We’re doing it next year.” Jean Rouaux © Simond What stands out is how little foundation he had. “No—I’d never really biked before,” he says. “Last time I rode, I was probably 10.” He bought a bike and panniers and started by meeting reality head-on: a kind of janky Tour du Mont Blanc loop, logistical messes, a flat he handled badly, time lost, a body learning. Then he did a loop to England to see a friend—“I must’ve done 3,000 kilometers total… I think it took a month.” He didn’t build a cyclist identity out of it. He says the simple truth: it wasn’t the bike that pulled him in, it was the long-range goal. “I’m not really into cycling for its own sake,” he explains. “It’s just—having a goal like that long-term is so good.” The North Cape trip became a kind of proof: “9,000 kilometers in sixty-something days,” winter in Lapland. But in his bags, he carried more than food and a sleeping setup. He carried a piece of who he is. “I brought a hangboard, my climbing shoes, and chalk.” “Looking back, the main risk is the road.” Jean Rouaux Climbing isn’t one sport among others in his story. It’s the base language. The one he learned as a kid in Chamonix, the one he returned to at 16 after injuries, the one that pushed him to get certified and coach. So on the road, he kept speaking that language so he wouldn’t get swallowed by the bike—which stayed, in his mind, a means more than an end. “Every four days, I’d do a hangboard session,” he says. And whenever he found real rock, he stopped. On the Norwegian coast, in the Lofoten Islands: “I did a few boulder problems there—it was absolutely legendary.” No crash pad, no grade-chasing, no staging it for anyone—just staying connected to the thing in him that doesn’t move. That’s where the next idea started to harden, almost by accident: Wait. There’s something here. The Real Danger That “something” became Nepal. Jean started looking up what had been done mixing bike travel and mountaineering, found the story of Göran Kropp—a Swedish climber who rode from home to the Himalaya—and the plan took shape. He doesn’t talk like a would-be influencer. “I’ve never posted on social media. I never wanted to publicize what I was doing.” The film happened almost despite him: a friend pushed him to reach out to Simond, the Chamonix brand owned by Decathlon. Jean tried without a plan, with one sentence: I’m leaving, you can give me whatever you want—but I’m leaving either way. At the time, he says, he had no audience and no real camera skills. “I had 500 followers on Instagram, and I’m not especially good at filming.” Jean Rouaux © Simond His training also breaks a cliché: no obsession with “getting strong.” “For physical prep, I didn’t do much, because I realized it didn’t really help,” he says. The way he explains it is simple: training makes the beginning easier, then fatigue stacks up and you have to learn to function inside it. The real prep was mental and bureaucratic: leaving alone, far away, for a long time, with visas designed for travelers who book hotels. “I was bivying the whole way,” he says—bivy meaning sleeping out, usually light and unplanned, not a formal campsite. “The activity just doesn’t fit visa applications. I never had an address to put down.” “Honestly, I think about eating a lot” Jean Rouaux And above all, he puts fear where he thinks it belongs. “Looking back, the main risk is the road.” Not “foreign countries,” not the unknown—the traffic, the speed, the passes. He even places his sketchiest stretch in Europe: “Maybe between Bulgaria and… Turkey.” He describes it with a crisp image that’s almost funny if it weren’t so unsettling: “In Bulgaria they have two lanes. But people basically invent a third lane in the middle while they pass.” For him, the crux wasn’t a mountain pass. It was the asphalt. Leaving Home Is the Hard Part Jean left Chamonix on August 10. And the hardest part, weirdly, wasn’t the faraway. It was the near. The first hours feel different because the reverse gear is right there. “By car, through the tunnel, you’re home in 15 minutes.” On a bike, the same terrain becomes a constant reminder: you have to earn every kilometer even though you know the shortcut by heart. The start turns into an internal negotiation—hold steady, don’t talk yourself into an excuse, let the valley close behind you. Then, day by day, the temptation changes shape. The distance becomes normal. Logistics settles. What felt impossible turns into… the day’s work. “The more you move forward, the easier it gets,” he’d tell himself. “I hadn’t cheated once… and then it all collapsed.” Jean Rouaux Over time, life narrows down to basics. “Honestly, I think about eating a lot,” he says. It’s funny, but it’s also the truth: find water, find food, find somewhere to sleep, repeat. “It’s simple. You think about surviving, getting to point B.” He barely listened to music—two songs in two months, max. He wanted his head clear, no soundtrack masking what was around him. He bivied almost every night: “Out of 58 days, I probably bivied 50 nights… maybe 52.” Jean Rouaux © Simond Problems were rare: an issue with dogs, one night ruined because he stopped too quickly and picked a bad spot, an evening in Pakistan when hospitality and curiosity started to feel suffocating—he finally snapped and took a lodge. And then there’s a choice that says a lot: he didn’t carry a lock for his bike. “I trust people,” he says, almost as a throwaway. He even felt the theft risk was higher in France or Italy, where “people understand a bike can actually be worth money.” Elsewhere, some people assumed he was broke and even offered him cash. When he tries to name the “best moment,” he doesn’t talk about arriving anywhere. He talks about vertical terrain—the thing he craves instinctively, coming from the mountains. He hates flat riding. “Riding on flat ground… it pisses me off,” he says. After two weeks of desert and headwind, Tajikistan flipped a switch: “And then suddenly—vertical.” The Pamir Highway, plateaus at 4,000 meters, then up toward Pakistan. A day facing Nanga Parbat. “It was insane,” he says. He keeps coming back to the time-warp part—the part you can’t photograph: a month and a half earlier, he was on his couch in Chamonix. The Flight, and the Crack in the Story The worst moment wasn’t epic at all. It was forms, deadlines, doors closing. In Turkey, Jean realized his Iran visa wouldn’t hold. He’d tried to plan ahead, worked with a visa service, thought it would go through. Then everything jammed up. The options didn’t show up like they do in adventure stories. They had schedules, closed borders, administrative uncertainty. Waiting became a gamble. And he had a calendar in his head: “By late October I needed to be on the mountain,” to leave room for acclimatization and a weather window. In that game, bureaucracy won. He flew roughly 500 kilometers. It wasn’t flying, in itself, that bothered him. It was breaking his personal rule: don’t break the continuity. He says he turned down rides from the beginning—out of stubbornness, sure, but also logic. Once you step off the line, you stop knowing when you’re getting back on it. Now he was strapped into a seat, watching the ground slide by too fast. “Honestly, I was on the plane… it was horrible.” Then he drops the sentence that captures the private defeat: “I hadn’t cheated once… and then it all collapsed.” “Alpinism is everything that gets you to the foot of the mountain. And if it doesn’t work out… you have to stay humble.” Jean Rouaux That’s also his story: a morality meant for himself. He’s not trying to teach anyone. He’s describing a pact he made with himself, and the moment it snapped. The trip kept going the way trips always do—find a box for the bike, wait for hours, then Kazakhstan, the desert, the feeling of starting from zero again. The crack didn’t disappear. It just became part of the narrative, like a scar—proof that your ethics don’t always beat reality. Kathmandu, Then the Body Says No Jean reached Kathmandu in 58 days, “way ahead” of what he’d imagined. He took one day off, picked up gear, then got back on the bike toward Jiri, the old starting point for walking into the Khumbu. Those two days cost him more than he likes to admit. “In my head, I’d put the bike in the basement,” he says. He forced it anyway—grimaced through it—then finally got what he’d come for: walking, feeling Nepal underfoot, entering the valley. Jean Rouaux © Simond That’s when his motivation spiked. He describes an almost physical euphoria, a ridiculous speed: he covered in two days a stretch that usually takes close to a week to trek. “I was so fired up… I had insane energy,” he says. And then everything flipped on something stupid, almost humiliating: “I ate something I shouldn’t have.” He got sick, kept going anyway, drained himself. At 4,100 meters, his body wouldn’t recover. “Shutting down at 4,100 is rough,” he says. Weakness, dizziness, hallucinations, the hospital in Lukla—and that feeling of being kicked out of your own project before you even understand what happened. Here, his story thickens, because the failure isn’t just physical. He also describes a shock in the Khumbu: tourism, consumption, certain power dynamics between clients and Sherpas. At the hospital, he says, staff told him an anecdote that stuck with him—a local woman in childbirth complications, and priority going to “a tourist who paid.” He doesn’t turn it into a big theory. He just says it like a clean wound. “When you see that… it hurts.” That’s where he offers his definition of alpinism, even though he didn’t “do” the mountain the way people expected. “Alpinism is everything that gets you to the foot of the mountain,” he says. “And if it doesn’t work out… you have to stay humble.” Then he draws a hard line in the middle of the mess: “Not every means is justified to reach a summit.” Climbing, Fame, and the 20-Meter Problem On the way back, Jean gives you two numbers that clash—and together say a lot. “I left at 70 kilos. I came back at 53.” Seventeen kilos gone. Not “training fatigue,” just the accumulation: days, nights, managing water, heat, hours in the saddle. He says he was hungry “a bit,” sometimes. He doesn’t dramatize it, but you can hear the cost: long-duration adventure wears down the machine even when the mind holds. Then he drops the other number like he’s setting it on the table: “But I gained 40,000 followers.” He’s still surprised by it. “I’m really discreet by nature… I didn’t want to be in the light at all.” Back in Chamonix, people recognized him. A kind of