Sports Festival, Tommy Caldwell, the king of climbing

From our correspondent Mario Salvini

September 24
– trento

Since he was three, his father, Mike, wore him Yosemite. “I saw him as a superhero”. And every time he looked at that majestic wall, those 900 and more meters of sheer wall of a mountain called El Capitan, in Spanish as he used a few centuries ago there in California. Or El Captain, Englishized. Tommy Caldwell told the story of him. The story of a man who for years watched, studied, prepared for that obstacle, apparently the most insuperable one could imagine and one day he climbed it, free climbing, in an extraordinary, long the Dawn Wall route, considered the most difficult in the world. Dawn Wall as the fil from that stretch expedition, a cult for climbers from all over the planet. “But I don’t know if that was my moment of glory – said Caldwell, quoting the title of this edition of the Festival dello Sport – because we don’t know what life can bring us”.

The beginning

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And in fact, on the stage of the Teatro Sociale di Trento, Tommy didn’t just talk about Dawn Wall and his El Cap. He started from the beginning. “My father’s idea was to prepare myself for the difficulties of life through the mountains, climbing. Together with my sister, so with the whole family. I was shy, certainly not one of those children full of strength and energy: I was born very premature, I had a slow development, vision problems “. You wouldn’t say looking at his exploits, his ease. The peace with which he gives the idea of ​​living.

The kidnapping

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There was another fate, much more dramatic, which marked his life. A kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan by a group of Islamist terrorists. “It was a strong thing that changed me. And it made me into something that I still don’t fully understand. We have been kidnapped for six days. To free myself, I dropped my jailer off a ravine. I was convinced that I had killed him. It was a necessity, but at the same time something that changes you forever. Before those six days of being kidnapped I was a little boy, since after those six days I have understood that life must be lived day by day. For a long time I was certain that the man was dead. Only a long time later, by chance, did I learn that he was alive. And I felt relieved. Also because I believe that he too, in that Islamist group, was in his own way a victim ”.

The hands

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The photos shown on the screen showed his hands. The sign of another crucial event. “I have lost part of my left index finger. They told me that I could not continue with climbing. A doctor told me I had to change my life. They tried to surgically reattach the lost piece, but it didn’t work. I was in the hospital for two weeks. It was there that a doctor, also a climber, told me that I could never do what I loved and love most. Then he walked out of the room and my girlfriend said, “Look, tell him to go fuck himself.” A little poetic phrase, but it was exactly what I needed to hear ”. The bleeding, almost flayed fingers tell better than a thousand descriptions the difficulty of what Caldwell can do. “But when you climb, surrounded by beauty, the pain is really the least important thing. The body is incredibly adept at adapting. I learned to strengthen the other fingers, the remaining ones. And I have a modified my way of climbing. That’s where I started focusing on El Capitan. What changed me, gave me even more motivation to challenge El Cap was the separation from my now ex-wife. Plus a friend told me that this was a way to prove that you are the best in the world. I never imagined that climbing would take me this far. Nor that for seven years I would have tried to figure out how to climb that wall. It’s an overgrown, Peter Pan thing. I studied that wall, learned it by heart. Years spent studying it, I understood his language. There are points that you think are inscrutable, but every time you find a little foothold. A couple of months a year I studied the wall, and the following months I spent them preparing the specific movements that I would need point by point. At the beginning I thought the undertaking was impossible, and for this I was fascinated by it. One of the beautiful things about our sport is precisely this: continually redefining the concept of impossible. And when you understand that this is how it works in climbing, you realize that it is the same in life. And then I became an optimist ”.