The episode title already says the essential. Head in the clouds, yes, for the dreamer who made the sky her trade. Feet on the ground too, for the strategist who prepares every detail before jumping. That double nature is not a contradiction, it is the heart of her keynote “De l'Audace” : really daring assumes you have worked on the ground for what will make the flight possible.
Mordu #30 · Domitille Kiger
Mordu, the season's last “Fat Interview”
Mordu is a podcast for boardsports and outdoor enthusiasts. To close its third season, Mathieu Gosselin sets up his microphones in Poitiers, in the zerOGravity wind tunnel that Domitille opened with her partners, at the entrance to Futuroscope. The exchange is long and candid. It follows her path, from the teenager in Paris who dreamed of hanging out with the adults to the world champion in vertical formation skydiving, then to the entrepreneur behind an eight million euro project.
The dream first, the preparation next
At twelve, she asks to make a jump. She gets a gentle pat on the head: come back in three years. Three years, for her, is a quarter of her life. She waits anyway. At fifteen, she does her tandem. Then, to pay for her training, she spends a summer making pizzas, then several seasons at the snack bar of a dropzone from seven in the morning to eleven at night, then packing other people's parachutes.
Passion is contagious, video is photogenic. The work that makes it possible is not. That is the first root of the Flight Plan, one of the three pillars of her RECORD Protocol: what people admire in the air was prepared on the ground, patiently, with no audience.
Do not wait until the fear is gone
Asked about people who dream of jumping but do not dare, she gives advice that sums up her view of daring: do not wait for the absence of fear, it will not come. Sweaty palms, a racing heart, the thoughts asking “why are we doing this again”, all of that is normal. The only genuinely hard moment, she says, is stepping through the door. Once outside, the stress gives way to the flight.
Daring is therefore not the absence of fear, it is the decision to go through it anyway, once you have prepared. Exactly what she now passes on to teams that hesitate to decide.
The accident, or telling the risk that costs from the one that makes you grow
This is the strongest moment of the interview. In 2010, during a formation jump, Domitille makes a half turn so as not to miss her next aircraft and, in full freefall, hits a skydiver she had not seen, at a hundred and twenty-five miles per hour. She talks about it without looking for an excuse: the error of judgment was hers. The other person is saved by his automatic activation device, the unit that opens the reserve parachute if the speed is still that of a fall. She gets two broken vertebrae, two weeks before her first world championships.
Two things in that account sum up everything she teaches. First, the clarity in the moment: in survival mode, she runs a cold checklist, get back belly to earth, deploy, take the controls, aim for the landing area. Then the reading she makes of it afterward. That risk cost dearly, she analyzes it without hedging, and four months later she sets the women's world record in head down flying. A risk taken on, understood, turned into a lever. That is exactly the distinction Fatal / Vital she places at the heart of her keynote: not every risk is equal, and knowing how to sort them is a skill, not a posture.
Flying together: each person's trajectory commits the team
She describes the formation jump as an air display where, instead of aircraft, there are humans. A leader holds the trajectory, the speed, the angle. The others adjust their flight to stay with them. And above all, at breakoff, each person has to deploy in an agreed direction, fanning out, so nobody crosses paths. Everyone's safety rests on each person's discipline.
You recognize her grammar of the collective there: perform together. What she lives with two hundred skydivers, where everyone carries a share of responsibility for the result, transfers to a team that has to move as one. And when she lands, injured, her teammates run toward her. The trust that binds the group is the pillar she calls the Parachute : what lets you dare because you know you are held.
Looking at what is uncomfortable
One last revealing trait: the way she handles the carbon footprint of her sport, an uncomfortable subject she does not go around. She lays out the options (offsetting, electric aviation), refuses the comfort of the comparison that soothes the conscience without solving anything, and above all argues for having the debate. That honesty in the face of what is awkward is the same clarity that, inside a team, tells the real issues from the false ones.
- What impresses in public was prepared backstage. Valuing the invisible work avoids mistaking the feat for luck.
- Daring is not being free of fear. A prepared team decides in spite of uncertainty, instead of waiting for it to lift.
- A risk taken on and understood can become a lever. That still assumes you look at it rather than deny it.
- Collective safety rests on each person's discipline. Inside a team, one member's trajectory commits the whole group.