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.

For a decade, North American indoor climbing rode an almost absurd growth wave: openings nonstop, money pouring in, a post-Olympics boom. But in 2025, the party’s over. In its annual report, Climbing Business Journal  says 73% of gym operators report worsening economic conditions. Tariffs, inflation, slipping attendance, labor tensions—the industry is entering a new era. Here’s a look inside a mini-crisis that could easily jump the Atlantic. (cc) Alexander Williams / Unsplash As usual, when she gets to work in the morning, Dana Caracciolo checks her dashboards the way you check lab results. Quick scan of day passes. A look at the retail numbers. A pulse check on memberships. The anatomy of a slowdown. In the final quarter of 2025, Dana’s coffee doesn’t taste the same. Used to double-digit growth, the manager of Doylestown Rock Gym—an independent, privately owned gym in Pennsylvania—watches the charts flatten out. The drop isn’t a cliff, but it’s enough to set off alarms. And the problem isn’t just in the spreadsheets. You can see it on the ground. “Customers aren’t buying new gear from the shop anymore,” Caracciolo told Climbing Business Journal  (CBJ). “Now they’re blunt about it—they say they can’t afford their little after-session treats. And I’m seeing more and more climbing shoes with holes in them, just trying to squeeze out one more session…” That detail lands because it’s familiar. Inside privately owned American climbing gyms, it echoes across the accounts CBJ gathered from about a hundred operators for its annual report . Published on February 8, the document functions as a reference point for the North American—arguably global—climbing industry. And the 2025 edition doesn’t bury the lead: 73% of gym leaders say their economic conditions have deteriorated. That number marks a turning point. It also answers the big question. Is the golden age of indoor climbing in the U.S. over? Yes. The Cost of the Screw As with most industry reports, the data does the talking. New gym openings haven’t collapsed—40 new gyms opened in the U.S. in 2025, down from 48 in 2024—but closures have started. Last year, 12 climbing gyms shut their doors for good. Net sector growth landed at 4.7%, down from 6.3% the year before and roughly 10% pre-pandemic. Nothing here reads like a sudden wipeout. These numbers are measured down to the decimal. But they show a clear trend line—and it’s pointing down. More worrying: attendance is slipping. CBJ reports traffic declines across every gym category. Small facilities (under 1,000 square meters) saw a 4.9% drop; mid-size gyms (1,000 to 2,300 square meters) fell 3.4%; and large gyms (over 2,300 square meters) dropped 2.1%. Even the big players aren’t immune. Meanwhile, costs are surging. Eighty-five percent of gyms say their total expenses increased. The biggest hits? Energy, insurance, and, above all, payroll. Eighty-five percent of operators had to raise wage budgets, squeezed between inflation, a shortage of skilled staff, and, in some cases, union pressure. “I think there’s been a lot of economic uncertainty this year with tariffs and other government policies that have played a role in reducing traffic to our gym” Javan Bowsher “Economic and political conditions are more difficult for most individuals and businesses,” summed up Darrell Gschwendtner, owner of Whetstone Climbing in Fort Collins, Colorado. John Pritchard, owner and CEO of Stone Co. Climbing in College Station, Texas, put it even more plainly: “The heart of the economy is weak. We’ve found ways to hang on a bit, but overall, the momentum we had in 2021 and 2022 hasn’t been there for a few years now.” Another manager—who runs a gym network and asked to remain anonymous—said it this way: “The boom years are over. It’s now much harder to be profitable if you don’t have the scale and the structure to support institutional growth or mergers and acquisitions.” Behind the downturn, the climbing world—like plenty of other industries—goes looking for culprits, sometimes half-real, sometimes half-ghost. First: tariffs. Since 2024, the Trump administration reinstated and increased a set of import taxes on goods coming from Asia and Europe. A big share of indoor climbing infrastructure—holds, modular wall panels, belay systems—is manufactured abroad. That means major chains like Movement, Touchstone, or Central Rock now face supply lines that are more expensive and less predictable. “I think there’s been a lot of economic uncertainty this year with tariffs and other government policies that have played a role in reducing traffic to our gym,” said Javan Bowsher, manager of Granite Arch Climbing Center in Rancho Cordova, California. Second: persistent inflation. Energy costs remain high, insurance premiums are climbing fast, and commercial rents keep rising in major metros. “This is obvious, but everything’s going up,” said Sharon Knorr, director of operations at MetroRock. “And people have less disposable income.” CBJ’s selected quotes converge on the same shift: customers are tightening up. In economist language, it’s a “compression of discretionary spending.” In gym reality, it’s one less beer after a session, a sandwich instead of the gym’s restaurant, and birthday parties that no longer happen under the ropes. Nathan Craft, who runs Inner Peaks, a small regional chain in North Carolina, sees the same pattern: “The dedicated climbers keep coming regularly. It’s the casual customers who are dropping off, or new people who don’t come back.” And it’s often that occasional crowd that props up a gym’s revenue—family outings, impulse merch, and birthday packages. Thanks, Boss Not every gym is taking the hit the same way. CBJ’s report shows a sharp divide between large chains and independent operations. On one side: the giants. Movement Climbing (34 locations), Central Rock (29), Touchstone (18). Often backed by investment funds or private capital, these groups are holding up better in the U.S. Their scale lets them negotiate bulk purchasing, absorb cost spikes, and keep marketing budgets aggressive. On the other side: small independent gyms. For them, the situation is critical. Trapped between inflation and chain competition, many struggle to keep staff. Some close. Others get bought. Welcome to standard economic Darwinism. CBJ notes that all 12 permanent closures in 2025 involved gyms under 1,000 square meters, mostly in rural areas. “Memberships and kids’ programs increased significantly—representing all of our growth.” Laura Bellisle That accelerated consolidation raises a deeper question: what kind of business model will end up defining American indoor climbing? Large chains—often tied to private equity (investments in privately held companies)—have to generate margins that satisfy investors. Movement, purchased in 2019 by El Cap Holdings (itself backed by an investment fund), is the clearest example. In that context, labor negotiations are showing up more often. Since 2021, 18 American climbing gyms have unionized, mainly within Movement, Touchstone, and VITAL. More and more climbing workers are asking for decent pay, protections against harassment, and safer working conditions. Management pushes back, arguing the margins are too thin. When