Unique, unclassifiable, revolutionary, tireless, ahead of his time, multi-faceted, physically unattainable… No one quite knows where French mountaineer and mountain guide Benjamin Védrine (33 years old) fits in. So much so that the Golden Piolets jury announced a few days ago that they would award him in a new category, created in his image, in recognition of the countless rapid ascents, extreme climbs, incredible ski descents or unprecedented paragliding flights carried out in the last three years. The Golden Piolets, created to reward the best mountaineering activity annually, will or should fail to reward him every year: tirelessly, he performs the sequence of feats at a pace that no one before him has been able to maintain. They reward him because he represents “the future of mountaineering,” a path that Vidrine has followed for at least five years. “The Gaul” is a perfect combination of the nicknames of the glorious mountaineers of the neighboring country: fast like Louis Lachenal, explorer like Lionel Terray, elegant like Gaston Ribova, inventive and technical like Jean-Christophe Lavay, insatiable and flying like Christophe Profit or Jean-Marc Boivin, philosophical and pure like Patrick Berholt, fast in… Eight thousand Like Marc Batard…
Vidrine, for all this, is something more: a young man who wants to explain himself, searches for himself, and realizes that there are no great stars in mountaineering without their own story, without a great book… or without a great documentary behind them. I love the word. At the same time as he published a book about K2, he just released his documentary K2. Chasing shadows, Which will be shown in theaters in 15 Spanish cities starting November 24. The work, directed by David Arnault and Hugo Clouzot, combines the crushing verticality of K2 (8611 m) with a story of failure, then overwhelming success, and great emptiness.
In 2022, confidently drunk after breaking the record for fastest ascent of Broad Peak (8,051), Védrines approached neighboring K2 with the idea of repeating. He almost died at an altitude of 8,400 metres, due to the beginnings of cerebral edema. A Mexican climber descending from the summit found him lying in the snow, tied to a fixed rope, unconscious. He put an artificial oxygen mask on him, increased the flow and brought him back to life. When he returned home, he decided that he would come back, but first he had to learn how to deal with his fear of death and decided not to leave anything to chance, and not to improvise on a whim again. He embarked on comprehensive preparation. He surrounded himself with a sports psychologist, a personal trainer, devoted himself to scientists who evaluated his ability to withstand extreme altitudes, sought advice from the best French paraglider… His dream was to complete the fastest ascent in the history of K2 in 2024 and take off in his kilogram glider from the summit itself.
Before he left, he swore that he would quit if he noticed any symptoms of altitude-related stress, a fear that had haunted him throughout the two years it took to prepare. Finally, as carefully as possible, with the handbrake on and with concerns nagging on his back, the Frenchman stopped the stopwatch at 10 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds. Astronomical time. The images of the documentary, with a permanent photographer at the base camp, others intermittently arriving at Camp 2 and flying a drone, would lose their meaning if it were not for the inexhaustible work of filming with the hero’s GoPro cameras, images that make one practically feel the snow under one’s feet or the air when taking off with the glider.
But the documentary is neither a record-setting story, nor an adrenaline-pumping affair: sporting events are the pretext for telling universal themes like the fear of death in the mountains, a fear that everyone shares even if they deny it to the public. Védrine is surprised by his ability to undress, to speak deeply, and to anticipate that mountain climbing is not so much a physical exercise as a mental exercise, an inner journey towards…nowhere?
If the French mountaineer dominates the stage, flowing whatever the terrain, flying over dangers as if they do not exist, his inner self is much less solid than one might imagine: “I think I do all this, climbing mountains non-stop because I need to trust myself… I lack confidence,” he blurts out in front of the camera like a bomb. Mountaineering is truly interesting when it reveals the soul of its actors, when they reveal without artificiality their motives, their desires, their traumas, their miseries. They are not superior beings, or gods higher than the peaks themselves, but are often beings in internal conflict. Like everyone. In exposing these flaws, Mountaineering presents an interesting, poignant and captivating story. Robotic climbers stopped stimulating a long time ago.
Védrines cries inconsolably, a man at the pinnacle of his art, on the second highest peak on the planet who cries while the audience wonders what is happening to him. Because it is not a cry of joy, not the ecstasy of an ecstatic athlete, and not a winner’s speech. He is a young man who has reached the bottom of himself and cannot find answers. His tears are more exhausting than the complexities of his climb, and he realizes that there is a mountain he may never be able to climb: the vital mountain of pain growing in his chest.
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