Escaping grip of celebrity

"I can't understand why anybody would want to be famous but that seems to be what everyone craves," he says. "People video everything and it's on YouTube the same evening. I just wanted to climb."

Thirty years on from those days, the lorry driver's son from Embsay, near Skipton, lives anonymously in the heart of the Peak District, looking after his two daughters and losing himself in the world of fell running.

At the height of his powers, at the end of the Seventies and the early Eighties, Fawcett was the best climber in Britain and arguably the best on the planet. He emerged at the top just as climbing was booming. Specialist magazines were appearing, sponsors were looking for stars to wear their logos, television was taking an interest and home video players were creating a market for specialist films. He was desperate to pay for his obsessive climbing and as a result became the country's first truly professional rock climber.

Mountaineers like Sir Chris Bonington were already making money from films and books and in the past rock climbers had occasionally managed to carve out a living on the edges of the sport by opening equipment shops or taking clients climbing. Fawcett wanted simply to go climbing. The result was a Faustian pact that he never found comfortable and for which, he admits, he was temperamentally unsuited. Ultimately it left him disenchanted with the sport he had once lived, and sometimes could have died, for. The man who did not feel he had done anything with his day if he had not been climbing came almost to dread going to the crag. Painfully shy, he was a strange paradox, totally relaxed being filmed high on a crag yet uneasy in front of the lens or a live audience at ground level.

In a new autobiography he tells how he first came to public attention when he starred in the BBC series Rock Athlete. The programmes were intended to capture the way that climbers had evolved from bearded blokes who trained in the pub, to super-fit athletes clawing their way up ever-steeper rock. The slow motion title sequence of a wiry Fawcett, stripped to the waist and without a safety rope, flowing effortlessly up a face in Snowdonia grabbed the attention of a wider public.

The final programme showed him, in running shorts and singlet, creating a new climb on Dinas Cromlech, a spectacular 100ft high rock corner which stands like a huge open book above the Llanberis Pass in North Wales.

Fawcett left school in the mid-Seventies with few qualifications though his studies had been going well enough until he discovered climbing at the age of 14. He took shift work and winter factory jobs which did not interfere with his obsession. Nevertheless he twice managed to travel to California's Yosemite Valley, a centre of world climbing where he impressed the locals while living by scavenging half-eaten meals abandoned by tourists.

Later, he trained to be a teacher, using his student grant to finance shoestring trips, sleeping rough and even shoplifting to supplement food supplies.

It was a far cry from the glamorous lifestyles of other top sportsmen or even those of his contemporaries in Europe, where climbing was already big business. The difference came home to him when he signed a German sponsorship deal and a camera crew came to the airport to meet him. He ruefully says: "Get a few headlines in Britain and you are there to be mocked by your mates. Do the same in Germany and someone will give you a BMW." At the time Fawcett was driving a Del Boy-style Reliant Robin.

Getting married concentrated his mind on earning a living. "Since no-one was going to pay me to go to the crag, the most obvious thing was to try to leverage my name into some kind of moneymaking enterprise which allowed me to carry on climbing.

"Now young men and women who do anything significant have at least an idea how to make money out of it but in those days I did not have a clue. I had had lots of exposure in the climbing media and national television but joining the dots to make some cash out of it was not obvious in 1981.

"There's a lot more to being a professional athlete than simply being good at your sport. Some climbers don't mind standing around at trade fairs chatting to complete strangers about how good they are, but I was never one of them. I had to talk myself up and that sort of thing did not come naturally to me. In retrospect I didn't really have the commercial nous to make it a long-term reality."

Fame also brought unwelcome attention, including sniping in the magazines, which he says he was sometimes too thin-skinned to shrug off. At other times there were cat and mouse games with climbing's own paparazzi, eager for shots of the star's latest project. More often it was simply the pressure of constantly being on show, watched by fellow climbers wherever he went, and expected to perform.

At the same time a new generation were snapping at his heels. They were stronger thanks to relentless training regimes and with a more ruthless code of ethics about what was permissible to force a new route. In making his own name Fawcett had pushed the bounds beyond what had previously been considered fair, occasionally straining his own conscience. He says of one breakthrough route. "I think what we did was acceptable – but probably at the wrong end of acceptable."

The new breed would spend days at a time on a route, practising every move until they could eventually climb it. It was an approach that bored the restless Fawcett. By the mid-Eighties he knew the game was almost up. The constant training was getting more and more tedious and he almost dreaded going climbing. So he slipped quietly from the limelight though he continued to work on films, usually behind the camera or as a stunt man.

He took up paragliding, becoming an instructor, and then running. Now, at 54, he competes as a "super-vet", winning medals in his own age group but well behind the leaders.

He still climbs, once again free to enjoy the sport without a need to perform.

Philosophically he says: "I suppose what happened came from it becoming a job and feeling you had to go out. I also blamed if for things that went wrong in my life at the time.

"I can't say I regret anything because I was lucky to be there when I was with all those new routes waiting to be done. But it's been good to recover the fun."

Ron Fawcett Rock Athlete by Ron Fawcett and Ed Douglas, Vertebrate Publishing 20, ISBN978-1-906148-17-1 To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www.yorkshirepost bookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing

is 2.75.