revenue stalls and investors still want returns, somebody pays. And it’s rarely the investor. Between Fear and a Second Wind CBJ’s report also points to a few real handholds—places where operators are finding traction. The most striking: youth programs. In 2025, kids’ and teens’ enrollment surged in some regions. The Midwest saw an 84% increase in new sign-ups for group classes and competition teams. “We made youth programming a priority,” said Christopher Deal, owner of Fargo Climbing in North Dakota. “Partly because we needed more sales—and more reliable sales.” “The feeling I get from gym owners across the entire Western hemisphere is fear.” Miura Hawkins Laura Bellisle, owner of Black Hill Basecamp in South Dakota, backed that up: “Memberships and kids’ programs increased significantly—representing all of our growth.” Technology is another possible path. In 2025, several manufacturers rolled out AI-based gamification systems, height sensors for auto-belay devices, and AI-assisted route-setting management tools. The hope, for some operators, is to keep younger customers coming back and to streamline operating costs. And bouldering-only specialization keeps accelerating. In 2025, 73% of new gyms opened in North America were bouldering-only facilities. Lower build-out costs, faster customer turnover, and a wider audience. It also reflects a cultural shift: climbing isn’t just a performance sport anymore. It’s become a social, urban, accessible activity. Even with these pockets of efficiency—and the sustainability angles some operators point to, like Walltopia’s bamboo walls or EP Climbing’s eucalyptus options—61% of operators still expect revenue to increase. That headline number hides huge gaps. Big chains are betting on modest growth. Independent gyms are mostly hoping for one thing: survival. Back in Pennsylvania, Dana Caracciolo keeps checking her dashboards as part of her morning routine. In early 2026, the numbers haven’t moved. Neither has the crisis. Like many small-gym operators, she’s learned to steer by feel in an environment that’s turned unpredictable. She’s now part of a generation of founders who—often for the first time—have to accept that the era of automatic, built-in growth is over. And in a quiet, unavoidable nod to the sport itself, climbing gym managers are also relearning how to sit with a feeling they know well. Because as another industry CEO, Miura Hawkins, put it: “The feeling I get from gym owners across the entire Western hemisphere is fear.”

Neutrality is a convenient fiction—one of those formulas that lets international federations keep the machine running—calendars, rules, podiums, press releases—as if geopolitics were just background noise. You take down flags, cut the anthems, invent “neutral” statuses, and tell yourself you’ve restored a clean, sanitized space where sport can keep presenting itself as a moral timeout in a world that isn’t one. It’s an appealing idea. It’s also a practical one. World Cup - World Climbing 2025 - Chamonix © David Pillet World Climbing’s latest statement (formerly the IFSC) is short. In that format, every sentence matters. It announces the lifting of the suspension on the Russian and Belarusian federations, reaffirms the policy of “neutral” athletes, specifies that no events will be held in Russia or Belarus—and then, almost as an aside, like a routine administrative note, it adds that the 2026 General Assembly will take place in Riyadh next April, with a session dedicated to the role of sport and international federations in the global geopolitical context. In other words: we’re going to debate neutrality and geopolitics from Riyadh. The setting is already doing the talking. Weeks ago, we reached out to World Climbing about “neutral” licenses and what this policy actually looks like on the ground—criteria, guardrails, red lines. So far, our message has gone unanswered. Riyadh 2026 doesn’t come out of nowhere. It extends a trajectory. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: a state that doesn’t just host sport, but uses it—organizes it, funds it, stages it—as a strategic tool of power. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, manages more than $900 billion in assets. It pours money into European soccer, Formula 1, professional golf, a steady stream of “mega-events,” the 2034 World Cup. This industrial-scale prestige project has a name—sportswashing—because it’s not just national enthusiasm. It’s image policy. And in this case, “image” isn’t a superficial concern. It’s diplomacy. We’ve already watched this dynamic play out with the Neom Beach Games: a controversial event, athletes taking different stances, a cautious federation, and a massive political project in the background. Riyadh 2026 doesn’t come out of nowhere. It extends a trajectory. And as often happens, what stands out isn’t only what gets decided—it’s how those decisions are left hanging in a fog, with no explanation, no doctrine, no story. The problem is that neutrality, once it becomes a tool of governance, always comes with blind spots. Saudi Arabia: 196 executions in 2022 and at least 172 in 2023, according to Amnesty International. A death penalty applied at a pace that should be enough, on its own, to make the idea of a “neutral venue” hard to defend. Women’s rights activists arrested and sentenced, sometimes under anti-terrorism laws. Opponents imprisoned for what they post on social media. Same-sex relationships criminalized and therefore subject to criminal penalties, within a legal system where punishments can be extreme. And then there is the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 inside a consulate in Istanbul—a political killing that stopped being a mere “international news item” a long time ago, and that U.S. intelligence services and the UN have attributed to an operation approved at the highest levels of the state . Institutions choose procedural order over moral order; the moment “neutral” isn’t manufactured to protect sport, but to protect the continuity of a system You can argue endlessly about which outrage should rank first. What you can’t do is pretend all of this is just scenery. This is where the staging starts to feel close to obscene: athletes are told to be neutral, to show up without symbols, to carry the weight of compromises in the name of universality—while the governance of international sport accepts the welcome on offer, and treats that choice as a simple logistics detail. Neutrality becomes a discipline imposed on individuals, and flexibility granted to institutions. It regulates bodies, not money. It clears flags off podiums, but makes plenty of room for the billions that set the terms backstage. We’ve seen the same mechanism in different forms: the moment institutions choose procedural order over moral order; the moment “neutral” isn’t manufactured to protect sport, but to protect the continuity of a system; the moment the debate over values becomes a communications exercise—hosted in a place that contradicts what it claims to question. This isn’t about fantasizing a pure sport, untouched by the world. It’s about finally admitting that neutrality isn’t the absence of politics. It’s politics. And the more it’s waved around like a magic charm, the more it turns into an alibi.