valley fame—sometimes funny, sometimes awkward. The sense of becoming “somebody” because of a trip, while his daily life is still climbing sessions, coaching kids, teaching. On the sponsor side, he says there was no pressure. Simond funded the expedition. He owed them footage for a film. Not reaching the summit wasn’t a problem. The heaviest pressure, he says, came from people close to him—so invested they experienced his stopping as their own defeat. And then there’s the modern reality he owns without turning it into a slogan: Instagram wasn’t “the deal,” but he started posting constantly—“one video a day.” Like the storytelling showed up alongside the expedition whether he wanted it or not. Now people even ask him to advise other athletes on communication. He smiles, hesitates, and says the line that sums up his relationship to visibility: “I really don’t feel like I’m the best guy to do that.” It worked, he says, but “kind of by accident.” He also refuses the moralizer role. Yes, his trips can inspire lower-impact choices. Yes, he’s environmentally aware—he lives “facing the glaciers.” But he doesn’t trust the preachy tone. He knows his contradictions: content production, digital footprint, attention economy. His “consistency,” again, isn’t a banner. It’s caution. At the end, Jean talks about what he actually cares about: climbing. Not as a backdrop—as work. He trains, follows plans, wants to improve. “I’d like to climb 8c next year,” he says—about 5.14b in the US grading system (8c). Then he says it plainly, without bitterness but with real clarity: that’s not what his audience comes for. “When I’m here and I post climbing stuff on Instagram, nobody cares.” He sums up the problem in one clean question: “Where’s the journey on a 20-meter line?” He says he can live an adventure just as intense on a short route as on 1,000 kilometers of road. But that doesn’t read to the general public. It isn’t instantly shareable. So he looks for a bridge. He talks about trad in England, autonomy projects with a pulk sled, the idea of coming back one day to do a “full” Ama Dablam: the gear on the bike, the out-and-back, and—maybe—the summit. He also talks about becoming a mountain guide, because in Chamonix the terrain is vast, and mid-mountain instruction has its limits. And at the center, what hasn’t changed: his need to pass things on. In his story, adventure isn’t an escape. It’s a way of refusing shortcuts—even the comfortable ones. “I hadn’t cheated once,” he says, like it’s a point of honor he doesn’t really need to explain. Then he tells you about the moment that point of honor cracked. And maybe that’s where the portrait really holds: in the tension between the straight line you want to keep, and the real world that forces you—sometimes—to compromise.

In Annecy, the screening has just ended. People are still talking in the aisles—about the film, about those wide shots of Lapland, about that steady voice describing glaciers that keep shrinking. Lauriane Miara sinks a little deeper into her chair, like she’s trying to buy herself a few more seconds out of the spotlight. Lauriane Miara (right) and her student (left) during a workshop where she teaches how to paint mountains © Vertige Media With a half-smile, she heads it off before anyone can misread her posture. “I’m sitting way back in this chair,” she says. “Not because I’m trying to look above it all. My back just needs it.” It sounds like a throwaway comment. It isn’t. It already tells you something about her: the reflex to disarm, to explain, to make sure no one thinks she’s “posing.” Miara—French, a graphic designer and illustrator—has that rare quality where, once you’ve met her, she stays with you. Maybe you can’t name exactly why. But you feel the impression she leaves. The audience in Annecy had just watched L’Art Vivant , her documentary, shown during the most recent Femmes en Montagne festival. On screen, Miara talks about black holes, uprooting, Alpine heat waves, and what she calls the capitalist “hypnosis” of screens, all while tracing the outline of an artist pulled toward big, wild mountain spaces. The film moves between laavus—open forest shelters in Lapland—and the cables and infrastructure around Bourg-Saint-Maurice, where she lives now. It follows work that looks fragile at first glance, and it asks a bigger question underneath: what place do people like her have in landscapes that are being reshaped, packaged, and wired up? The festival jury thought the film landed with real clarity. They awarded it the Environment Prize. There’s a small irony in starting our conversation with someone who tells me right away that she hates screens. L’Art Vivant  will soon air on Swiss public television (RTS), one of the country’s major broadcasters. She avoids screens because they make her feel physically sick, and yet she’ll have to deal with them. So she reaches for a word that comes up often when people talk about her watercolors: peace. And the calm that seems to rise out of them. “People talk to me a lot about softness,” she says. “They’ll say, ‘It’s Lauriane’s softness.’ I read it sometimes, too. For me it’s strange, because I don’t feel soft at all. I feel like I’m hard.” The invisible fight When Miara describes what she’s lived through, she doesn’t hide behind euphemisms. When she says “black hole,” she means it literally. “There was a time in my life when I fell into a hole,” she says. “Really—a black hole. I don’t have a better image than that. And then I had to climb back out. It’s better now, but I still have this daily fight not to get pulled back into it. It’s like I’m walking on ground full of holes.” Her words are plain. The meaning is, too. More than once, she leaves space for the hard parts without naming them directly. For her, moving forward is about noticing, anticipating, adjusting—not to “optimize” her life, but to stay upright. “I have to pay attention to how I sleep, what I eat, what I drink, what I consume, my pace, the way I work,” she continues. “I have to watch a lot of things so I don’t fall back in.” “I have serious sleep problems. I’ve had them, and I still do. But in those environments—no. I sleep well. I can’t really explain it. Maybe it’s feeling the cold, seeing the stars.” In that work of keeping herself steady, she says her center of gravity sits with other people, far from her own comfort. “In my life, anxiety takes up a huge amount of space,” she says. “It’s invasive. And I really don’t want to pass my anxiety on, out of respect.” In recent years, talking about mental health has become a constant public expectation—almost a moral rule. With Miara, it reads differently. It feels less like a confession and more like a commitment: don’t let your fear spill into someone else’s life. Lauriane Miara, in Annecy, November 2025 © Vertige Media That’s where her art starts to feel thicker than it looks at first glance. From a distance, Miara’s watercolors match what people project onto her: softness, clean lines, delicate palettes, lost cabins, miniature ice floes, silent forests. You could mistake it for another version of slow living turned into an aesthetic. But when she talks about it, she shifts the whole frame. “At first, drawing is a refuge, sure,” she says, “because I’m trying to draw things that represent a kind of calm I don’t have access to. So in a way, I’m drawing a fantasy. When I paint, I can be inside that calm. I can almost touch it.” Green, not walls In the documentary, you see her in a cabin in Lapland, a candle burning, and then under a laavu—an open shelter that lets the sounds of the night come through. For many people, sleeping like that in winter, deep in the woods, sounds like vulnerability. For her, it’s the opposite. “Out there, I sleep well,” she says. “I have serious sleep problems. I’ve had them, and I still do. But in those environments—no. I sleep well. I can’t really explain it. Maybe it’s feeling the cold, seeing the stars. I find it more reassuring than being at home, in a small town, in a small bedroom, in something closed, closed, closed. When I sleep in the mountains or in the forest, it’s even stronger: I feel sheltered. No one’s going to find me. Nothing can happen. Nothing can happen to me. It’s deeply calming.” “I see more and more lift cables, power lines, all the development,” she says. “It’s taking up more and more space because it’s a valley where there might be snow longer than elsewhere. It’s nightmarish. Even if it’s still wild, it’s like it’s not wild enough for me anymore.” Everything flips. The closed room becomes the threat; the night outside becomes protection. The cabin, she says, is “sealed,” it “creates a barrier between what’s happening outside and what’s happening inside.” The laavu brings her back into contact with the living world—you hear, you smell, you’re not separated. That same logic shows up in how she travels. In the film, she drops a line—“Four days on a train goes by pretty fast”—and the room laughs. There’s a shared understanding now that travel time should be crushed down, that you’re supposed to “get there quickly.” Miara argues for the opposite. “I don’t experience a train trip as being ripped away,” she says. “It’s more like a thread unspooling. It feels gentle. I leave my place on foot, I go to the station—a familiar station—and little by little, the thread of the trip plays out.” Flying, on the other hand, feels like concentrated violence. “You’re dropped into a completely unknown environment,” she says, “in a time frame that’s way too short and not natural at all. It’s not the same temperatures, not the same sounds, not the same smells. All of a sudden it’s brutal.” Behind the usual “train versus plane” debate, she’s talking about something else: whether what your body is sensing can keep pace with what the landscape is becoming. The train gives your mind time to catch up to the movement. The plane cuts from scene to scene like an Instagram story. At the end of that line is the taiga—the vast northern forest she calls a kind of “mountain of trees.” And then there’s the return, which she says is harder than leaving. “When we finished filming, at the end of our trip skiing with a pulka sled, I couldn’t talk anymore,” she says. “I was crying. I couldn’t speak because we were about to leave. The truth is, I wanted to go back into the taiga. I felt pretty bad.” Back in the Alps, watching the wild shrink Miara lives now in Bourg-Saint-Maurice. She arrived through a love story, and for a while, the place fit. “Not the town itself,” she says, “but the