Unique, unclassifiable, revolutionary, tireless, ahead of his time, multifaceted, physically unattainable… Nobody knows exactly where to place the French mountaineer and mountain guide Benjamin Védrines (33 years old). So much so that the Golden Piolets jury announced a few days ago that it will reward him in a new category, created in his image, in recognition of the countless fast ascents, extreme climbs, incredible ski descents or unprecedented paragliding flights carried out in the last three years. The Piolet d’Oro, created to reward the best mountaineering activity every year, would not be up to par or should reward him every year: tireless, he chained together his feats at a pace that no one before him was able to maintain. They rewarded him for representing “the future of mountaineering”, a path that Védrines has been pursuing for at least five years. The Gaul is the perfect synthesis of the glorious mountaineering surnames of the neighboring country: fast like Louis Lachenal, explorer like Lionel Terray, elegant like Gaston Rébuffat, creative and technical like Jean Christophe Lafaille, bulimic and flying like Christophe Profit or Jean Marc Boivin, philosopher and pure like Patrick Berhault, fast in eight thousand like Marc Batard…
Védrines, with all this, is something more: a young man who wants to explain himself, who searches for himself, who understands that there are no great mountaineering stars without their own story, without a great book… or without a great documentary behind them. I love the word. At the same time as publishing a book about K2, he has just released his documentary K2. Chasing the shadows, which will be released in theaters in 15 Spanish cities starting from November 24th. The work, directed by David Arnaud and Hugo Clouzeau, mixes the overwhelming verticality of K2 (8,611 m) with the story of a failure, then of an overwhelming success and of a great void.
In 2022, drunk with confidence after destroying the record for the fastest ascent of Broad Peak (8,051), Védrines approached nearby K2 with the idea of a repeat. He risked dying at 8,400 meters, betrayed by the onset of cerebral edema. A Mexican climber who was descending from the summit found him lying in the snow, tied to the fixed rope, unconscious. She put him on the artificial oxygen mask, increased his flow and brought him back to life. When he returned home, he decided that he would return, but first he had to learn to deal with his fear of dying and decided not to leave anything to chance, not to improvise on a whim again. He undertook exhaustive preparation. He surrounded himself with a sports psychologist, a personal trainer, he dedicated himself to scientists who assessed his tolerance to extreme altitude, he asked for advice from the best French paraglider… his dream was to complete the fastest climb in the history of K2 in 2024 and take off with his one-kilo paraglider from the summit itself.
Before leaving he vowed that he would stop if he noticed any symptoms of stress associated with altitude, a fear that haunted him for almost two years during his preparation. In the end, with all the caution possible, with the handbrake on and with a disturbing apprehension on his back, the Frenchman stopped the clock at 10 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds. A sidereal time. The images of the documentary, with a fixed cameraman at base camp, others sporadically up to camp 2 and the flight of a drone, would lose their meaning if it were not for the inexhaustible filming work with the protagonist’s GoPro cameras, images that practically make you feel the snow under your feet or the air when you take off with the paraglider.
But the documentary is not the story of a record, nor a question of adrenaline: sporting events are the pretext to narrate universal themes such as the fear of dying in the mountains, an apprehension that everyone shares even if they deny it to the public. Védrines is surprised by his ability to undress, to engage in profound conversations, to anticipate that climbing mountains is much less a physical exercise than a mental one, an internal journey towards… nothingness?
If the French mountaineer dominates the scene, runs on any terrain, flies over dangers as if they didn’t exist, his interiority is much less solid than one might imagine: “I think I do all this, climb mountains without stopping because I need it to trust myself… I lack trust”, 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 lay bare their motivations, their desires, their traumas and their miseries without artifice. They are not superior beings, deities higher than the peaks themselves, but often beings in internal conflict. Like everyone. And it is in the revelation of these shortcomings that mountaineering offers an interesting, moving and captivating story. Robotic climbers stopped being inspiring a long time ago.
Cries inconsolably Védrines, a boy at the peak of his art, on the second highest peak on the planet crying while the audience wonders what is happening to him. Because it is not a cry of joy, it is not the euphoria of an ecstatic athlete, it is not the speech of a winner. He is a young man who has reached the bottom of himself and cannot find answers. His tears are far more stressful than the complexity of his climb, and, he acknowledges, there is one mountain he may never be able to climb: the mountain of vital anguish growing in his chest.