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.

On January 23, Netflix will livestream American star Alex Honnold as he free-solos Taipei 101—a 508-meter (1,667-foot) skyscraper in Taiwan—without a rope. The made-for-the-world event is already everywhere, and it’s splitting the climbing community. Vertige Media brought together three informed voices: Alain Robert, the French “Spider-Man” and a legend of urban free-soloing; Anthony Andolfo, a younger French climber following in Robert’s footsteps; and Owen Clarke, an American climbing journalist who has interviewed Honnold multiple times. A conversation that blows hot and cold. Alex Honnold / Taipei © Netflix The panel 🎙️ Alain Robert  — Nicknamed the “French Spider-Man,” he has soloed more than 150 skyscrapers worldwide, including Taipei 101 with a rope in 2004. 🎙️ Anthony Andolfo  — A 31-year-old French climber who has been free-soloing on rock and buildings for four years. In Alain Robert’s wake, he’s climbed the Tour Montparnasse and a tower in Melbourne—an ascent that landed him a week in prison. 🎙️ Owen Clarke  — An American journalist specializing in climbing, who has interviewed Alex Honnold several times. Vertige Media: When you heard Netflix was going to livestream Alex Honnold free-soloing Taipei 101, what was your first reaction? Anthony Andolfo:  I thought it was awesome. I never expected building free-solo to get mainstream coverage one day. You have to understand: when we climb buildings, we get slapped down every time. I did a week in prison in Australia for it. Alain has done time too. The last tower I did—Montparnasse—I spent 36 hours in police custody. So I was like: it’s cool that, for once, it won’t automatically be framed as something illegal. Alain Robert:  I didn’t find it that surprising. I’ve done four or five live broadcasts for big TV networks with millions of viewers. I soloed in front of cameras in Caracas, the Emirates, Rio de Janeiro, Canada. For me, that part isn’t new. The big difference is global reach. And that’s because it’s Netflix. Owen Clarke:  Honestly, it didn’t interest me that much. But I think most people reacted one of two ways: either “Wow, this is amazing,” or yelling betrayal—like Alex is going back on his word. My reaction was basically: “Cool, Alex is going to make some money. Good luck to him.” Alain Robert / Sears Tower / Chicago © Coll. Alain Robert Vertige Media: How do you explain Netflix’s interest in free solo, and the decision to turn this into a live event? Owen Clarke:  I think it’s pretty grim, actually. Content creators—from tiny channels all the way up to Netflix—keep raising the stakes to grab our attention. Anthony Andolfo:  Climbing has blown up in the last few years. It became an Olympic sport, Alex’s documentary Free Solo  won an Oscar… Netflix feels like it has to cover what’s become a phenomenon, and Alex Honnold gives them the chance to do it. Alain Robert:  Netflix is a money-printing machine. For them, climbing has exploded in the media, so they’re going in. And they don’t do anything halfway. What I’m seeing is that now you can talk openly about stuff like free solo. Before, you couldn’t. Owen Clarke:  What bothers me is this whole “Look how dangerous I am, look how much I’m risking my life” culture. You see it everywhere now— influencers posting crazier and crazier stuff for clicks. Netflix is part of that. Now, do I think Alex is doing something wrong? No. I know him a little, and I know he’ll use the money from this climb for his foundation (which funds environmental projects, especially solar power in underserved communities, editor’s note). He’s not a guy blowing cash on sports cars and champagne. Anthony Andolfo:  I don’t think he came up with the idea by himself. He’s pretty introverted—a purist. We all saw that in Free Solo . He seems more tied to the rock than to anything happening around him. That said, he’s said he’s been thinking about Taipei 101 since 2012. That’s 13 years. Alain Robert:  When I went on his podcast two weeks ago, Alex told me it was just a new experience for him. But his life—clearly—is on rock. It’s not on buildings. Buildings are just something a bit different for him. In the trailer I saw, you get the feeling he’s chasing this huge dream. That’s not really how he described it to me. You can tell Netflix is hyping it way beyond what Alex actually feels. Owen Clarke:  Alex has told me before that he thinks it’s fun to climb buildings. There are even some skyscrapers he’s wanted to do for a long time. The thing is, it’s usually illegal and pretty disrespectful to do it without permission. He’s very strict about that. So I think getting the chance to do it legally—with the city’s support—solves that problem for him. Alain Robert:  In 2013, with National Geographic, he was interested in the Burj Khalifa (the tallest building in the world, editor’s note). But that building is impossible to solo. So the one they landed on was Taipei 101 in Taiwan. One: it actually can be climbed without a rope. Two: it’s tall. Three: the government gave the green light. The truth is, building climbing is mostly political. When the Taiwanese government contacted me to climb it in 2004, it was because they thought the tower was cursed. Guys were dying every day during construction. I was supposed to break the spell, in a way… Vertige Media: Technically speaking, how hard is this ascent? Alain Robert:  A while back, I created a rating scale for skyscraper climbs (with David Chambre, editor’s note). It goes from 1 to 10. For Taipei 101, I’d put it at a 5 or 6. Alex recently said that, for him, it’s like 6c+—around 5.11 (6c+)—so he’s got a huge cushion compared to his top level. I’m not worried about him at all. He took far bigger risks on El Capitan. Anthony Andolfo:  Same for me—the climb is 100% under control. He’s prepared, and when he goes for it, everything will be dialed. The pressure might come from the fact that it’s live, on camera. But he’s used to being filmed now. Alex Honnold / Taïwan © Netflix Owen Clarke:  It’s pretty basic climbing. It’s the same move