a 60-year-old man climbs a Paris skyscraper for pensions

When, during the summer of ’61, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko created the character of spider man in it 625 Madison Avenue, in Manhattan, where the offices were Marvelneither of them imagined that a Frenchman named Alain Robert I would put flesh and bone to the red and blue strokes. known as the ‘French Spiderman’, this man raised in Burgundy has climbed this Wednesday a skyscraper in Paris to protest against Macron and his pension reform, which delays the retirement age from 62 to 64 years.

“I’m here to show my support to those who oppose the pension reform. I want to tell President Emmanuel Macron to go back down to earth… climbing without a safety net,” he told Reuters before beginning his ascent of Tour Alto.

A while later, Robert was waving from the top, dressed in red, 150 meters closer to the sun than his compatriots who were cheering him from the sidewalks of the La Defense district. Completed the climb without any kind of harnessusing only his bare hands and a pair of climbing shoes.

Last weekend, after several months of tug-of-war with the unions, mass strikes and violent demonstrations, Macron signed his pension reform into law. “I’ll have to keep climbing longer“Robert said about it.

Spiderman’s first appearance hit the newsstands in August 1962. It was issue 15 of ‘Amazing Fantasy’ magazine. That same month of that same year Alan Robert was born in Digoin. A coincidence that would threaten the eternal debate between whose idea was Spiderman, Lee or Ditko, with a resounding answer: neither of them. The real Spiderman may be Robertnow that it seems more real than the fantasy of the Marvel writer and cartoonist.

[Spiderman a la cárcel: ocho años para el ladrón del Picasso]

Hundreds of climbs

Since that August of 1962 have been published thousands of issues of spiderman comicsin addition to various adaptations to films, television series and video games.

Also, thanks to Robert, the myth of Spiderman has climbed over 150 towering structures around the world. Architectural works such as the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the Everest of human constructions, the Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate in San Francisco or the Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai.

His skill and courage in urban climbing – he always climbs without any security equipment– have made him a very popular figure all over the world. The first great feat of him is possibly the ascent, in 1994, of the iconic Empire State Building in New York.

A year later he climbed the Montparnasse Tower of Paris, the tallest building in Europe at the time. With the rise of the Eiffel Tower he earned the nickname ‘French Spiderman’ and, in 1997, scaled the impressive petronas twin towers from Kuala Lumpur.

Among its milestones of the 21st century are the ascent to the Agbar Tower Barcelona in 2006 (144 meters high and difficult to climb due to its unique oval shape) and the climbing of the Burj Khalifa in 2011, the tallest building in the world (828 meters). To Barcelona, ​​by the way, he returned in 2011 to climb the 116 meters of the hotel in just a quarter of an hour Melia Barcelona Sky.

[Los Mossos denuncian a un hombre por escalar la Torre Agbar]

Meanwhile, the fight in France against the pension reform continues and, at the same time that the ‘French Spiderman’ climbed the Tour Alto this Wednesday, he announced that the general secretary of the French Democratic Confederation of Labor (CFDT) Laurent Berger.

“It is not a whim or a decision dictated by current affairs,” explained Berger, 54, in an interview with ‘Le Monde’. Berger is one of the main faces of the social movement against the pension reform and has said that he made this decision to “respect the collective rules”. Alain Robert, for his part, has titled his feat: “La gente”.