mountains around it. There are wild spaces big enough that you can live there for a few years, at least.” But the wild is shrinking, and she sees it every day. “I see more and more lift cables, power lines, all the development,” she says. “It’s taking up more and more space because it’s a valley where there might be snow longer than elsewhere. It’s nightmarish. Even if it’s still wild, it’s like it’s not wild enough for me anymore.” She doesn’t say it for effect. It lands like a simple fact: her mental health depends, in a very direct way, on being able to be in places that aren’t fully organized by people. Her first uprooting happened earlier, when she left the rural northeast where she grew up. She doesn’t turn it into a dramatic family story, but she doesn’t downplay it either. “In that case, it’s uprooting,” she says. “It’s not tearing something apart. It’s uprooting. I planted myself somewhere else. Because I wasn’t okay. There were things I had to get away from just to exist. To exist—or to grow, to develop. That wouldn’t have been possible where I’m from.” In the film, she gestures at what she went through. She knows it could hurt the people close to her. “My parents aren’t very curious about what I do,” she says. “They don’t really understand. What I mention briefly in the film is still a huge taboo with them.” There’s a kind of mutual protection in that: not saying everything, not showing everything, accepting that part of the story stays under the surface. Uprooting, for her, isn’t settling scores. It’s survival. After the glaciers That relationship to the wild isn’t only emotional. It shapes her current work, too—especially a collaboration with glaciologist Jean-Baptiste Bosson and the collective Marge Sauvage, focused on post-glacial ecosystems. “Glaciers are retreating in the Alps. It’s over. They’re going to disappear. That’s done—we know it,” she says. “But behind a glacier, there isn’t nothing. New ecosystems develop. And those spaces need to be protected right away from infrastructure.” Scientists map out zones, track which species arrive first, return year after year. Miara takes that raw material and turns it into a graphic narrative, scheduled to be published by Actes Sud. “We want to talk about what we do with wild places in the Alps,” she says. “What are they? How do we describe them? What do we do with them? Do we need to do anything at all? Do they belong to humans? Do we see ourselves as part of the living world—so humans can inhabit those spaces? Or do we see ourselves as a separate species?” It’s the same set of questions her watercolors have been asking quietly for a long time: is the mountain just a backdrop for our hobbies, or is it something with its own standing? Do we behave like one species among others, or like an owner trying to squeeze value out of everything before the final melt? “I wish for us to live in peace” You might assume that with her patience for long travel, her distrust of screens, and her attention to vanishing glaciers, Miara lives outside the digital current. It’s not that simple. She has a phone, social media, all of it. She uses it to work and communicate. But she’s built a kind of active caution around it. “I decide when I pick up the phone and go look for information,” she says. “I use it, then I stop for a long time, then I use it when I have to, then I stop again for a long time.” She talks about stretches when she catches herself spending “way too much time” there. Her body reacts fast. “I feel disgust really quickly,” she says. “It’s physical—I feel nausea. And that’s when I know I need to step away.” This isn’t a trendy speech about digital detox. It’s a political diagnosis, in her own words. “We have to rethink our relationship to time, to family, to how we live our friendships, our loves,” she says. “Because those things are stolen from us by something we don’t name that often. But I think it’s called capitalism. And we can’t just let it happen.” For Miara, the mountains, drawing, disconnecting—none of it is a niche aesthetic. It’s an attempt not to dissolve. Against what she calls the “hypnosis” of screens, she claims something simple that almost sounds like a dare in 2025: the right to daydream. She describes it in plain terms—making herself take moments to do nothing, listen to music, let her mind drift “like a dream.” She talks about childhood boredom as an “immense” creative space, and she says, with calm sadness, “I feel like it’s over. Now kids don’t get bored anymore. And that’s dramatic.” Still, she knows the world’s dysfunction doesn’t hit her personal life in the most direct ways. Because, for her, happiness points outward. “You can’t really wish much for me, because I have everything,” she says. “My wish is collective. There’s only one thing I wish for us: to live in peace.” Then, as we’re about to wrap up and turn everything off, she says it again, like she wants it to land. “If my life stays like this until the end, I’m okay with that,” she says. “Now—yes.”

At Poush, just a few yards from the humming asphalt of Aubervilliers, there’s a mountain that doesn’t exist—except it does, in the way art can make something feel physical. It’s an imagined, poetic peak where contemporary artists take aim at our myths of the vertical: what we project onto height, what we go looking for up there, and what we pretend not to see until the ground starts shifting. © Simon Jung Le bord de la terre  was presented as a six-chapter journey—part expedition, part storybook—built to be walked like you’d read an adventure novel. Photographers, sculptors, and performance artists played the role of guides, leading visitors toward that precise point where the “ground” seems to fall away and vertigo takes over. Art—like alpinism—is often a story about limits: physical ones, geographic ones, but most of all poetic ones. Like a climber searching higher up for some kind of absolute, the eleven artists gathered at Poush pushed at the edges of what we think “mountain” even means. Far from the tired cliché of a summit to conquer, Le bord de la terre  invited visitors to read the mountain differently. Each work acted like a handhold—something you grab as you move through a shared narrative, step by step, from romantic dream to the tangible reality of a landscape in flux. A trip to the mountain’s far edge “I go to the mountains because up there is where the edge of the earth happened,” wrote Italian author Erri De Luca. That end-of-the-world feeling was the pulse Le bord de la terre  set out to capture. Shown at Poush (Aubervilliers) from May 22 through July 19, 2025, the exhibition took over the entire Le Rift  building. The scenography turned the space into a vertical, maze-like terrain—less a neutral gallery than an exploration zone, built for wandering, doubling back, and climbing your way through ideas. From the entrance, the premise was clear: you were meant to “walk the mountain” the way you’d turn the pages of a narrative. Six chapters structured the route, like a series of living tableaux that approached the mountain from different angles—“from romantic landscape to object of study.” You moved from a dreamlike vision inspired by the great Romantic painters to an encounter with the Pic du Midi in a speculative film: young people watched from a preserved landscape, taking in both our thin horizons and our own finitude. Sometimes the point landed with brutal simplicity—an ice cube suspended over a body of water, enough to suggest the permanence of a world that’s disappearing. The show also gestured toward a real, unsettling image: Swiss glaciers wrapped in vast tarps to protect them from melting—photographs that can read like shrouds, as if, failing to preserve the ice, we’re at least trying to carry it off under a sheet. Le bord de la terre  didn’t sidestep what’s pressing on our societies right now. It put visitors in front of outcomes that already feel decided, already irreversible, forcing you—through art and poetry—to face the strange absurdity of watching mountains rise while our future flattens. In other words: climate change was there, in the room, in the work, in the pacing of the walk. And some of the high-up performances on display could seem less “wild” than the tragic story quietly sitting behind the pieces themselves. Artists tied into a rope team, looking at the mountain together To bring this collective story to life, curators Simon Jung, Jeanne de La Masselière, and Inès Massonie brought together eleven artists whose works spoke back and forth across the mountain world. It was a kind of rope team—climbers would call it a cordée , a group literally tied together—except here the link was the conversation between images, materials, bodies, and ideas. Téo Becher, Simon Boudvin, Julia Borderie & Éloïse Le Gallo, Claude Cattelain, Caroline Corbasson, Max Coulon, Antonin Detemple, Matthieu Gafsou, Julia Gault, and Noémie Goudal formed a panoramic, richly varied set of viewpoints. Each artist brought a distinct way of seeing the mountain: changing landscapes, verticality, geology in motion, borders, perception, the body under strain. © Simon Jung Among the standout works, Noémie Goudal’s Soulèvements  series reimagined geology through striking visual illusions. Simon Boudvin’s ladders became symbols of crossing natural boundaries. Claude Cattelain leaned into the poetry of the “useless” gesture through physical performances. Matthieu Gafsou exposed the contradictions baked into our tourist habits, while Julia Gault staged the precariousness of any kind of vertical stance. The duo Julia Borderie & Éloïse Le Gallo, meanwhile, treated the mountain as lived space—threaded through stories, crossings, and human experience. Late night, last calls Even if this artistic expedition ended on July 19, it didn’t go quietly. On Wednesday, July 16, Poush hosted a special late-night opening to celebrate the “mountain” deep into the evening. Starting at 5 p.m., the curators led a free guided tour—an inside look at how the project came together and what was happening behind the scenes. After that, the night stretched into a music set, turning Le Rift into a kind of basecamp dance floor, with sounds meant to echo the peaks. For anyone who missed the nocturne, there were two final chances to catch the show during regular opening hours: Friday, July 18 and Saturday, July 19 (closing day), from 3 to 7 p.m. Admission was free. Le bord de la terre  was shown at Poush, 153 avenue Jean-Jaurès, Aubervilliers (Métro Quatre-Chemins). Free admission throughout the run.

