Alain Robert on his way to the top of the Hang Seng Bank Head Office building. Mike Clarke / AFP

People think he's mad. Today's real-life Spiderman says he once was afraid of everything but began compensating when one fateful day he found himself locked out of his apartment way up on the seventh floor. Kane Wu reports.

He is 60 percent disabled. He suffers from vertigo. Yet he is the only one in the world who makes a living by scaling buildings. He is Alain Robert.

"He is crazy!" exclaimed a passer-by at Queen Victoria Street Jan 26, while Robert, nicknamed "Spiderman", was climbing up the side railings of the Hang Seng Bank Head Office building in Central.

No harnesses, no helmet, there was only the bare-handed Spiderman in his tight sports jumper and climbing shoes, clawing up the narrow railings of the 137-meter-high skyscraper, one step at a time.

Police officers and firefighters quickly blocked the street as more and more reporters and pedestrians gathered to watch the scene, holding their breath.

Robert didn't cast a sideways glance. His hand grasped the narrow railing, no more than 15 centimeters wide, he carefully extended a leg, in search of his next footing. Up, up, up, steadily. Then, suddenly he stopped.

"What's he doing?!" onlookers gasped as Robert stretched his left arm and left leg in the air with only one hand clinging to the railing.

"Is he feeling tired?" "Will he be able to finish?" People asked anxiously.

Police set up a huge cushion as Alain Robert climbs up the Hang Seng Bank Head Office building on Jan 26. Kane Wu / China Daily

Robert wiped some chalk power from his pocket onto both hands, then continued his upward progress, returning to his previous pace. His silhouette shrank in the cascading sunlight.

Before police set up a huge buffering mattress down on the ground and move into rescue positions, Robert had already reached the top.

"It took me some 40 minutes. I expected to complete faster than that," the 48-year-old Frenchman told reporters after the ascent. It was the fifth time the Spiderman has performed the stunt in Hong Kong, after scaling the Cheung Kong Centre in 2005 and 2009, the Four Seasons Place in 2008 and the two Lippo Centre buildings back in 1996.

The Hang Seng Bank building, being the shortest of all, ranks only "five in a scale of 10" on Robert's list of buildings.

"It was just a small ascent but it was not so easy. I was surprised," he said.

In fact, anyone would be surprised to see Robert, a 1.65-meter-tall man weighing only 52 kg, was able to do this at all. The French native of Digoin, Saone-et-Loire, Bourgogne, has conquered 85 giant structures around the globe so far, including the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Empire State Building in New York, Malaysia's Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur and the Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai. Sometimes he carries a mission with him. Sometimes, he climbs just for fun.

"As a young boy I was shy, afraid of heights and lacking confidence. I was kind of afraid of everything," he tells China Daily in an exclusive interview.

When he is not climbing, he wears a blue leather jacket and a pair of blue leather pants, which, combined with his long draping hair, makes him even more iconic.

His passion for climbing was triggered quite by accident. He was locked outside his home one day when he was 11. Both of his parents were working. So the little boy had no choice but to climb up the building into his own house. "The first ascent was quite something to me even if it was just a seven-story building with balconies," recalls Robert. Since that day, he has known that climbing is the only thing he's ever wanted to do in life.

"It was my pleasure. It was my dream. But it was not so easy for someone who had no skill and who was afraid of everything," he says. As a little boy, he practiced on the building he lived in and various rock faces in his hometown, a mountainous city in eastern France, adventuring into cliffs and even icefalls later on.

"The darkest hours in my life were when I had to work in a sports shop just to have enough food on the table and a roof over my head," Robert says. He couldn't bear even an hour without climbing or just thinking about it. The young boy eventually quit the 18-hour-a-week job to become a full-time professional climber.

"At one stage, the banks were eating my money. I was in big debt and everything was a mess," he says. But two years later, he began to attract sponsors, who gave him free sportswear and free climbing trips: it became a sustainable business.

In every great story there is twist and turn, so it is with Robert's story. His climbing career almost came to a full stop in 1982, when he fell from a cliff straight onto a sharp rock face 15 meters below. His head touched the ground first, and both his wrists were smashed when he tried to support himself with the arms. He lost a lot of blood and was in a coma for several days. When he woke up, the first thing he heard from the doctor was, "you won't be able to climb again." The worst news he had ever heard.

"But I didn't want to give up. I was thinking, what is important? It is to climb," Robert says. "So if you can't climb some difficult stuff, at least you can claw on something easy."

He trained himself by simple climbing exercises on a wall near his apartment. "At first I could only claw up 15 centimeters and it took ages," he says. "But the funny thing is after two years, I was even better than ever!"

The Spiderman miraculously recovered and gradually moved his domain from cliffs to skyscrapers, even though his wrists cannot rotate to this day. "I need to use my shoulders if I want to rotate. And I felt strong pain in my wrist all the way from bottom to top but there was nothing I could do until I reached the top," he said after the Hang Seng Bank ascent.

The pain has accompanied him in most of his ascending challenges. But what is more challenging is the police. He spent a week in jail in the United States and nearly got caned in Singapore after scaling the buildings there. In Japan and the United Kingdom, the police sometimes try to obstruct him while he is on the way to ascend. The Hong Kong police, by comparison, are "very nice". Robert had to stay in the Hang Seng Bank building for two hours after the ascent while his lawyer negotiated with the police. In the end, he was released without charge, just like the previous four times he had come into confrontation with police in the city.

"The legal side is always overtaken by the personality side. Usually Alain manages to charm everyone," his local lawyer John Pickavant tells China Daily. "At the end of the day, no one is hurt. No one is really inconvenienced. And everyone's life is a little bit richer."

Pickavant is one of Robert's many designated lawyers around the world. All are working for him as friends. As he travels around the world, local liaisons help him contact the press and organize speeches, all for free as well.

His Hong Kong liaison, publisher Pete Spurrier, explains his charisma, "He dresses like a rock star. He behaves like one. He's a unique human being. I've never heard or met anyone like him."

Spurrier published the English version of Robert's autobiography With Bare Hands in 2008. The book, originally in French, had already been translated into German, Russian and Italian before that.

Now, apart from scaling buildings, Robert also gives speeches around the world, which promises a decent income. Approaching the age of 50, the father of three boys however still has no plan to retire. "I have no idea what I would do if I had to quit. Why would I spend time speculating so much?" he says. "As long as I'm in good health, I still want to do the same stuff."

Robert plans to scale ten or eleven buildings in 2011. His next target is the newly opened Burj Khalifa in Dubai, currently the highest building in the world. He might also come back to Hong Kong in the near future. "I wanted to climb the IFC. They tried to get me the approval but they haven't succeeded," Robert says. "If one day they get the approval and organize a big charity event, I'm willing to do it."

The Spiderman has never bought any life insurance for himself. "My mind is my insurance," he says.

Aren't you afraid? People always ask him. The daredevil answers with a smile, "A lot of people are dreaming but they don't have the guts to make their dreams come true. At least I'm the one who did it. I'm not afraid of dying, I'm afraid of not living."

Alain Robert, 48, nicknamed "French Spiderman", has astonished the world with his climbing of 85 skyscrapers. Mike Clarke / AFP

(HK Edition 02/17/2011 page4)