Thierry Vladikine dies at 62

Paratrooper and bike rider Thierry Vladikine died Sunday on the age of 62. He had been battling sickness and was checked into the Clinique Claude Bernard in Albi.

Vladikine was a member of the French Marines‘ eighth Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment within the Nineteen Eighties, significantly working on the garrison in Castres. The 8^e RPIMa (8^e Régiment de Parachutistes d’Infanterie de Marine) primarily serves as a peacekeeping unit.

In1988, he entered the Paris–Dakar Rally on a Suzuki DR 600 ready by twice champion Gaston Rahier. The next 12 months, Vladikine switched to a Kawasaki KLR 650.

He wrapped up his service as a grasp corporal. In 2021, Vladikine was amongst 236 former army personnel—together with thirty Marines—who signed an open letter penned by former officer Jean-Pierre Fabre-Bernadac to President Emmanuel Macron to warn of civil warfare if the nation continued upon its present trajectory. The letter, closely proper wing and anti-immigrant in rhetoric, acquired an endorsement from far-right chief and presidential aspirant Marine Le Pen and was considered a risk of a coup d’état.

“It’s with disappointment that I inform you that the eighth Para Thierry Vladikine has simply made his final soar, to affix the DZ (drop zone) of the courageous beneath the wings of our patron saint Michel,” reads a press release from an unofficial 8^e RPIMa site run by paratrooper Jean-Daniel Salles. “Died in his 62nd 12 months on July 14, 2024 of sickness on the C.Bernard clinic in Albi. He had served with the 8 RPIMa within the Nineteen Eighties on the HQ of the Regiment. A bike fanatic, he had run the Paris-Dakar beneath the colours of the eighth.”

His service and burial will likely be at Le Mée-sur-Seine.