Farewell to Maxim Petrenko, extraordinary Ukrainian climber

From Ukraine comes the tragic news of the death of Maxim Petrenko, hit by a mortar in the battle for Toretsk. Anyone who took part in climbing competitions around the new millennium will remember Petrenko well, both for his immense physical strength and for his slightly weird and wonderful way of interpreting climbing and life.

Born in Lugansk in 1978, Petrenko formed part of that new generation of climbers from the East who travelled to Italy, France and the rest of Europe for months on end to dominate climbing competitions and make the crags tremble. The likes of Serik Kazbekov, Nataliya Perlova, Evgeny Ovchinnikov, Maxim Stenkovoy, Maxim Osypov, Olena Ryepko, Olga Shalagina ... just to name a few of this motley "gang" of climbers, all driven by a love for climbing that had few equals.

Alberto Marazzi describes that period in the early 2000s well: "They all came to sleep at my parents' home, who luckily have a big house. They slept everywhere because there were so many of them, and then the great thing is that during their wanderings across Europe, they always stopped by to say hello to us, to say hello to my parents Franco and Luciana. Often they wanted to cook, as a sign of gratitude perhaps (God, did the house stink of onions!), then we'd all have dinner together. And then of course we'd train on the boards and obviously they smash the living daylights out of us "Westerners", all perfect and know-it-all. They on the other hand were… disarmingly simple, and the most incredible thing of all was their mental game. Determined to the core, so much so that they could make black white."

Petrenko was certainly one of the greatest in this group. Youth World Champion in Moscow in 1997, third at the World Championships in Birmingham in 1999, numerous podiums in the Lead World Cup in the 2000s. In short, a huge talent, capable of sending 8c+ when this was considered almost the max. A power of nature, and above all an infinite joy of life. But this all suddenly ground to a halt with the wretched war. As his friend Anna Piunova writes, "he didn't want to fight. Didn't want to die." Unfortunately yesterday we received the news that, had someone mentioned it during those crazy days twenty years ago, none of us would ever have believed it.