August 07, 2022 - Pieter as my witness.

I has been wanting to try "Pirouette Cacaouette" since 2013 when we filmed Daniel Olausson for Neil Hart's movie 'Out of Sight', but it was way out of my league back then. Considering the height of the boulder, I never came back to try it alone, but today Pieter agreed to go and try it.
We both had miserable sweaty hands, and were struggling with the first part at first, but after some time, the slopers got slightly better, but I couldn't do the dynamic move to the vertical crimp high up. The boulder being so high, it is not possible to work out that move separately, so everything had to be from the ground up and I hadn't bothered setting up the camera yet as the move to the vertical crimp had to feel possible first. After some time, I started as usual, but when I got to the point of doing the move to the vertical crimp, I suddenly did something that I hadn't seen anybody else do in any of the videos that I had watched. Instead of going to the vertical crimp dynamically, I first switched to a low undercling left hand and was able to place a heelhook where my left hand was earlier. This allowed to me take the high vertical crimp statically. When I had the crimp good and did the next move successfully, I knew that an easier part followed and for a fraction of a second I thought of jumping off to setup the camera first, but when Pieter encouraged me to climb on,  I did so and topped out this hidden gem.
I had mixed feelings, knowing that a video repeat immediately after topping out tends to be harder due to being less motivated or climbing with too much confidence, making tiny mistakes. Unfortunately this was also the case today and on top of that, the skin was feeling worse with every repeat attempt that followed, so eventually I had to throw in the towel for doing a video repeat. At least I have Pieter as my witness of successfully topping out.

Below a short video video of a few failed attempts trying to repeat it for the video.