By Tayler Willson
Alain Robert doesn’t see obstacles the way the rest of us do. Where others see walls, he sees opportunities. Where most would back away, he climbs. It’s not rebellion for rebellion’s sake. It’s something deeper, something coded into his very being.
Robert’s story, though, doesn’t begin on a towering skyscraper or a rock face. It starts on a seven-story apartment building in the south of France where as a young boy he found himself locked out of his family’s home on the top floor. His parents were at work. There was no key. So, he climbed.
“I had dreamt so much that one day I would become courageous. And I had it really deep inside me.”
“It was an easy one,” shrugs the 62 year old, as if scaling a building as a child is the most natural thing in the world. “But quite complicated because I was still this little boy afraid of everything.” That climb changed everything. “I had dreamt so much that one day I would become courageous. And I had it really deep inside me.”
I’m speaking to Robert via Zoom. The Frenchman is sitting poolside in his idyllic Bali-based home, sipping a flute of prosecco. “Climbing has always been about doing something courageous with my life,” he tells me, before taking another sip. “Let’s just call it a version of being courageous.”
“I had this vision of being courageous,”
Courage is a word that gets thrown around a lot. But for Robert, it’s not a philosophy, it’s a birthright. He wasn’t inspired by the great climbers of history, he tells me, but by the swashbuckling outlaws of legend: Zorro, Robin Hood, men who defied the system and dared to be different. “I had this vision of being courageous,” he recalls. “And I found out that I could become courageous one day by climbing.”
Robert's fascination with courage all started with a movie. A black-and-white thriller from 1956 called The Mountain, starring Spencer Tracy. The plot? A plane crashes, and two brothers embark on a death-defying rescue mission. For a nine-year-old boy glued to the screen, it was a revelation. The irony? Before that moment, Alain Robert was afraid of everything.
"I don’t recognise what I am doing as a sport. It’s an art. A life path.”
Fear is what keeps most people on solid ground. Robert, however, turned it into a launching pad. To him, climbing isn’t a sport. It's a calling. “Although I am featured in some books among the 100 greatest sportspeople of all time, I don’t recognise what I am doing as a sport. It’s an art. A life path.”
But even the fearless have their moments of reckoning. In 1982, Robert suffered a near-fatal fall after he plummeted 15 metres when his rope came undone during an abseiling descent. The fall left him in a coma for five days, with a fractured pelvis, both forearms shattered, a dislocated elbow, and a broken nose. The damage was extensive — so much so that doctors declared him 66 percent disabled. They told him he’d never climb again.
Since then, though, Robert has free-soloed the Empire State Building, climbed the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, and the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, a feat he eventually succeeded in doing in 2009 after being arrested on previous attempts.
“My body is shit nowadays,” Robert laughs. “But I don’t complain about it. I just decided, fuck the doctors. I’m going to make my way. And I’ve been climbing ”
Truth is, there’s a rebellious streak in everything Robert does. When asked if he considers himself eccentric, he grins. “I am a little bit of the word that you have used,” he says. “I am somebody who is eccentric, rebellious, badass, and a maverick. I’m a combination of all of that.”
Most climbers approach their sport with meticulous calculation, balancing skill, endurance, and precision. Robert, on the other hand, is an agent of chaos. “The most important thing when you are free soloing is whether it is random or not,” he explains. “And the randomness of the routes I did at the end of the ‘80s and the beginning of the ‘90s were insane.”
Today, Alain Robert is more than a climber. He’s an enigma. Part artist, part outlaw, part philosopher. He exists to prove that fear is a construct, that the limits imposed upon us, by society, by doctors, by ourselves, are meant to be broken.
“Nobody can tell me what I should do or what I shouldn’t be doing,” he says. For Robert, even at 62, as long as there are mountains to climb, buildings to conquer, and rules to shatter, he will continue to reach for the impossible.