When the Alps start crumbling, some people pour concrete. Others take the loss seriously—and try to save what can still be saved. Aster Verrier, an artist and climber, has chosen a third option: he records the fleeting gestures of climbers and turns them into a kind of poetic archive. Part sensitive report, part quiet stand against forgetting, his work gives shape again to a mountain heritage that’s changing fast. © Aster Verrier It starts with movement. The movement of rock that cracks, glaciers that melt, ridgelines that shrink. When an alpine landscape is shifting this hard, what can a climber do—besides try to preserve something from terrain that may not be there much longer? Verrier’s answer is both conceptual and strangely simple: he archives climbers’ motions—an invisible choreography from a sport that depends on natural features that can, quite literally, disappear. In a project that sits somewhere between climbing, contemporary art, and the close study of human movement, Verrier isn’t chasing raw performance—the frantic race for harder grades and cleaner sends. He’s drawn to the quiet stuff: the barely noticeable adjustments, the private beauty of a move that doesn’t need an audience. We met with the guy who’s turned archiving into a form of commitment—and climbing into a kind of watchful, patient dance. The delicate art of climbing differently In Saint-Gervais-les-Bains—a tidy, well-heeled alpine town where climbing can sometimes feel like a social trophy—Verrier needed a form of art that was subtle but a little provocative, just to poke at local assumptions about what climbing is. In a valley where “alpine performance” often gets translated into status, he sets up a counterpoint: no heroes in Arc’teryx puffies, no spotlight. Just anonymous silhouettes, stripped down to the essential thing—the movement. “I wanted to get away from the clichés of performance climbing and go back to what’s universal and intimate about it: the gesture,” he tells us. So he went out and met local climbers—everyone from seasoned vets to total unknowns—then followed and filmed them with a GoPro mounted on a helmet. The point wasn’t to freeze a grade or document difficulty. It was to catch an emotion. “Some movements aren’t spectacular at all,” he says, without any defensiveness. “But their value shows up in what they mean to the climbers themselves.” © Aster Verrier It’s an approach that feels almost anthropological—careful, precise, and heady in the best way—and it cuts against the dominant sports-and-spectacle version of climbing. The question stops being “Who climbed the hardest?” and becomes: what does it look like when a body has a private conversation with rock? From competition to contemplation: a sharp turn Verrier didn’t come to this by accident. He used to compete, trained in the strict world of high-level climbing, and still carries a complicated relationship with sport climbing. But he ultimately leaned toward art—“because climbing every day at 3 p.m. didn’t work with class schedules,” he says, bluntly. The choice stuck. Then came the Netherlands. Living somewhere with almost no real relief—no peaks, no big walls—did something unexpected: it sharpened his attention to verticality. From that flatness, he first imagined a dystopia where climate disruption had erased the mountains altogether. The project began as fiction. Back in the Alps, it stopped feeling fictional. He realized the dystopia was showing up in real time. “The disappearance of iconic features like the Drus pillar isn’t some futuristic fantasy,” he says. “It’s happening right in front of us.” So his response became aesthetic and political: build a memory of something that won’t hold still. The archive, for him, is a subtle but total answer to the same blunt problem—the landscape is being wiped away. An archive you can feel—for a heritage you can’t always see But how do you preserve a route’s memory when the rock itself may not survive? For Verrier, the answer isn’t the usual climbing-trip imagery, and it isn’t worshiping athletic feats. “What I’m archiving is an emotion,” he says, “not the raw difficulty, but the deeper meaning a movement can carry for the person doing it.” That’s why his choice of routes is deliberately eclectic. One climber, for example, picks a line that might look “average” on paper—but it matters to her because it brings her back to her years as a caver. Archiving that—that particular set of movements, tied to that personal history—is a way of preserving an intimate record that mainstream climbing media rarely touches. © Aster Verrier In that sense, Verrier is offering a counter-story to contemporary climbing: a version where the private outweighs the ego, and felt memory matters more than measurable performance. A political approach, without slogans Part of what makes Verrier’s work land is how quiet it is. There’s no overt activist pose here, no big declarations—just an implied manifesto embedded in the choices. “My project is an archiving proposal that can be questioned, and it leaves a lot out,” he says. “It doesn’t necessarily address the debates around climate, or around how we practice climbing. I hope it brings up a contemplative imagination—not the rush to the mountains to bag sends, but more the idea of actually being there and enjoying it.” In that light, the exhibition shown in Saint-Gervais through September 21 carries extra weight. Visitors who don’t climb discover a version of climbing stripped of its sports codes. Experienced climbers, meanwhile, end up reflecting on their own habits. “The most surprising thing is how positive the climbing community’s response has been,” Verrier says, “even though they know exactly what my archives leave out.” That’s the point. He wanted a space where the conversation could happen—quietly, productively—far from the loudest versions of the sport, and toward a shared way of thinking about memory, landscape, and what human movement means inside all this change. A living heritage, even as the mountains shift Verrier isn’t claiming he can stop the mountains from falling apart. But he’s insisting on something else: if the relief fades, the gestures don’t have to vanish with it. His project—dense with meaning, held tight with emotion—asks you to move past simple nostalgia for a disappearing landscape. It suggests a different kind of attention, a different way to face the future. A fragile, precise “vertical dance” that reminds you that even in collapse, something fundamental can remain. The movement. The quiet poetry of bodies hanging in space.

