{"id":109991,"date":"2025-11-12T19:13:57","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T19:13:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/explorersweb.com\/?p=109991"},"modified":"2025-11-12T19:42:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-12T19:42:07","slug":"piolets-dor-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/explorersweb.com\/piolets-dor-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Special Piolets d’Or to Odintsov, Vedrines"},"content":{"rendered":"

This year, the Piolets d’Or has given its Lifetime Achievement Award to Russian high-altitude climber Alexander Odintsov. The committee also awarded a special mention to the tireless French ace Benjamin Vedrines.<\/p>\n

From Soviet to Russian<\/h2>\n

Born in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) in 1957, Alexander Odintsov came from the Soviet school of alpinism. For decades, he excelled in the typical Soviet playgrounds: the Pamirs, the Tien Shan, the Caucasus, and the USSR championships.<\/p>\n

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Odintsov expanded his goals to the world’s big mountain faces, which, until then, he could only dream of.<\/p>\n

At the same time, he stayed loyal to the Russian style of climbing. In 1994, he launched The Russian Way — Big Walls of the World. <\/em>As the Piolets d’Or described it, the project aimed to “climb new routes on the most iconic big walls on Earth, with limited resources, in alpine or capsule style…while reinterpreting the legacy of the Soviet climbing school.” Capsule style means that a big-wall team fixes at least some pitches ahead from a camp, returning to the camp at night, if required.<\/p>\n

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Alexander Odintsov and Alexander Ruchkin on Latok III in 2011. Photo: Alexander Odintsov<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

During the first years of ExplorersWeb in the early 2000s, we covered Odintsov’s expeditions. They were always daring and ambitious, always on a shoestring budget, and often epic. His teams combined the best climbers of the former USSR and a younger generation who soon made history in the post-Cold War world. Among these were Dmitry Golovchenko<\/a> and Sergey Nilov<\/a>, double Piolets d’Or recipients, who perished in consecutive expeditions on Gasherbrum IV.<\/p>\n

The dream walls<\/h2>\n

Odintsov’s dream was to climb 10 big walls around the world, in modern yet “Russian” style. He and his teams climbed nine of them. Here is the impressive list:<\/p>\n