Alain Robert, an Injured Climber’s Comeback
- Matthieu Amaré
- il y a 3 jours
- 7 min de lecture
Last time, we left Alain Robert in free fall. When he hit the ground, he lost 45% of his blood. He survived—somehow—and then started the long, stubborn climb back to elite-level climbing. Against every sensible prediction.
“It happened on a Wednesday,” Thierry Robert says. “I remember because it’s the day the parents aren’t home. I was with my sister when the police knocked. They told us he’d had a serious accident and they’d flown him by helicopter to Grenoble.” Forty years later, Thierry still can’t tell it without emotion: “We had to wait for our parents to get back before we understood he was in a coma—between life and death.”
At first, the details are blurry. But once the family reaches the hospital, the picture sharpens fast: Alain has bled out 45% of his total blood volume. The staff at Grenoble’s university hospital (the CHU) has basically never seen anything like it. He’s transfused nonstop for six days. Then, at some point in the night, he wakes up. Another miracle.
The Mummy Returns
“What saved my life,” Alain Robert says, “were my elbows. They acted like shock absorbers.”
He fell headfirst, but he managed to throw his hands out in front of him. After a 65-foot fall, his hands hit the limestone and essentially detonated—wrists and forearms with them.
“We call it a bone crush,” he says. “My bones broke into a hundred pieces.”
After he wakes up, surgeons spend weeks operating. “They put pins in his forearms—the kind they usually put in the femur of a motorcycle crash victim,” his younger brother explains.
Back at the hospital in Valence, he’s treated by a hand specialist, Gérard Hoel. Hoel looks at what’s in front of him and comes to two conclusions: one, he’s never seen hands this destroyed; two, this patient will never climb again.
“He told me my wrists were like scrambled eggs,” Alain says. “And that I could forget about climbing.”
On paper, for a 20-year-old with a fractured knee, foot, pelvis, and forearms that look like they went through a blender, he’s “lucky.”
After two months in the hospital, Alain goes home. He can’t turn a faucet. He can’t twist a key in a lock. “I felt like I had two crystal flutes instead of hands,” he says, stroking his forearms. “Like if I bumped them on anything, they’d just snap.”
Over lunch, he shows his wrists. The left still carries faint marks. The right sits at an angle that would make a radiologist wince. It’s hard to picture that, forty years earlier, Alain Robert decided he was going to rebuild his upper body on his own—openly defying the limits of conventional medicine.
“It rebuilt my body, sure. But more than that, it rebuilt my head”
Alain Robert
“I started by filling pots with water and carrying them, one by one,” he says. “Once I could lift all four sizes, I started hanging from my hands—first on a stair railing, then doing pull-ups.”
One pull-up. Then two. Then three.
“I went with baby steps,” he says. “Every day, my goal was just a little higher than the day before.”
To prove to himself it was real, he sets a target: traversing the wall of the MJC in Valence, the community center down the street. He crimps his fingers on the mortar seams between bricks and moves sideways.
Every day, he falls. Every day, he tries again. Two years later, he finally traverses the whole thing—about 330 feet. “That wall saved my life as a climber,” he says now. “It rebuilt my body, sure. But more than that, it rebuilt my head.”
Unbreakable.
Because when he comes out the other side, Alain Robert is stronger than he’s ever been.
“Do You Recognize Me? It’s Alain Robert.”
Gérard Hoel also climbs—casually. One day, he’s fighting his way up something in the French 5th grade range (think roughly 5.8-ish in Yosemite grades) when he sees a shadow move past him. A guy in the next line just eats up the overhang—steep, roofy climbing—like it’s nothing.
At the top, the man introduces himself, wearing blue tights: “Do you recognize me? It’s Alain Robert.”
“He smiled and told me I’d really worked hard to prove him wrong,” Alain says, still amused. Hoel was wrong. But Alain thinks his case fascinated the doctor—because it cracked open a world Hoel didn’t know existed.
A lot of other people can’t believe it either. Like the day in 1984 when, after rehab, a Social Security medical examiner comes to calculate Alain Robert’s disability rating.
The verdict: 66% disability. (For context, a paraplegic is around 70%.)
Following Alain Robert’s “baby steps” means walking through his philosophy. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” he says in interview after interview, like it’s a New Year’s toast you can’t stop repeating.
Still, his case stays strange. It starts to gather a kind of mystique.