repeated a hundred times. Alex trains constantly. He free-solos and does high-end scrambling (moving fast over steep, exposed terrain without a rope) all the time around Vegas, where he lives. I agree—his safety margin is huge. And it’s been planned for months. They inspected the line, cleaned it, checked that everything was solid. It’s not like Alain, who sometimes climbed not knowing whether a bolt was loose or not. Alain Robert:  That’s for sure—when I climbed Taipei 101, we weren’t in the same situation. I had 15 stitches in my elbow, it was pouring rain, and 30% of the beams were covered in vinyl with oil on it so it could be removed. I thought I’d do it in two hours—I took twice that. Alex is working on a schedule, but with his level and his current fitness, he should move fast. It’s the same eight “blocks”—eight is a lucky number in China—separated by three-meter-wide platforms where he can rest if he wants. Anthony Andolfo:  The biggest factor is endurance. On a building, you never really get a true rest. On Montparnasse, it was the same left-right movement for 200 meters. In Melbourne, it was harder because it overhung in places, but mentally, you don’t doubt. Once you do the first move, you have to get to the top. You don’t have a choice. Vertige Media: What about responsibility? Owen Clarke:  I don’t think Alex has any responsibility here. It’s his life. We know he’ll be careful—he’s not stupid. Every day on Instagram, I see videos of people getting blown up in Palestine, or starving to death in Sudan. Here in the U.S., we watched a woman get murdered on the street on a livestream. These are tragedies we carry around in our phones and face every day. If Alex fell, it wouldn’t be the most traumatic thing most people saw this week. Anthony Andolfo:  It’s tricky, though. One mistake and someone dies—and it’s live. That’s something people have thrown at me a lot: “If you fall, I’ll be traumatized for life.” But I’m not asking anyone to watch. Still, the responsibility of making other people want to do it—that can be a problem. I get that too. People see me and they want to try. Alain Robert:  Come on—Alex Honnold has zero responsibility. He’s a professional climber. When people get into their car, they don’t think they’re Lewis Hamilton, as far as I know… Owen Clarke:  I think Netflix has more responsibility. They’re a media giant, always pushing for more extreme buzz. They’re constantly dealing with subscriber stagnation. They need “more,” so they stage these kind of absurd spectacles. If something happens, it’ll be on them. Me? I’m just happy Alex gets to take their money. [laughs] Alain Robert:  This endless question of our responsibility in the face of danger also comes from how the West relates to death. People are obsessed with it. They’re so scared of dying that when they see someone doing something risky, it reminds them of their own end. I live in Bali—most people here are Buddhist. Death is celebrated. It’s a festival. We need to stop treating it like the ultimate punishment. Anthony Andolfo / Paris © Coll. Anthony Andolfo Vertige Media: Millions of people will watch. Does that change anything? Alain Robert:  Not many people know this, but when I climbed for Sábado Sensacional  in Caracas in 2002, I was dressed as Spider-Man to promote the movie at the time. The stunt drew several million live viewers. When I climbed in Abu Dhabi after another ascent, the whole city was honking. There were traffic jams for more than 150 kilometers. It was a party. I felt a lot of love. Owen Clarke:  There’s something beautiful about what Alain did. Building climbs can carry real power—real beauty. But I don’t think that power comes through when you plan it out and broadcast it live on Netflix. At that point, it’s just a circus show. Alain Robert:  It’s different, yeah. I come from a time when climbing wasn’t covered like this—it was a one-shot thing. The climbs were more spontaneous. Here, with Netflix, we’ve been getting blasted with info on social media for two months. Anthony Andolfo:  For me, climbing a building is still deeply personal. No matter who’s watching or what they think, it stays a refuge for a lot of people. I’ve done a few building solos, and I’m not doing it for fame. I’ve got 2,000 Instagram followers—I don’t care. What I like is being in my own bubble when I’m climbing. On a building, the vertical is pure. The freedom is absolute. It’s the only time that, when I’m climbing, I start singing. Alain Robert:  I discovered other worlds through the show—other ways of living, other cultures. I loved that. And I think Alex is going to love it too. During the climb, you don’t think much because you’re focused. But Alex will have such a big cushion on Taipei 101 that he’ll be able to perform a little. I warned him: people don’t want to see you fall. They’ll push you upward, cheer you on with every move toward the top. Vertige Media: What kind of mark will this leave on climbing history? Anthony Andolfo:  For a lot of purists, it probably won’t be seen as a good thing. But in climbing history, it’s interesting because it’ll be the first time a free-solo is broadcast live around the world. In terms of popularizing climbing, that’s massive. For me, it might even be one of the biggest mainstream climbing events we’ll ever see. And it’ll be hard to top. Owen Clarke:  I don’t really know. It’s a media stunt. It’s circus. It’s not a real climbing achievement. To me, a real achievement is unlocking a new level of difficulty, or putting up a route for the first time so anyone can go try to repeat it. Here, Alex gets permission because he’s Alex Honnold. Other people won’t be able to go repeat it—they’ll probably get arrested. Alain Robert:  I think it will leave a mark, though. I don’t know exactly what kind, but Netflix has more than 300 million subscribers worldwide. The reach is enormous. That said, for Alex, it won’t change anything. He has nothing left to prove. His biggest climbing moments are already behind him. Netflix will broadcast the Taipei 101 ascent live on Saturday, January 24 at 2 a.m.

