Alain Robert takes high risks as a way of life

　　阿兰-罗伯特视冒险为一种生活方式

　　What do you call a man who scales the world’s highest buildings equipped with only climbing shoes and a bag of chalk powder? Urban climber Alain Robert has earned the nickname ‘Spiderman’ for his barehanded climbs up 50 of the world’s tallest towers.

　　The 42-year-old Frenchman got his start when he forgot the keys to his parents’ apartment. Rather than wait for them, the 12-year-old climbed the exterior walls to the eighth floor. Since then he has scaled Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers, Tokyo’s Shinjuku Tower, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the Empire State Building in New York. Robert has listed Shanghai’s Jin Mao Tower, the third tallest building in the world, as his next goal.

　　“After conquering two of the highest buildings in the world, The Sears and the Petronas Towers, I want to climb the landmark Jin Mao Tower,” he says. “In fact, it’ll be very easy because of its shape and architecture.” What’s after that? Just down the street to the 230-meter-tall International Ocean and Finance Building.

　　Robert never asks permission to perform his daring feats and is used to being arrested by the police at the top of the towers he scales. “Fortunately, the courts usually let me go,” he says, “but I prefer staying in prisons to hospitals.” He should know -- in 1982 he fell 15 metres when a rope came undone and fractured so many bones that the doctors predicted he would never climb again.

　　Six months later, the superhuman Robert proved them wrong by breaking yet another urban climbing record. “I was not willing to give up because I was born to take risks – that is my way of life,” he says. “Modern people are only willing to believe in their computers, while I believe in myself.”