Two years after his coma, Alain Robert is back at his top level. He can do 700 pull-ups an hour. He’s on rock every day. And he picks up right where he left off: a route called L’Abominable homme des doigts—“The Abominable Finger Man,” nicknamed “L’Abo.”
Before the accident, he’d failed on it every time. Now, at 22, he finishes it in a few weeks. It’s graded 7b+, roughly 5.12c/d—at a moment when the climbing world has only just broken into the 5.13 range.
His comeback starts inside a life that looks almost normal. He gets a job at Bado Sport, a shop in downtown Valence, working the climbing-and-mountain department. On his lunch break, he heads to the nearby cliffs and inhales hard routes.
“In ’82, he misses the climbing boom. And when he comes back, it’s Edlinger—the blond guy, the pretty face—who gets all the light. Alain is small. He’s twisted up. They’re total opposites”
Laurent Belluard
He keeps that ritual through the second half of the 1980s. One obsession among others: L’Abo.
He opens variations. He bans himself from using certain holds. And eventually he promises himself he’ll climb it as a free solo—no rope, no gear, no margin for error.
He does it in 1986.
From then on, the guy running the department spends his lunch breaks grinding on that chunk of rock without a rope the way other people go play squash.
As he gets more confident, the free-soloist stays almost totally unknown. He signs up for the Vaulx-en-Vélin World Cup event in 1986, but his injuries keep him just outside the final. His hopes of doing anything in competition climbing die right there.
So there’s the solo. But Alain Robert isn’t alone anymore…
Edlinger vs. The Abominable Finger Man
In 1982, climbing enters French living rooms through a mid-length film, La vie au bout des doigts (Life at the Tips of Your Fingers). You watch Patrick Edlinger free solo on his Mediterranean cliffs. When Jean-Pierre Janssens’ film airs on Antenne 2, it hits like a bomb.
For the first time, climbing in its “purest” form—free soloing—is embodied by a climber presented as chemically pure, too. Handsome, loose, weightless, Edlinger becomes a star. He’s on the cover of Paris Match.
That same year, Alain Robert is flat on his back in a hospital bed, watching the train go by.
Behind the Edlinger locomotive come Patrick Berhault, Catherine Destivelle, Isabelle Patissier… In the south, there’s also a crew of young climbers who settle in Buoux for half the year. Stage name: the “Parisian gang.” Laurent Jacob, Jean-Baptiste Tribout, Marc and Antoine Le Menestrel—they open routes, harder and harder. David Chambre is part of the group, too.
“The first time we heard about Alain, he was basically a curiosity,” Chambre says. “We’d heard about his accidents and a few of his solos, but honestly, we had a hard time believing it.”
Starting in 1985, Robert comes to Buoux once in a while. But when he runs into them at the base of routes, he often heads off alone to climb on the west face—abandoned, out of the way.
“He didn’t have a place back then,” Chambre continues. “He wasn’t part of the movement pushing free climbing upward, and competition wasn’t really an option because of his disabilities. He chose a solitary life, doing his thing in his corner.”
Philippe Poulet, editor-in-chief of Vertical, says the same thing: “He slipped through that era. That’s why he’ll carry this image his whole life—this little troublemaker trying to sneak in through the back door.”
Alain Robert wasn’t there at the right moment. And now he simply isn’t where he “should” be.
“He’s at Crussol, at Entrechaux, in the Drôme… super hard cliffs, but not the stuff that’s fashionable,” adds Laurent Belluard.
For Belluard, it’s also about aesthetics. “In ’82, he misses the climbing boom. And when he comes back, it’s Edlinger—the blond guy, the pretty face—who gets all the light. Alain is small. He’s twisted up. They’re total opposites.”
So much so that you could almost cast him as the anti-hero.
Alain Robert can pull on fluorescent, harlequin tights and grind himself into the most extreme routes on his home crag in Cornas—the decade still forgets him. Edlinger keeps shining. Catherine Destivelle stacks world titles. Alain climbs in the shadows, alone.
Or under the worried eyes of his wife and two kids.
By 1990, the soloist is a family man. And to break the spell of his invisibility, he’s about to throw himself into the boldest solos of his career.
Also the most reckless.
A slice of the climbing world starts to buzz about what he’s doing, but Alain Robert still looks, to most people, like a sporting-goods store employee who climbs pitches on his lunch break.
Until 1991, when he’s going to change scale entirely.
To be continued…
