Three-time world climbing champion in the 1980s, mountaineering legend in the 1990s, Catherine Destivelle proved that women climbed as high as men. At 64, the pioneer inaugurated the final of the women’s Olympic climbing games in Paris on August 10 and remains to this day the only woman to have received a Piolet d’or, the “Oscar of mountaineering”, throughout her career. career.
I wouldn’t have gotten here if…
…If my parents had not opened the door to dreams. We lived in the southern suburbs of Paris, in the town of Grand-Vaux, in Savigny-sur-Orge (Essonne). Living in a city was a choice, with a library for everyone, my mother’s painting studio accessible to children, the utopia of the 70s! Since we didn’t have television, my sisters and I would go to our teacher’s house on Thursdays to watch the soap opera. Bella and Sebastian. Here I discovered the mountain, in black and white.
Then I wanted to climb, around 12 years old. I was a “vigousse”, a little exalted. We were five girls, but my father, who was an engineer at the National Center for Space Studies, raised us as boys. We did the four hundred movements, we climbed the trees, the poles, we walked balanced on the railings of the Paris bridges, on the rocks while we walked through the forest of Fontainebleau (Seine-et-Marne).
My parents let me leave every Sunday around 6am to take the 8:23am train at the Gare de Lyon in Paris and walk 10 kilometers through the forest. I was the youngest cadet in the French Alpine Club. At that time, the first great mountaineers were Parisians, thanks to Fontainebleau, where they could train.
And yet, you escaped Paris to reach even higher…
Sometimes he secretly went out to go climbing in the Vercors, he camped in the mountains. One Sunday I came back with snow blindness; My parents suspected that I had not contracted it in Fontainebleau! The following week I saw my father on the station platform. After that, I stopped doing nonsense. My parents wanted me to do well in school and trusted me the rest of the time.
One day, on vacation, while we were driving in the car, I asked my father if he would leave me in Oisans, because I dreamed of exploring the massif alone. He said, “Okay, I’ll come back to pick you up in two weeks.” » I was 14 years old. My father gave me the key to move forward, self-confidence. Then I met climbers and scientists from top schools. They told me, “Your turn,” so I learned to climb like a boy, unfazed, not knowing that I was climbing routes that no girl had climbed at the time. There were no phones, no Internet, no magazines to compare yourself to.
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