In L’Argentière-la-Bessée, ICE Climbing Écrins still brings a few hundred people together every winter around ice climbing. From the outside, it looks like one of those mountain meetups that’s been there forever—steady, familiar, basically part of the local winter scenery. But the 2026 edition landed in a weirder moment than the postcard suggests: a new organizing team, shrinking public funding, and a warming climate that makes “ice season” feel less like a season and more like a gamble. So how do you build an event when you can’t fully predict what you’ll have to work with? Pelvoux © PEMA ICE Climbing Écrins has never been “spectacle” in the classic sense. No grandstands. Very little staging. Even fewer flashy promises. For thirty-six years, the point has been something else: give climbers from all backgrounds a way to discover or level up in ice climbing, rooted in the place itself and the people who live there. Taking Over Without Breaking It In 2026, that surface-level continuity hid a real handoff. After ten years led by Cathy Jolibert, the event changed hands. The takeover was quiet and collective—no dramatic “new era” messaging—but it forced the new team to look at ICE differently: not just through the participant experience, but from the ground up—its finances, its relationship to the practice, and the values it actually puts into action. The transition wasn’t rushed. Julie Gégout, an osteopath from the Hautes-Alpes, had already been working on the event for years when she learned—along with Maëlle Le Ligné and Oriane Jouneau—that Jolibert was preparing to step away. “We knew it was coming,” she says. The handoff took shape gradually, forming a core group of five people, later joined by two guides, Octave Garbolino and Nil Bertrand. They describe their structure as horizontal: no single director, no one public face. That choice slows the tempo, but it also sets the method—understand first, adjust second. “We knew a lot about what was on the surface, but not what was underneath,” Gégout says. In other words: people see the climbs, the clinics, the evening hangouts. What they don’t see is everything that makes those moments possible—partnerships, schedules, long-standing teams, and the whole logistical balance. Cervières © PEMA So 2026 became a year of observation. The team kept the overall framework, leaned hard on people who’ve been involved for twenty or thirty years, and avoided sudden shifts. But they still put their stamp on it. Registration opened first to people who had never attended before, and only later to returning participants. Gégout says close to three-quarters of this year’s participants were first-timers. Altogether, the event brought together about 500 people, including 70 invited guests welcomed through a solidarity-based program. The message is straightforward: don’t let the festival shrink into a closed circle of regulars. And don’t pretend a mountain gathering is only about skill level or gear—it’s also about access: to a sport, to a place, and to the kind of story people come to the mountains to live out. A Fragile Model—and No One’s Pretending Otherwise Financially, ICE runs backward from what many people assume. It’s not primarily carried by private sponsors. Its balance rests on three pillars: registration fees, public subsidies, and—far behind—brand booths. The total budget is around €100,000. About half comes from registrations. Partners—mostly the brands present at the expo—bring in around €10,000. The rest depends on local public bodies. That dependence is intentional, but it’s also stressful. “It runs on subsidies. Today it works. Tomorrow, we’ll see,” Gégout says bluntly. Grant applications go in during the fall. Answers often arrive in February or March—when the event is already underway. So ICE gets built with a built-in unknown: if funding drops—or disappears—you’re forced to adjust after the fact, on money you’ve essentially already spent. In that situation, the options narrow fast. If subsidies fall, you either raise registration prices, start charging for concerts that used to be free, or cut certain budget lines. None of those moves are neutral. Each one hits the event’s identity: a gathering designed to stay accessible, even though ice climbing, by definition, requires time, travel, and a certain baseline cost. Tour Freissinières © PEMA That reality also shaped some 2026 decisions. To supervise the invited groups, the team relies on a partnership with several local guide offices, which mobilize instructors on a volunteer basis through internal agreements within their organizations. The setup opens the event to people who might not otherwise be able to participate, while limiting a cost line that, in previous years, weighed heavily on the budget. So yes, there’s a solidarity message. There’s also a very practical truth underneath it: keeping prices low in a tightening financial climate means rebuilding the math. Ice, With No Guarantees The future of ice climbing sits in the room, whether anyone wants it to or not. Warming temperatures make conditions more uncertain, more variable, sometimes simply not workable. ICE isn’t trying to dodge that. “We don’t want to lie,” Gégout insists. Some years are great. Other years are not. There have already been editions where planned ice outings had to be replaced with other activities because conditions didn’t come together. The team pushes back, though, on the idea that ICE is drifting into “ice-adjacent” programming as a replacement. The rough numbers they give are clear: around 300 people per day are out on ice outings, compared to about 50 total across all the other workshops. Diversification exists, but it’s still on the margins—more a response to specific needs (recovery options, activities for accompanying friends or partners, weather disruptions) than a plan to substitute something else for natural ice. On artificial ice, their stance is cautious. Existing structures can serve as a fallback, especially for first-time instruction. But the team doesn’t want, at this stage, to systematically replace missing natural ice with artificial installations. “For now, we’re going year by year,” Gégout says. If the ice is there, it stays central. If it isn’t, the event adapts. That philosophy shows up most clearly in the logistics. Vegetarian meals, local products, and a system where participants wash their own dishes: these choices—carried over from previous editions—are kept without hedging. The most debated piece is the “autowash,” the setup that asks everyone to clean their own plate and utensils, which Gégout says is “heavily contested.” Some criticism even comes from mountain professionals, irritated by what they see as an extra layer of constraints. Gégout doesn’t try to sell it as a moral lesson. She points to the alternative. Serving 500 dinners each night means either mountains of disposable waste or a more demanding system. The line is framed less as virtue signaling than as consistency. One Last Awkward Detail: The Name There’s also a distinctly modern discomfort the event can’t fully shrug off: the acronym itself. In 2026, “ICE” doesn’t only mean frozen water. For part of the public, it also calls up U.S. immigration enforcement. Gégout smiles, then admits the awkwardness: “In 2026, can we still be called ICE? I don’t know. But we were here first.”

