Introduction

We will forever remember the Beau Rivage Hotel on Lake Léman in Switzerland. It was early June 1986 and we were attending an angioplasty course in Lausanne, Switzerland. At that time, we were a little bit “orphaned”, since Andreas Grüntzig had left us without warning. Alain Cribier had just performed his first percutaneous aortic valve balloon dilatations…and then, suddenly, Jacques Puel announced that he had implanted “springs” into human coronary arteries. He was our “philosopher” physician, sometimes poet, fascinated by the flight of swallows combining lightness and liberty. Without knowing it, we were in a transitional phase, entering into the coronary stent era which, initially, was far from being “a long steady river”. Let’s go back to those days and try to understand how this crazy idea of implanting an endoprosthesis in a coronary artery gradually emerged.