He took the Mont Joly ski lift (Haute-Savoie), almost like everyone else, on March 25 at 4:30 p.m. Except that two and a half hours later, at nightfall, Matthias Giraud set off for an unprecedented aerial feat: to sign the first night ski base jump in the world. And this by setting off from the west face of the Aiguille Croche (2,487m altitude) in Megève, accompanied by a flare and three LEDs for the only lights. At 60 km / h, the 39-year-old athlete took off from this cliff of the Aravis which he has frequented for fifteen years. But this time after informing the town hall of Megève, and making sure to leave less than thirty minutes after sunset, in order to respect the ban on flying in the dark, so as not to disrupt air traffic.
Matthias Giraud recounts the preparation for this jump which has given rise to an incredible video (already more than a million views), after having skied 200m and having taken off for about twenty seconds before opening his parachute: “I I could barely see the relief, it was a bit of a blind jump. At night, it is essential to know very well the route you are taking and the right exit point from the cliff. This is why he tested the spot twice, the day before and the same morning, while making sure to have “a stable snowpack”.
“A great orchestration work”
One minute of flight in total and a safe landing at the foot of Côte 2000 later, Matthias Giraud talks about this extreme sport that is ski base jumping, which only has around thirty professionals: “It’s in my opinion the most dangerous discipline in base jumping because you add a lot of variables by mixing two sports. We don’t add up the risks, we multiply them. A stick can quickly get tangled in the lines, and the parachute would then not open as expected. There, I had more anxiety jumping at night because there were more uncertainties. It was a big orchestration job. But a night jump is magical. And that allowed me to discover another facet of this spot. This painstakingly planned feat was inspired in part by wingsuiters who flew with flares on their feet. Friend of Matthias Giraud and cameraman, Stefan Laude, present on March 25, just like the drone pilot Lucas Hoarau, gives his vision of this performance.
We were all alone in the mountains and it was magnificent with the onset of darkness. In such a sport, where there is never room for error, the joy is as great as the risk involved. My heart beats every time I film Matthias because whatever happens, he is on his own.
Matthias Giraud then thought of Pascal Jacquemoud, his teacher at the Saint-Nicolas-de-Véroce ski club, who had taught him, at the age of 14, “to ski blindfolded to master skiing above all with his feet”. A native of Evreux (Eure), the person concerned put on skis from the age of one and a half years. At 9, he already felt attracted to base jumping, and he was doing backflips at 15.
“Losing my hero, it fucked me up”
It was in the United States, where he left at the age of 20 to join one of the few business schools in the world located in the mountains, in Durango (Colorado), that he got a taste of base jumping for good. At the same time, in February 2004, he inherited the nickname “super frenchie”, attributed by the announcer of a “big air” competition in which he dropped “a big somersault with a superhero cape in the colors of the French flag”. . This nickname will stick, as will his indelible memory of his first base jumper ski jumps.
“I wanted this environment, a priori hostile, to become my playground and fulfilment”, summarizes the one who rubs shoulders across the Atlantic with a legend of freeride, the Canadian Shane McConkey, until his death in 2009 during a base jump in the Dolomites (Italy). “Losing my hero, it fucked me up,” says Matthias Giraud. For me, it was superman who was dying. He was a super pro, I saw him indestructible. “He has since sought” to perpetuate his memory “by performing jumps sometimes spotted by Shane McConkey, but which he could not achieve due to his sudden death at 39 years old.
“This event has tested my passion”
After narrowly escaping a huge avalanche in 2011 at the Aiguilles Croches, deploying his parachute just in time (more than 10 million views for this spectacular video), March 27, 2013 marked a turning point in the life of Matthias Giraud. It was during a jump at the Pointe d’Areu, in the Aravis massif, still in ski base jump. “The wind made me hit the cliff four times,” he recalls. I flew 1,500m unconscious and crashed into a tree. I had a cerebral hemorrhage for three days, and I had a triple femur fracture. For a year and a half, I couldn’t speak normally. The mountain called me to order that day. “However, the one who became a father for the first time three weeks after this terrible accident, returned to ski base jumping at the beginning of 2014, after “a long reconstruction”.
Did I have to stop everything because I almost died? No, what I want to teach my son is to live his dreams to be fulfilled. This ordeal tested my passion and dedication to the mountains.
Notably sponsored by GoPro, “super frenchie” has been setting world records since June 2019 with the highest jump ever made in ski base jump, jumping from the Red Rocks (4,359 m above sea level), while near the summit of Mont Blanc. Last year, he also became the first man from the Dôme du Goûter (4,304 m) by skiing an 80 m serac, before flying off at 4,000 m between the Aiguille du Goûter and the Aiguille de Bionnassay. .
“We cancel about one out of two scheduled jumps”
Each of these performances for ten years remains marked by the pain of the Pointe d’Areu, as his friend Stefan Leude reminds us. “There was a before and an after,” recalls this paragliding instructor. I had personally refused to accompany him that day and the first thing he said to me in the hospital, with his deformed mouth, was “I should have listened to you”. He had then underestimated the power of the wind on exiting takeoff. Since then, I have somewhat become his surety, and he himself is hyper-vigilant about the wind. We cancel about one out of two scheduled jumps. »
The famous night jump from the Aiguille Croche should have taken place last year. “But the conditions were not met so I did it again, specifies Matthias Giraud. My approach to each project is more thorough now and I ski less explosively. “Becoming Franco-American in 2016, and dividing his life between Oregon and the Alps, “super Frenchie” would have almost settled down. Well, almost what.