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

Gilles Rotillon died on July 11 at 78. He wrote for Vertige Media, but more than that, he was one of the sharpest minds to ever take French climbing seriously as a subject worth thinking about—its growth, its contradictions, its promises, and the problems it keeps creating as it gets bigger. This is a portrait in tribute, written at human height. Gilles Rotillon to the right of his brother Noël, surrounded by friends from the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois club © Coll. Rotillon family Everything is quiet. The talk should have started already, but a low-grade drift hangs in the half-lit room at the 2025 Salon de l’Escalade. The program promises a “masterclass” by Lucien Martinez—then editor-in-chief of Grimper  magazine—on the growth of climbing, framed as a simple question: good news or bad? But nothing’s moving. Because, clearly, everyone’s waiting for someone. Gilles’ gift A few minutes later, an elderly man comes in like he’s been dropped into the room mid-step. His neck looks stiff. He’s carrying a book and a few loose sheets tucked under his arm. He doesn’t scan the audience. He seems locked on one target only: the chair waiting for him. He sits down, unhurried. Only then does Lucien Martinez begin. “I was supposed to do this on my own,” he says, “but we changed plans at the last minute.” Then he adds, plainly: “I couldn’t do it without Gilles Rotillon.” Since July 11, though, everyone has had to do it without him. Rotillon died of a stroke. People often introduced him as a “theorist of climbing.” He was also a professor emeritus in economics, a longtime member of the FSGT (Fédération Sportive et Gymnique du Travail), a founding member of the FFME (Fédération Française de la Montagne et de l’Escalade), the author of several reference books on how climbing evolved and spread in France, and an unrelenting columnist on the world of climbing. Across all of it, one thread holds: he spent his life giving intellectual structure to a sport that was expanding fast—asking what made it tick, where it was heading, what it got right, what it broke, and what it refused to see. A former climber with a deep love for the practice, he also carried a lifelong commitment to left-wing politics, militant since adolescence against what he called “the drift of a capitalist society that is pushing humanity into an increasingly catastrophic situation.” “Gilles was clearly an intellectual,” warns Yves Renoux, a longtime FSGT member and a friend of 40 years. “But—careful. At heart he was a math guy. He moved into economics, but he kept that logical mind. So yes, a theorist. But a theorist who turns ideas into action.” Renoux knows exactly what he means. He joined Rotillon’s FSGT climbing club after seeing, in the most concrete way possible, what “making climbing popular” could look like: bringing a climbing wall into the city. It happened at the Fête de l’Huma in 1976. “The first wall at the Fête de l’Huma was in 1955,” Renoux says, precise as ever. “But I met the FSGT, their ideas, Gilles Rotillon, by first seeing a wall with holds. That’s Gilles to me. Ideas—but above all, real proposals. Otherwise what’s left? Just talk.” « It’s true we liked ticking boxes, but for us, climbing was still more about pleasure than pure performance  » Noël Rotillon, brother of Gilles Rotillon’s own first encounter with climbing came a decade earlier, in Saint-Geneviève-des-Bois. He was 18 when the town’s youth center—the Maison des Jeunes et de la Culture—opened its doors. “The first director came from the Ivry section,” says his brother Noël, 18 months younger. “Her husband was an aspiring mountain guide, so one of the first sections they created was the climbing section.” In 1963, the two brothers discovered varappe—old-school French for rock climbing—at the same time. The next year, they went on their first trip to Fontainebleau. This was France in the Trente Glorieuses, when mass leisure was spreading—but climbing was still a small world, reserved for a social and technical elite. For the Rotillon brothers, it wasn’t only a sport. It was also fertile ground for political thinking. “Our father was a Communist activist,” Noël says, “elected first deputy mayor of Saint-Geneviève-des-Bois. We grew up in a very left-wing environment.” The era’s events pushed them toward activism, the intellectual rush of May ’68, and the mountains. Gilles Rotillon © Coll. Caroline Rotillon Friends, games, and getting good—fast Rotillon fell hard for the discipline. From his first days on rock, he approached the mountains with a methodical, almost scientific focus. “The most striking thing,” Noël remembers, “was that he knew the topos—the guidebooks—by heart. If he’d done a route or a crag, he remembered every move. Standing at the base, even if it was thirty pitches, he already knew which pitches he’d lead—climb on lead, with the rope running up above you—and which he’d follow.” That attention to detail carried him quickly into the big classics: the Dru, the Walker Spur on the Grandes Jorasses. He stacked alpine routes, ticked off some of the “100 finest” from Gaston Rébuffat—one of the era’s true bibles, a list of legendary Alpine climbs. “It’s true we liked ticking boxes,” Noël says. “But for us, climbing was still more about pleasure than pure performance.” And yet: it was Rotillon’s mountain résumé that pulled in teenagers from the Paris region—kids who saw what was possible and wanted in. One of them was Pascal Étienne, who would become one of Rotillon’s closest friends. In 1975, he was 16 when he stumbled on an article in La Marseillaise de l’Essonne about two climbers from the Saint-Geneviève-des-Bois FSGT club. “It was a full-page story about a small feat,” Étienne recalls, “two climbers, including Gilles, who had climbed the Directe Américaine on the Dru.” He joined a club soon after. On his very first