A few hours after Alain Carrière publicly announced he was stepping down, a French national-team climber emailed the entire French Mountain and Climbing Federation (FFME) to call out what she described as the federation’s “problematic” handling of her case—an alleged sexual assault by another member of the national team during a World Cup stop. Vertige Media collected her account, then put the allegations and the process to Carrière, the FFME president at the time. Here is what our reporting shows. © David Pillet It’s been a strange end of year for the FFME. On December 6, Alain Carrière announced his resignation . That same evening, a bluntly titled email landed in the inboxes of everyone with an @ ffme.fr address: “Sexual assaults on the France team.” The author—whom we’ll call Emma*—is a member of the French national climbing team. In the email, she says she filed a criminal complaint for sexual assault against another national-team member. She also says she does not intend to focus on the accused as a person, but on “the way the federation’s disciplinary bodies have handled this issue, to this day.” Over several paragraphs, Emma—who says she is “deeply angry”—accuses the federation of failing to put adequate protection and safety measures in place, for her and for others. She points directly to Carrière as the main person responsible. Later in the email, she describes the months she has lived through: insomnia, injuries, anxiety—six months in which, from her first report to the public prosecutor to two successive disciplinary panels, she says she never once felt protected by her federation. Vertige Media spoke with Emma, then questioned Carrière. The facts and their responses raise a broader question for French climbing’s federation system: how does it handle sexism, sexual harassment, and sexual violence? Anger, an Olympic dream, and a long dark stretch It’s close to 11 p.m. when Emma’s long message hits the inboxes of FFME staff and officials. In the email, which Vertige Media obtained, she says she filed a complaint for sexual assault against another member of the French team. She adds that her goal is to discuss “the way the federation’s disciplinary bodies are handling this problem right now.” Paragraph by paragraph, Emma says she is furious. She writes that the federation has not taken the protection and safety steps she believes it should have taken—for her, and for other athletes. She places responsibility on Carrière. She also describes what she calls months of ordeal: sleepless nights, injuries, anxiety. Months in which she says she “begged” a federation president to act in response to a situation she now calls “unthinkable.” Like many elite athletes, Emma started climbing young. Training, discipline, and talent took her into the Pôle France program, then the youth national team, and eventually the senior team. She made finals, landed podiums, and began dreaming about the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. “When I wake up, it’s like when someone taps you on the shoulder. You know you woke up because someone tapped you—but you didn’t really see the person do it.” Emma It’s summer 2024. The Paris Olympics are about to begin, with a month of major competition ahead. Emma says she likes being part of the national team. When she shows up to a new team gathering she’s been called into, she finds the vibe “great.” She likes competing, and she likes the way her athletic status makes her college life more flexible. She also says she had no idea an event was about to blow up her life. Now, on the phone, she tells Vertige Media what happened—and what led her, six months later, to alert the federation. During summer 2024, on the night between the two competition days of a World Cup stop, in the very hotel the federation had booked for its athletes, Emma says she was subjected to unwanted sexual touching by the man she later reported. She says he repeatedly ignored her lack of consent. She says it wasn’t the first time. In 2023, she says, the same person tried to assault her while she was asleep. “When I wake up, it’s like when someone taps you on the shoulder,” she says on the phone. “You know you woke up because someone tapped you—but you didn’t really see the person do it.” She describes a pattern of conduct that, in her view, fits what France often groups under “VHSS”—sexist and sexual violence and harassment. Beyond the alleged assaults while she was asleep, Emma describes repeated behavior and says the accused even admitted he’d “been pushy.” “Except that the ‘pushiness’ is touching,” she says. “And it’s violent, coercive, and threatening. He crossed the line. The line was my consent.” That night, she says, felt worse than anything before. But for weeks afterward, she stayed silent. She says the Mazan rape case —dominant in late-2024 French news—triggered obsessive thoughts. “Radio, TV, Instagram—everything dragged me back into it,” she says. “It got extremely anxiety-inducing.” She kept a lid on it for a few more months. Then, in May 2025, she told her coach, who immediately escalated it to the federation’s National Technical Director (DTN). Under Article 40 of France’s Code of Criminal Procedure , a public official who becomes aware of a possible crime has a duty to report it to the public prosecutor. A report was made. The justice system was notified. In the meantime, Emma says she kept receiving messages from the man she reported. She says he knew she’d spoken up. And then, buried inside a longer text exchange, one sentence hit differently—because it was the first time she says she truly felt afraid. A threat—and the president’s shadow “I’m tired of trying. I’m going to make you disappear. I hate you with every cell in my body.” For Emma, the placement doesn’t matter. She says she read it as a death threat. At the time of the report, she says she was supported by the federation’s VHSS point person—support she still calls “exemplary.” In summer 2025, she filed a formal complaint at a police station. “I ended up begging a federation president” Emma At that point, the question became what the federation president would do next. After first consulting the head of the federation’s ethics body—an former magistrate—Carrière decided to refer the matter to the FFME’s first-instance disciplinary commission. Reached by Vertige Media, Carrière confirms: “As soon as we learned about the allegations, the DTN made a report. We were monitored, supported, and advised by the ministry and by our legal counsel.” On August 29, 2025, the commission issued its decision: it said it lacked jurisdiction. The stated reason was that “the facts, even though they occurred during a night between two competition days, concern the strictly private sphere.” Emma says she was stunned. “It’s unbelievable,” she says. “It’s like they said, ‘What happens at night isn’t our business.’ So the sun goes down and it becomes a lawless zone?” A few weeks later, her lawyer noticed something else. The decision cites Article 2 of the FFME disciplinary regulations—but stops right before a key paragraph. That paragraph states that disciplinary bodies are competent in cases involving breaches of the federation’s ethics charter, including “violence or sexual and/or psychological harm,” including when the alleged acts happened locally “in the context of the activity of an affiliated association.” In the written decision, the paragraph explicitly addressing VHSS was omitted. How do you explain that? On the phone, Carrière first says: “I can’t explain the decision. I was very surprised.” He says that surprise is why he ultimately decided to appeal—after a brief period where he says he consulted the Ministry of Sports, the DTN, the federation’s director general, legal counsel, and other federations. Emma disputes the sequence. According to her, Carrière initially told her he felt “uneasy,” that he wasn’t sure he would appeal, and that he would get back to her after a few days of thinking. She says he called her again less than a week later. “He explains that based on the advice he got, an appeal has little chance of working, and so he won’t do it,” Emma says. She describes the moment as devastating. With her mother beside her, she says she fell into acute distress. She says she relayed that distress to the VHSS point person, her coach, and the DTN—and she pressed Carrière again. “I ended up begging a federation president,” she says. “I was angry. I was crying.” She says she couldn’t understand his reaction and felt a lack of empathy. “When I told him that not taking my side is taking the attacker’s side, he just answered, ‘Alleged attacker,’” she says. “Even if that’s the legal term, it’s not what you say to someone who filed a complaint.” Carrière, for his part, describes Emma as “extremely shaken” by what was happening and frames the disconnect as “a matter of perception.” He does, however, acknowledge that there was “a phase” at the beginning where he did not think he would appeal. Then, five days after his initial refusal, he changed his mind. At the last possible moment, Carrière referred the case to the appeals commission. He attributes the reversal to “consultations.” Emma offers a different read: “I think he got scared of the consequences,” she says. “If a court decision doesn’t go his way later and he didn’t appeal, people could hold it against him.” The drop The appeals commission met quickly, in October 2025, after accepting the president’s referral as admissible. A different panel sat than the first-instance commission. On October 17, it first reversed the earlier ruling on jurisdiction and held that the federation was, in fact, competent to rule on the matter. But the decision went on to state that “no element makes it possible to establish that X** would have overstepped the consent of Ms. X**.” For Emma, it was another gut punch—especially because she says she had provided, this time, “testimony from other people that strongly supported [her] account,” along with the harassment messages and the death threat. In the email she sent to federation members, she writes: “I don’t know what would count, in cases like this, as proof of my consent (…) But obviously, I don’t have a video of him assaulting me in my sleep.” Asked what he thinks of the appeals commission’s ruling, Carrière says he does “not want to comment on judicial decisions”—even though disciplinary commission rulings are not court judgments, since they are not issued by courts. He also says he never read the harassment messages or the death threat. “I know these elements were transmitted to the commissions, which I want to stress are independent,” he says. “If I have access to the initial report, I can’t have access to the entire case file, which is protected by the secrecy of the investigation.” In the end, Carrière says he believes he was properly advised and does not think he made a mistake. The appeals decision ended the federation process. For Emma, there were no more internal remedies. The man she reported was not sanctioned by the FFME. He continued to receive federation funding