When I first started climbing, sometime in the early 1990s, Jerry Moffatt’s name is one of the first I remember hearing. And, even though the lycra outfits he still sported (along with the Le Menestrel brothers, Wolfgang Güllich, John Bachar, and the other big names of 1980s climbing) already seemed bizarre and embarrassingly outdated, it was clear that, fashion aside, these were the guys to be emulated. Years later, as I began to climb a little harder, The Real Thing, a film he made with Ben Moon about bouldering in Fontainebleau, became the soundtrack to countless training sessions. It was with these memories in mind that I ordered a copy of Moffatt’s autobiography, Revelations, when it was released this year.

In an interview with a US climbing magazine, Moffatt was once asked what he liked most about climbing. ‘I like burning people off’, he replied. This is probably a good thing, given that ‘burning people off’ is what Moffatt did pretty consistently for a good part of two decades at the top of the climbing scene. From his precocious ascent of the still-scary Master’s Wall in 1983 at the age of 20, to the cutting edge first ascent of The Ace, a Font 8b boulder problem on Stanage gritstone 17 years later, Moffatt was at or near the top of the game.

With Masters Wall and The Ace roughly marking the start and finish of both this book and of Moffatt’s professional career, Revelations covers, in great detail, the many hard ascents in between. While Moffatt does tend to talk himself up – being sure to note that he beat Ben Moon to doing all the hard moves on Hubble, for example – he is also remarkably candid about his own struggles to find motivation, beat injury, and get up cutting-edge routes again and again. One is constantly reminded just how hard, hard climbing really is and of the level of training and commitment required to stay at the top level of the sport.

Moffatt is at his best when he talks about the life of a climber.

It is difficult not to be infected by his enthusiasm and love for the sport when he talks about the years he spent living in caves and dossing in leaking barns, hitching to crags in the rain and snow, living on fifteen quid a week, caring about nothing but going climbing every day, all the time. And one can only be pleased for him when sponsorship and competition victories finally pay enough to buy him a house and the fast cars and motorbikes that he seems to crash both regularly and spectacularly.

But, what makes this book more than a simple autobiography and what, ultimately, makes it worth reading is the fact that it talks about much more than the life of just one climber. In effect, what Moffatt has written is a history of modern sport climbing. Despite the fact that his history is selective, focusing largely on one man (Moffatt himself) and on one country (the UK) it still manages to cover tremendous ground. It describes Kurt Albert’s coining of the phrase ‘to redpoint’, as he slowly freed the red paint-marked aid routes of the Frankenjura and the great debates that accompanied the slow replacement of ‘yo-yo-ing’ and other trad practices with bolting and modern sport climbing ethics. Moffatt also covers the evolution of training methods, describing, for example, a season spent living in Germany with Güllich, training on his newly-built campus board and the unprecedented strength gains they achieved with this ‘secret weapon.’ He even talks about the development of bouldering, from a revolutionary method of training for hard sport routes to its emergence as a fully-fledged sport in its own right, a sport that gradually became the focus of Moffatt’s own career.

Jerry is apparently more interested in surfing and in golf these days (no word yet on whether he has managed to ‘burn anyone off’ on the putting green). But, despite his absence from the crags, he remains one of climbing’s most entertaining characters and his story, within the larger narrative of sport climbing as a whole, makes for a cracking read.

Ben Buckland, Geneva 2010.

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