outing, he helped write a footnote in climbing history. “A guy from the club went to Fontainebleau to pick mushrooms,” says Étienne, now a climbing instructor, “and tells us he found a new passage on a nice boulder. It was Roche aux Sabots—this little area to us back then that’s now internationally famous.” The story says something about the FSGT’s early, exploratory spirit. But what struck Étienne most was the club itself. The article on Gilles Rotillon's performances in La Marseillaise de l'Essonne © coll. Pascal Étienne «  Every Tuesday night, Gilles brought me to the FSGT headquarters in Pantin. I was just a kid, but I listened hard. The flood of ideas was incredible. I felt like I was watching a revolution. » Pascal Étienne, friend of Gilles Rotillon “Gilles was kind of the guru at the time,” he says. “At 30, he was an excellent climber, an excellent alpinist. He could’ve just coasted on that. Instead, with his brother, they created a collective momentum that really hit us teenagers.” The Rotillon brothers built a whole training system designed to raise everyone’s level quickly. And they were willing to touch what was taboo. “I think they created some of the first competitions,” Étienne says, “back when competitions were basically forbidden in the culture.” At the club entrance, they put up a grid—names along one axis, and “all the sixes of Cuvier” on the other, a famous Fontainebleau sector. In the boxes: French bouldering grades—6A, 6B, 6C, up through “G,” because “7” didn’t exist yet in their system (roughly what many climbers would map to today’s V-scale mindset, even if the labels were different). They’d go out, climb, and check them off. And in that grid were already the Rotillons’ own checkmarks. For the kids, the goal became simple: catch them. The effect was immediate. “Honestly, we went at it harder than ever with our friends,” Étienne says. “I think it raised the club’s level a lot.” The energy was everywhere—on Bleau boulders, in the club, and most of all, in people’s heads. By then, the FSGT already had a slogan with teeth: “Ni guide, ni client”—neither guide nor client. “For us, coming from working-class backgrounds,” Étienne says, “that spoke to us. It motivated us.” Behind the slogan was a social project: make it possible for people who couldn’t afford guides to still do alpinism—to climb and learn without being priced out. “We must have done a thousand routes with volunteer leaders,” Noël says, “without any problems beyond minor sprains.” It’s impossible now to count how many young climbers learned independent, self-sufficient climbing through the FSGT—but it’s clearly in the thousands. In the early 1980s, the federation created the Commission Fédérale de la Montagne (CFM), which Rotillon would lead. “I remember he took me under his wing,” Étienne says. “Every Tuesday night, Gilles brought me to the FSGT headquarters in Pantin. I was just a kid, but I listened hard. The flood of ideas was incredible. I felt like I was watching a revolution.” The making of modern climbing Forty years later, Yves Renoux still uses that word—revolution—without blinking. For him, the FSGT’s projects changed the sport from the ground up. He points to “Les 24h de Bleau,” a popular event that still matters today, where beginners and experienced climbers link up boulder problems across the forest. He points to the “yellow circuits” in Fontainebleau, designed to guide newcomers through some of the best rock with a clear, progressive path. And he points, especially, to the “Hauteroche cliff,” nicknamed the “falaise à l’aise,” which laid the groundwork for what many now think of as modern sport-climbing training cliffs. “Gilles was one of the main drivers,” Renoux says. “I love that project because it contains the whole flavor of our ideas.” In 1974, FSGT members bolted—or, in the older language, “equipped”—that cliff in Côte-d’Or with a clear concept: allow people to climb on lead from the very beginning of their learning. “That meant breaking with the alpinism mindset,” Renoux explains. “Before that, the people equipping cliffs were all climbing at least ‘6.’ They’d place pitons when they got scared. If you were a beginner, you had to be out of your mind to lead. Nothing was built for you.”  « It was the first time we separated the two disciplines that firmly, Climbing had always been seen as training for alpinism. For Gilles, it had to break free. » Noël, brother of Gilles Rotillon Alongside the push to popularize crag climbing, the FSGT also challenged the elitist logic that kept the “leader”—the first on the rope—at the top of a social pyramid. “What we wanted,” Renoux says, “was to show that being first on the rope is something anyone can do.” Hauteroche held, in miniature, what would shape the FSGT’s ideological backbone into the next century: climbing that was both popular and autonomous. Renoux himself would help bring those ideas to life. In the early 1980s, as a PE teacher, he and his students built the first climbing wall in a school setting, in Corbeil-Essonnes. But again, he points back to Rotillon’s influence. “It was him and Jean-Marc Blanche who first pushed the idea of climbing walls,” Renoux says. Blanche, a young architect at the time, designed mobile bouldering structures they hauled to Montreuil to get kids from working-class neighborhoods climbing. Étienne confirms it. He joined a study trip to England with Blanche. “We visited walls over there,” he says. “Either they were university setups hacked together by climbers, or they were private facilities. When we came back and brought it to the CFM with Jean-Marc, we decided to develop it in the public sector. We built walls in housing projects, schools, for events… and that matters, because unlike the UK, France’s history shows public climbing walls appearing before private gyms.” Produced by the FSGT, Des montagnes dans nos villes (Mountains in Our Cities) tells the story of