and to attend national-team gatherings. Emma argues that, independent of the final ruling, the president could have taken interim protective measures under Article 12 of the FFME disciplinary regulations —what amounts to a temporary suspension or separation: removing the accused from gatherings, keeping him away, barring participation until matters were clarified. Carrière says he never considered using that power. “I thought there was no reason to,” he tells Vertige Media. “The DTN told me the program and coaches had put measures in place so that Emma and the alleged attacker wouldn’t cross paths. I trusted my teams.” Internal sources at the FFME confirmed to Vertige Media that such measures were discussed and implemented. Emma, however, says she was the one who repeatedly pulled back “without being asked by staff.” She says she was harmed most by being the one who had to step aside—and she argues the federation failed its duty to protect other athletes as well. “Given the complaint, it’s reasonable to question what threats could be hanging over the safety of the other athletes,” she says. Carrière responds: “If we stopped selecting for the France team the person she denounces, he could also file a complaint.” ( An interim protective measure is meant to be protective, not punitive .) Legal caution, institutional self-protection, or a lack of empathy? The reporting leaves the question open. The result for Emma, she says, was the same. “Me too” Beyond any speculation, one thing is clear in Emma’s account: she says she spent six months getting through it with antidepressants, sleeping pills, and Xanax. She says anxiety combined with lack of sleep made her far more injury-prone: tendinopathy, shingles, back pain. The day before our call, she says she threw her back out again. “My Olympic dream moves farther away with every sleepless night, with every new injury,” she says. What she describes, above all, is abandonment. “Except for a few people I still want to thank, I was very alone,” she says. “Dozens of messages went unanswered.” At times, she says it tipped into the absurd. “The VHSS prevention campaign the federation posted on its social media at the beginning of October made me sick,” she says. “It’s easier for me to testify now because it was much harder for others before. And if, in any way, I can make it easier for the women who speak after me, then that matters.” Emma Carrière disputes that. He says the FFME is exemplary on VHSS, pointing to recognition he says the federation received from the Ministry of Sports. Again, he frames the gap as “a matter of perception.” He says he discussed Emma’s case weekly with the DTN and his teams. “And she didn’t perceive that,” he says. “She even perceived it as a lack of interest. Updates about Emma came to me indirectly. It’s true I didn’t reach out to her directly when she was doing badly. But I’m not a psychologist.” In the end, Carrière says he believes he was properly advised and does not think he made a mistake. Emma disagrees. She says Carrière ran from his responsibilities. “I’m not saying he’s responsible because it’s his fault,” she says. “I’m saying he’s responsible because it’s his job. And the fact that I had to fight him the way I did—that’s not normal.” Emma says she is speaking now because, after a year and a half of what she calls a nightmare, she reached a conclusion: “I told myself there was no point in me going through this if other people were going to go through it too.” She continues: “As a woman who grew up in the 2000s and 2010s, I’m part of a generation that was still raised with a lot of awareness of these issues. It’s easier for us to talk about sexist and sexual violence because other people spoke before us. In other words, it’s easier for me to testify now because it was much harder for others before. And if, in any way, I can make it easier for the women who speak after me, then that matters.” Emma says she spent two months writing the email she sent to the FFME. She now describes the support she received afterward as something that made her feel “much less alone.” “That also gives me more strength,” she says. “At the beginning of this, I thought it would be impossible to keep my sports career going. Today, I think it’s possible.” Her decision to break the silence changed the terms of an affair that, until then, had been known only to a small handful of people inside the French Mountain and Climbing Federation. The timing was striking: it came just moments after the federation publicly announced the resignation of Alain Carrière, who had been president since 2016. The federation insists it was a coincidence. Name changed.* Labels used to protect anonymity. **

On October 13, 2021, in Sydney, a climber fell roughly 40 feet from a route equipped with an auto-belay (a self-belay device) and was killed. Four years later, an Australian court fined the gym operator and two directors a combined total of about €250,000. It’s easy to fixate on the number. But the bigger point is simpler—and harder to sit with: the slack that kills isn’t always in the webbing. A lot of the time, it’s higher up the chain, in an operation that stopped tightening its own bolts. © Jonathan Chan In almost every gym, there’s that comforting sound: click-click , the strap retracting. It’s mechanical, steady, almost soothing—the noise that lets you climb without a human belayer. You pull, you let go, you start up. At Sydney Indoor Climbing Gym in St Peters, that ritual failed. The auto-belay didn’t retract. Gravity did the rest. Four years later, the ruling is a reminder to the whole community: safety isn’t just steel and nylon. It’s also habits, procedures, and a culture that has to be maintained—on purpose, every day. The facts, without the drama On the day of the incident, the workplace safety agency SafeWork NSW released an Incident Information Release with the basics: a failed auto-belay, a fall of around 13 meters (about 43 feet) at Sydney Indoor Climbing Gym in St Peters, and a death. No storytelling—just the official timeline of a tragedy. In August 2025, the Sydney court fined the operator 281,250 AUD, and two directors 84,375 AUD each . Total: 450,000 AUD, about €250,000. Some general-news coverage widely repeated 375,000 AUD for the company—a middle figure. But the final total, documented by specialized sources, is clear. In climbing and in court, it’s worth checking the last draw: that’s often where the outcome gets decided. In court, the uncomfortable obviousness The technical record doesn’t read like a freak failure. It reads like a list of warning signs that should never have been brushed off as “small stuff”: A worn lanyard with its wear indicator rubbed away. A strap jammed in the drum. Debris built up in the nozzle. A carabiner gate that no longer snapped shut cleanly. Add to that a major service overdue since July 2021, a last internal inspection dating back to January 2020, and a maintenance log that had already flagged faulty retraction in the last meters more than once. After the accident, the gym acted: it permanently removed all auto-belays, introduced daily inspections, and scheduled annual external testing. Proof, if any were needed, that fixes exist—and that they too often arrive after someone is already gone. What this says about climbers—and gyms An auto-belay is not a guardian angel. It’s not a harmless convenience, either. It’s industrial equipment, and it demands routine, rigor, and follow-through. Inspection, maintenance, documentation, training: without those four pillars, the tool becomes a trap. The judge put it bluntly: the risk was “extremely obvious,” and the measures were “readily available”—and they weren’t taken. The translation for climbers is plain: if the strap doesn’t retract, you don’t climb that line. Full stop. Safety isn’t a faded poster by the wall. It’s a system you actively run: repeatable checks, written procedures, and records you can actually produce. International echoes: “zero slack” isn’t paranoia In 2024 and again in March 2025, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) recalled several TRUBLUE iQ / iQ+ models over a retraction defect—devices that “can fail to retract.” The guidance was simple and harsh: stop using them immediately and send them back for factory service. Different country, different legal system, same hard line: no slack tolerated. In France, the FFME updated its materials as well: a 2025 auto-belay safety poster and 2024 rules that keep hammering the same routine. Pull and release the webbing to verify retraction. Do a short hang-test about a meter off the ground on your first climb. Don’t use the unit if it doesn’t retract. Post those instructions in big, obvious places at the base of the devices. That isn’t decoration. It’s how you build habits that hold up when attention drifts. In France: tragedy, and a louder alarm On November 2, 2024, at Climb Up Lyon, a 72-year-old man died in a fall . According to local reporting, he may have forgotten to clip in. Not the same mechanism as Sydney: human error versus an operational failure. But the lesson converges anyway. Build layers—human, mechanical, procedural, technological—so that a mistake, whatever its source, never gets to finish its trajectory. Clear signage. Layouts that make clipping in unavoidable. Staff routines that don’t let a lapse slide. Alert technology that kicks in when attention drops. All of it is about the same goal: weaving more nets so a fall doesn’t turn fatal. In Nancy, more recently, another gym in the Climb Up network chose to add a loud warning before gravity gets the chance: installation of B.A.S.S. , a device that screams if someone launches without being attached. It’s not a magic fix. It’s one more behavioral barrier—a loud backstop that catches an oversight when fatigue and routine start dulling the mind. It doesn’t replace pull-and-release checks or training; it makes them more likely to happen. Three habits, one culture: zero slack The move. At the base of every auto-belay line, pull and release the webbing, test retraction over the first meter, and stop immediately if you feel any slack. It’s basic. It’s lifesaving. The eyes. Frayed webbing, a missing wear indicator, sluggish retraction? Climb down and report it. Safety is a team sport. The proof (for operators). A log for each device—photos, serial numbers, timestamps, corrective actions. Not bureaucracy. Memory that protects people, and documentation that holds up. Why write this now? Because Sydney isn’t some distant, one-off headline. It exposes a blind spot that’s everywhere: routine that lulls people to sleep. Auto-belays taught us to climb without a belayer. Now they have to teach us something else: never climb without a safety culture. And if there’s one last plain way to say it: in Sydney, the problem wasn’t just slack in the strap. It was slack in the system—habits, oversight, governance. Our job is to tighten the chain: clear checks, visible signs, regular inspections, and records that actually exist. No panic. No sermon. Just doing the smart things, on purpose.

