[Livre] Mont Blanc express

« The only excursion to the summit of the mountain which has previously been made in less than two days was by Mr. Jackson in 1825. He was absent from Chamonix about an hour less than I, but remained on the summit only a few minutes. “From a piece of a sentence unearthed in a 200-year-old story, Jean-Philippe Lefief puts an end to the received idea that mountain speed records are a practice in keeping with the times that are moving too quickly: ” A bit petty, the footnote says a lot about the competition that the gentlemen of Mont Blanc are already engaged in ” writes the author of The Crazy History of Trail Running (Guérin-Paulsen, 2018).

In 1787, a year after Paccard and Balmat’s first attempt in an unknown time, Cachat the Giant succeeded in the ascent in 23 hours. In 1864, the Englishman Frederick Morshead lowered the mark to 16 hours, a record that would stand until 1910, before being beaten again in 1968. Crossing the ages, the author tells us the story of a record like no other against a backdrop of changes in equipment, practice and knowledge in the mountains, while drawing a portrait of forgotten athletes such as Laurent Smagghe (5h29 in 1988) and ” his angelic face, his light clothing, his criminal record and his immoderate taste for risk, even suicidal tendencies. »

The pioneers, the Sunday runners, the crazy summer of 1988, the case of Kilian Jornet (author of the preface)… Jean-Philippe Lefief forgets no one in this exhaustive story, and especially not the girls, even if there are only two who have, for the moment, left their names in the tablets: Emelie Forsberg, 7h53 in 2018, and Hillary Gerardi, 7h25 in 2023.