On November 16th, famed French sport climbing pioneer Patrick Edlinger passed away at the age of 52. I’ll confess to not being terribly familiar with his history, but PlanetMountain’s piece reflecting on his life does a great job explaining how Edlinger went about leaving his mark on our sport:
After having repeated all the hardest routes close to home, the youngster didn’t think twice, abandoned his studies and hitchhiked to the South of France where he was awaited by that famous, infinite sea of limestone and a sport which still needed inventing.
The obit in The New York Times has more including Edlinger’s influence on the American sport climbing scene as characterized by Phil Powers:
“Before that moment [Edlinger’s victory at the 1989 Snowbird comp], in America, sport climbing was cheap; it was not really respected,” Phil Powers, the executive director of the American Alpine Club, said last week. “And it seems to me that after that moment, sport climbing became something we can respect.”
Fascinating to read about some of the early history of sport climbing and about a man who has clearly left an indelible mark on our sport. RIP.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaBuNFl1mJM]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvsgHWKJOUA]
The 89 snowbird final win was remarkable. It was a cloudy day, nobody had made it up to the roof 2/3’s up. Patrick makes a fluid static move that everyone else needed to dyno through and looks to be in another league. He clears the roof, and as he makes it over the lip he’s able to balance on his feet using a large lip hold and jam both hands into his chalk bag. Just then the sun breaks through the clouds. He then proceeds to complete the route.
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I was there. I also had dinner with Patrick the night before and old friends like Kauk were in the restaurant and looked at me wondering what I was doing. It was pretty amazing. He made everyone else look like amateurs.
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Thanks for that – Just wonderful, I love hearing memories like that.
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Thanks for sharing those stories. Much appreciated.
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I was a teenager when Patrick made his first trip to the US. I arrived in the Gunks for college about a month after Patrick had come through and flashed most of the routes that were considered test pieces. I remember walking through Lost City with older friends as they were saying “Patrick flashed that, He flashed this one over here even though he didn’t know how to place gear very well. . .” It was really something because before that we though that 5.12 was “hard” but Patrick flashing all those lines changed that thinking in a hurry. We want from just wanting to climb 5.12 to wanting to flash 5.12 almost overnight. Two years later I was in the Verdun, never saw Patrick actually climbing but we did see him in town driving the slick black M3 that BMW gave to him (at least that was the rumor). At that point he was a complete rock star.
That fall in France, rumors were swirling about concerning “Patrick’s secret crag.” which turned out to be Cesuse. If being the first developer of Cesuse was his only achievement he would have made a significant mark on the sport.
By the time Snowbird came around no one familiar with Patrick’s climbing was surprised by his beautiful performance. We Americans had been inspired by Patrick but no one was at his level. Scott Franklin and Jim Karn were doing well but they didn’t have Patrick’s fitness, composure, or beauty. Beyond that Patrick was something of a climbing philosopher, he had ideas about what climbing was and what it meant; and he gave expression to those ideas through words and beautiful ascents.
By 1991 people were wondering what happened to Patrick, and someone I knew who also knew Patrick very well said that he was falling into alcoholism and told some very sad stories of how he was loosing control.
Anyway, Patrick made wonderful contributions to our sport, he was a great mover, He provided aesthetic, intellectual, and athletic leadership to a lot of climbers around the world, and I hope we remember him for a long time.
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