In the United States, trans women are now barred from every women’s category in competitions sanctioned by the national climbing federation. Not after a sweep of podiums. Not after some slam-dunk scientific report. But after a political order from the top. Climbing—this sport that loves to imagine itself outside the world—just got yanked into a culture fight that has nothing to do with a simple rulebook debate. © David Pillet In a gym, pulling a hold is how you reset and set something new. But when the “hold” you remove means shutting down an entire lane and a spot on the start list, that’s not setting. That’s exclusion. This summer, that’s exactly what happened to trans women climbers in the U.S. In a curt email, the USOPC (the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee) directed every national governing body to bar trans women from women’s categories. USA Climbing —after eighteen months working closely with trans climbers on an inclusive policy that was nearly finished—had to shove it in a drawer. Not because anything had “gone wrong” at a competition. But because a presidential directive said so. And in Olympic-style American sport, politics isn’t in the background. It’s the head coach. “Keeping men out of women’s sports” In the American sports hierarchy, a national federation is tied to the USOPC the way a rope is tied into an anchor—your whole system depends on it. That tie is official certification and elite-sport funding. If the USOPC cuts the rope, the federation takes the fall. In February 2025, Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14201, titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” —a policy framed as protecting women’s competition by systematically excluding trans women. Two words do all the work: Executive Order . This isn’t guidance. It’s a federal directive, and the USOPC’s job is to apply it across its affiliated federations. Refuse, and you risk losing recognition and funding—an administrative death sentence. USA Climbing, which was preparing an inclusive policy aligned with IFSC criteria (testosterone under 10 nmol/L for twelve months), was forced to abandon the work. Executive Order 14201 Signed:  February 5, 2025, by Donald Trump. Purpose:  Exclude any trans woman from women’s competitions in sports governed by USOPC-recognized national federations. Mechanism:  Compliance required to keep certification and funding. Scope:  Every discipline—from basketball to curling… and now climbing. Climbing didn’t have this “problem” Part of why this lands so hard is that climbing didn’t have a high-profile, messy precedent around trans women’s participation. To date, no American trans woman has competed in an IFSC World Cup, or in an elite national championship, or cleaned up podiums. The “problem” this rule claims to solve didn’t exist in this sport. And even on performance, the usual argument about a massive physical edge doesn’t map cleanly onto climbing. The men’s/women’s gap is smaller here than in many measured sports. Look at the outer limits: Roped climbing: the women’s benchmark is 9b+— Excalibur  by Brooke Raboutou (about 5.15c). The men’s benchmark is 9c (about 5.15d). Bouldering: the women’s benchmark is 8C+—Katie Lamb (roughly V16, with 8C+ noted once). The men’s benchmark is 9A (roughly V17). Some iconic lines were first climbed by women before men repeated them— Meltdown  (8c+/9a, about 5.14c/5.14d) put up by Beth Rodden, and Lynn Hill’s one-day free ascent of The Nose . In other words: the glass ceiling is real, but it’s cracked—and sometimes people punch right through it. Exclusion before evidence The International Olympic Committee recommends restricting participation only when there’s robust evidence of a disproportionate advantage that’s specific to the discipline. Plainly: if climbing could show trans women win reliably because of a clear, decisive physiological edge, then yes—rules could be debated on that basis. But that isn’t what’s happening here. No published study. No statistical record showing a huge imbalance in this sport. What’s driving the decision is a theoretical fear—and, more than that, a political signal. The implicit message is: whether the problem exists or not, we’re going to show we’re “fixing” it. It’s like installing a lightning rod on a blue-sky day. The consequence is immediate and concrete: a precedent where exclusion comes first, and proof is optional. In the current U.S. cultural climate, that sequence isn’t an accident. It’s the point. How does enforcement even work? Once the rule exists, you still have to enforce it. Right now, USA Climbing does not verify participants’ gender identity. Tomorrow, will they require medical letters? Hormone test results? And who collects that data, stores it, protects it? Here’s the problem: American sports federations are not bound by medical confidentiality. There’s no guarantee that a document submitted for a competition won’t be accessed or exploited by local authorities—especially in states where gender-affirming care is being criminalized. That means a trans woman climber could face legal risk simply by registering for a sanctioned event. And then there’s the part no rulebook can capture: gym culture. In climbing, people size you up by how you climb—your try-hard, your commitment—not by what’s on a form. Like that final where a trans woman competitor, frozen by the fear of actually winning, heard her rivals yell, “Go for it.” That kind of solidarity can’t be outlawed by a federal directive. Cracks in the wall Not everything is locked down. Local competitions that aren’t run by USA Climbing can still welcome whoever they choose. Groups like Trans Climbers Belong are holding onto the inclusive policy written over the last two years, ready to deploy it if and when the opening appears. And above all, there’s still the everyday culture of the gym—the one where performance is measured by the willingness to try, not by the sex marker on a certificate. That bond is the one thing no federal memo can strip off the wall. Timeline : September 2023:  USA Climbing publishes a first trans policy (testosterone < 5 nmol/L for 12 months). November 2023:  After criticism, the policy is suspended; a working group is formed with trans athletes. February 2025:  Donald Trump signs Executive Order 14201. June 2025:  The USOPC incorporates the order into its official policy. July 2025:  USA Climbing announces a total ban in women’s categories for sanctioned competitions. October 2025 (planned):  Enforcement details to be published ahead of the Youth Series.

You can stick a boulder and still know—deep down—that you didn’t really own  it. It goes today, sure. But try it tomorrow and it’s a coin flip. In software, Martin Fowler popularized a word for this: refactoring—rewriting the internal structure without changing the outcome, so it holds up over time. On the wall, the idea is simple and slightly annoying: progress isn’t always about getting stronger. A lot of the time, it’s about reorganizing a move until it’s stable, clear, and repeatable. (cc) Tofan Teodor et Walkator / Unsplash - Montage Vertige Media It’s Tuesday night. The gym is packed, the music’s too loud, people keep brushing past each other. A boulder that “goes” eventually lands in the sent column: three tries, a grimace, one last move yanked out, and then that quick smile halfway between relief and self-belief—the one that says you barely got away with it, but you’d rather tell yourself it was under control. It looks clean on the scorecard. In your body, it feels… questionable. You won it with tension more than understanding. So you do it again. Not because you’re a masochist—because something feels off. This time you prop a phone on the ground and film the whole thing. On screen, the diagnosis is instant: shoulders creeping up, hips drifting out, feet tapping  instead of settling, a chain of tiny panic-corrections. A system that survives. And that’s exactly the problem. This is where Fowler’s refactoring mindset —built for code—turns out to be a useful method for climbing. Refactoring, in the most practical sense, isn’t “doing more.” It’s making the structure readable. And readable climbing is often worth more than extra strength: you can repeat it, you can use it elsewhere, and it holds up when conditions aren’t perfect. You sent. So what? There’s a stubborn misunderstanding in climbing: people confuse success  with solidity . Success is an event. Solidity is an architecture. An architecture can be wobbly and still stand—until the day something changes: you’re tired, your skin’s thin, you’re stressed, the humidity’s up, the move’s just slightly different. That’s when the “it goes” style shows what it always was: a stack of compensations. The trap is that this kind of climbing validates itself. Since it worked, it becomes your method. Since it paid off, it pushes you to add another layer: a little more power, a little more core tension, a little more stubbornness. Strength becomes a patch—effective, immediate, rewarding. And deeply misleading. Because what we call “getting better” can just be getting better at compensating. The mistake isn’t fixed; you’ve just increased your margin for slop. Then one day the hold isn’t as positive, or your focus is off, and the whole thing falls apart—not because you “lost your level,” but because you built up too much debt. Refactoring Without Changing the Score In software, Fowler’s idea is almost provocative in a speed-obsessed world: refactoring means changing a program’s internal structure without changing what it does from the outside. You’re not shipping a “new feature.” You’re making it possible to keep shipping without everything catching fire later. It’s a promise to your future self, not a present-day fireworks show. On the wall, it’s the same. You redo the same boulder—but differently. The goal isn’t a harder grade. It’s the stable version: the one that survives repetition, fatigue, and surprises. The one where you can say—without lying to yourself—“I can do that again.” In a sport obsessed with “I sent” (send, meaning you climb it clean without falling), that shift is almost subversive. Refactoring is the difference between a momentary win and an actual skill. One is a fluke you can’t bank on. The other is something you can carry. If you want progress that lasts, you need structures: readable code, readable movement, readable climbing. Feet: The Forgotten Syntax A lot of climbers think “strength” when they should be thinking “syntax.” In plenty of failures, the issue isn’t weak muscles—it’s a badly written sentence: a foot placed too late, hips left out, a path that wastes motion, a breath held at the worst moment. You pull to cover for positioning that never happened. Then you call it “I’m not strong enough,” when what you’re really missing is structure. In climbing, your body is a language. Your feet are the grammar. Ignore them and it’s like writing without punctuation: the message might get across, but everything becomes expensive, violent, and sloppy. And that cost gets mistaken for “power.” It’s hard, so I need to get stronger.  Not necessarily. It’s messy, so you need to get clearer. Refactoring here is painfully concrete: place the same foot differently, weight it earlier, accept losing half a second to save three at the crux (the hardest part of the problem). Spend less emotional energy “trying hard,” and more attention placing things correctly. That kind of attention eventually produces a rarer kind of strength—the kind you don’t notice, because it lasts. Movement Debt “Dirty” climbing is climbing on credit. You borrow from your skin, your tendons, your headspace, your confidence. You borrow from the future to pay for the present. In the moment, it works: you get up, you tick the box, you move on. But the debt piles up quietly, with no immediate receipt. Then one day you stop improving and you reach for a noble explanation for a basic problem: plateau, no motivation, bad style.  Sometimes it’s simpler than that. Sometimes it’s just the bill coming due. Refactoring is about paying down that debt instead of chasing more power. It’s not flashy. It asks you to redo problems below your ego, to replay sequences without the dopamine hit of novelty, to let a session feel like a workshop instead of an exam. And, most of all, it asks you to give up a piece of identity—the part built around this is how I climb. But it’s also the only road that doesn’t end in a crash. In climbing and in code, what matters isn’t sending once. It’s building a system that keeps working when conditions get worse. And they always do: fatigue, stress, cold, pride, age, life. The Protocol: Same Boulder, New Architecture Refactoring isn’t a vibe. It’s a practice. Pick a boulder you can do “with tricks,” the one you can muscle through when you have to. Then impose a quality constraint—not an outcome constraint: quiet feet, hips in, steady breathing, fingers placed exactly where you want them. Do it again. Adjust. Do it again. Same result. Different structure. One thing almost always happens: for a while, you get worse. The patches stop working. The compensations get rejected. The little cheats disappear. That’s normal. A new internal logic often feels fragile before it feels efficient. Then, without warning, it goes—with a calm obviousness. Not the loud kind of obvious that says watch this , but the quiet kind that says yeah, that was it. And in that moment, you get something strength doesn’t always buy: margin. Margin that makes your climbing steadier. More transferable. More durable.