how climbing became accessible to a wider audience, thanks in particular to the construction of artificial walls. The unaligned intellectual For Rotillon’s friends, there’s no debate: he was ahead of his time. In the 1980s, he was everywhere—inside every committee, every structure. In 1985, he helped create the Fédération Française d’Escalade (FFE). Two years later, when the FFME was created, he took leadership of its climbing sports committee. For ten years, he defended a vision of climbing as a common good—something that should be accessible to everyone. But by the 1990s, the sport was shifting. Competitions multiplied. The FFME looked more and more toward competitive climbing. Too much for Rotillon. At the federation’s 1997 general assembly in Avignon, he was pushed out. “He fought tooth and nail for what we’d done at Hauteroche,” Étienne says. “For him, the federation should’ve put money there—scaled the experiment.” Rare image of Gilles Rotillon not reading © Coll. Noël Rotillon Rotillon’s fights left marks—first in the people who knew him, and then, enduringly, in writing. Many of the people Vertige Media spoke with called him an intellectual. “I think he was born an intellectual when he met the FSGT,” his brother Noël says. After May ’68, Rotillon read constantly, argued constantly, thought constantly. Beyond federation work, he distinguished himself on the terrain of ideas. His first major book, L’Alpinisme laisse béton, was published in 1985 with Louis Louvel. In it, the two theorists argued—perhaps for the first time with that level of bluntness in France—that alpinism is a practice that kills. By contrast, climbing, through thoughtful bolting and the deliberate reduction of risk, could become popular. “It was the first time we separated the two disciplines that firmly,” Noël says. “Climbing had always been seen as training for alpinism. For Gilles, it had to break free.” The book landed hard in a small, tight world. “Let’s say the alpinists didn’t love it,” Étienne says with a smile. But it broadcast Rotillon’s central idea—the one he carried for life: climbing had to leave elitist circles. That thread runs straight into his 2016 book—arguably his most complete—La leçon d’Aristote, where he reworked and republished his theories. «  He read constantly, with an unbelievable ability to focus. He could read books while we drove 800 kilometers, while someone mowed the lawn right next to him, while his granddaughters pulled his hair » Françoise Rotillon, Gilles' wife His writing didn’t just document him; it defined him. “I immediately saw it was his thing,” says Françoise Rotillon, his wife. “When Louis came to work on their first book on Wednesdays at the house, they’d shut themselves in all day to talk, think, debate.” She adds: “He read constantly, with an unbelievable ability to focus. He could read books while we drove 800 kilometers, while someone mowed the lawn right next to him, while his granddaughters pulled his hair.” He wrote constantly, too. Near the end of his life, when his body kept him from climbing the way he used to, he poured his free time into analysis and debate about society. He was part of the Economists at Large (économistes atterrés), made videos for Xerfi Canal where he could summarize the myth of capitalism in four minutes, and starting in 2020 published a weekly column on Mediapart. As if that weren’t enough, he gathered his love of film into a book titled Goûts et Dégoûts cinématographiques. And of course, the climber never stopped writing for climbing outlets—Grimper, Alpine Mag, Vertige Media. “His secret?” Étienne says. “He didn’t sleep. How do you produce that much if you sleep? He knew everything about everything—the latest climbing performances, some new video, some institutional report… he amazed me. When you look at his life, you honestly wonder how he managed all his responsibilities.” Masterclass If you look at the core of “Rotillon,” the intellectual never left his path. “Today, events prove him right,” Renoux says. “His left-wing, Marxist vision—which is also the FSGT’s—still inspires everyone in the federation. I’m convinced the way we carry Gilles’ work forward will be collective.” Reading his columns, listening to his public remarks, you have to admit how modern his positions were—on ecology, economics, gender. He was a relentless observer of modern society. “Recently,” Françoise Rotillon says, “I’d even say that’s almost all he did. The day he went to the ER in the afternoon, up until one o’clock he was at his computer, writing things.” Not necessarily optimistic things, given the times. “For me, he was a bit like our Frédéric Lordon,” Renoux says—meaning someone who understood that things weren’t necessarily moving in the right direction, and who sensed we might not find the fix in time. “He often said to his granddaughters, ‘I hope Papou is wrong,’” Noël says. “The way the world was changing, the future for his children and grandchildren—it didn’t make him happy.” And maybe because of that, Rotillon never stopped climbing. After a ski accident, Noël says, he couldn’t lift his head anymore. “We used to say he climbed in Braille,” his brother recalls, “because he was feeling for holds. But he climbed—again and again.” Étienne, who watched him on walls and cliffs for fifty years, still can’t quite process it. “He was in rough shape at the end,” he says. “But he never quit. He always showed up at the wall. I’ve never seen anyone that motivated, that passionate.” If you’d only seen the limping outline, you might not have guessed that a many-layered legacy of French climbing was still moving through the world in that body. So when you picture that old man settling into his chair in front of the Salon de l’Escalade crowd, you can’t help but smile again at what Gilles Rotillon gave people—and kept giving, right to the end. Because after an hour, the schedule held. It really was a masterclass.