In software culture, there’s a technique that’s as weird as it is effective: you explain your problem to someone who won’t talk back—a rubber duck. In climbing, that same habit of explaining might do what a lot of sessions don’t: turn “this beta isn’t working” into an actual diagnosis. And then—finally—into progress. © Al Elmes / Unsplash You know the scene. A climber falls at the same spot, lowers, pulls back on, falls again, repeats. And as the attempts pile up, the explanations get shorter: “Bad skin.”“No gas.”“Just morpho.”“Not my style.” Sometimes that’s true. A lot of the time it’s just convenient: it closes the case while making it feel like there was nothing to figure out. Except climbing isn’t only about strength and skin. It’s a sport made of tiny decisions, stacked fast. Where does the foot go? When do you lock off? What hip angle do you need? When do you breathe? When do you relax? More often than we like to admit, we don’t fail because we’re not strong enough—we fail because our logic is sloppy: a hidden assumption, a rushed read, a sequence we “kind of” decided on without really deciding. That’s where, in this slightly ridiculous story, the duck starts to make sense. Not as a gimmick. Not as a good-luck charm. As a tool for clarity. It forces you to put words on what you’re doing—until you hear, in your own sentence, the exact point where it stops making sense. What’s Yellow and Teaches You Something? “Rubber duck debugging” comes from a book—and from a certain idea of rigor. In The Pragmatic Programmer  (1999) , Andrew Hunt and David Thomas describe a deliberately low-tech method: when a problem won’t budge, explain it step by step to a third party—not so they solve it, but so the solution shows up the moment you try to make your logic consistent. The duck is just staging: a perfect listener—silent, available—who makes you go all the way through. As long as your reasoning stays in your head, it can live in a comfortable fog—feelings, hunches, shortcuts. The detail that turned it into legend is an anecdote that’s basically canon now. At Imperial College London, David Thomas worked with a research assistant, Greg Pugh, known as an excellent programmer. Pugh carried a small yellow duck and set it on his terminal . When he got stuck, he’d start over from the beginning, sentence by sentence. The duck didn’t answer—but the act of explaining often revealed the contradiction that had been hiding inside his mental shortcuts. The book is clear about the real point: duck, houseplant, teddy bear—doesn’t matter. What matters is being forced to spell it out. That’s exactly why the method outgrew office folklore and became a teaching tool. Harvard’s CS50 —the famous intro computer science course—explicitly presents it as a debugging technique, right alongside more “serious” tools, because shaky logic tends to give itself away the moment you explain it cleanly. For a while, students on campus even got their own “ddb”—duck debugger. And yes, it’s still sold in Harvard’s online store. The iconic CS50 rubber duck debugger (ddb) © The Harvard Shop In other words, the duck is a tiny device for rigor: a portable version of a simple idea—if you can’t say your logic clearly, there’s a good chance it isn’t clear. Talking Is Testing Why does this work so often—even for very experienced people? Because putting something into words isn’t just “telling a story.” It forces an idea to meet a standard: coherence. As long as your reasoning stays in your head, it can live in a comfortable fog—feelings, hunches, shortcuts. Once you say it out loud, you have to pick an order, a cause-and-effect, a justification . That’s when the cracks show: an assumption you never named, a sequence that “worked” only because you never really ran it end to end, a “this should go” that collapses the second you try to be precise. Learning research talks about this under the label “self-explanation”: forcing yourself to explain improves understanding , because explanation doesn’t just create connections—it also exposes gaps. The duck doesn’t need to approve your answer—it’s there to reveal the moment you don’t have one. The little “uh…” In sports, there’s a more practical cousin: self-talk. Not the vague mantra meant to hype you up, but short, action-focused cues that keep your decision-making stable when everything starts to blur: “foot first,” “hips in,” “breathe,” “push.” When that self-talk is instructional, research suggests it can support performance by steering attention toward the right signals and cutting down the noise. The duck just takes the same logic to its strictest version. It doesn’t let you get away with a single keyword. It demands the details. And details have one ruthless benefit: they don’t tolerate hand-waving. That’s why it can make you better. The Climbing Duck Climbers already know the idea of “getting your thoughts out of your head”: route reading . You watch, you anticipate, you tell yourself a plan. But that story is often the short version of us—a fast summary that skips steps and assumes your body will “figure out the rest.” You announce an intention (“hit the jug”) without laying out the path (“with which foot, what hip angle, what timing, what relaxation”). You confuse a direction with a strategy. The “climbing duck” is the opposite. You describe the sequence like someone else needs to understand it. Not to play coach. Just to force yourself into something rare: clarity. Start with a blunt question: where is the complexity, exactly? The crux? The top-out? Managing fatigue? The read? Fear? Coordination? Then you walk through it move by move, naming what actually organizes the action: how hands and feet relate, where your hips need to be, where your eyes go, the rhythm, the breathing. And you add one simple, brutal follow-up: “…for what?” “I put my foot there… for what?”“I lock off here… for what?” (Locking off: holding a bent arm position so you can move with control.)“I switch hands now… for what?” This isn’t rhetorical. It makes every move accountable to an intention. The duck doesn’t need to approve your answer—it’s there to reveal the moment you don’t have one . The little “uh…” In climbing, that “uh” is often more honest than the fall. It marks the spot where the sequence wasn’t “too hard.” It was just misunderstood. Testing isn’t repeating. Testing means changing one identifiable variable and watching what happens. Without turning your session into an audit, simply talking it through tends to surface three classics—not “mistakes,” exactly, but very normal mental traps that are extremely good at sabotaging improvement. 1) The goal bug:  thinking you’re searching for the most efficient solution, when you’re really searching for the one that costs the least discomfort . On paper, those look the same. In your body, they’re not. You call a risk-minimizing strategy “beta” (beta: the planned sequence of moves), then act surprised when it fails on a route that demands the opposite—commitment, positioning, accepting a moment of instability. 2) The cause bug:  blaming the hold—“it’s bad”—when the real cause happened three moves earlier . A foot placed too early, hips left out, a lock taken at the wrong time, breathing cut off. Verbalizing forces you to rebuild the chain , and once you have a chain, excuses are harder to keep. 3) The everything-at-once bug:  changing three variables at once , succeeding once “because it went,” and naming that “the right beta.” You didn’t understand it—you got lucky. And luck has one huge flaw: it doesn’t repeat. The duck pushes you back toward a harsher discipline that pays off: isolate one variable, test it, learn . A Hypothesis, Not a Novel The key moment after diagnosis is how you manage your attempts. The duck is useless if you go right back to lottery mode—pulling on and hoping your body magically does better this time. Testing isn’t repeating. Testing means changing one identifiable variable and watching what happens. One burn (burn: a try that doesn’t send) for a foot placement—not “everything with my lower body.”One burn for timing—not “be more dynamic.”One burn for hip orientation—not “get positioned better.”One burn for a micro-rest—not “manage pump.” (Pump: that forearm swelling/burning that makes you feel like you’re losing grip.)One burn for breathing at the right moment—not after you’ve already been holding your breath too long. This kind of minimalism is frustrating because it’s slow—almost too plain for a sport where we often confuse intensity with efficiency. But that’s exactly why it works: it produces knowledge, not just fatigue. It makes improvement traceable. It turns progress into understanding instead of a vague memory (“I did it once”). At the end of the day, the duck doesn’t add strength, skin, or courage. It adds something rarer: a way to stop lying to yourself. It turns failure into information, and information into progress. In a sport that loves to romanticize “instinct,” the duck offers a simpler, freeing truth: you don’t get better just by trying again. You get better by trying again with an explanation . And when your explanation collapses, that’s not a disaster. It’s finally a starting point.