Rock climbing is expected to be catapulted onto the world stage by becoming an Olympic sport. Though an official announcement is still a few weeks off, sport insiders say it is to feature at the Tokyo Olympics.
Sport climbing was one of five sports recommended for the Olympics by organizers of the 2020 Games.
The International Federation of Sports Climbing is working out the finer details about how competitors will be scored, but essentially there will be three disciplines, lead climbing, a speed test and bouldering, with the gold medal going to the competitor with the overall highest score.
Some within the sport see inclusion in the Olympics as the ultimate reward for years of hard work. However, others have expressed concern that this could be the first step to regulation, officialdom and the commercial exploitation of a sport that for many years lay beneath the radar.
Shauna Coxsey, 23, who this year became the first Briton to win the Bouldering World Cup in the event’s 17-year history, is one of those who is fully behind climbing becoming an Olympic sport.
“Anything that makes people live a healthier lifestyle is surely a good thing. This will make climbing even more popular and hopefully open it up to people who normally wouldn’t give it a go,” Coxsey said.
Competitive climbing, of which sport climbing is one of the disciplines, secured a foothold in Europe in the early 1980s and then gained traction in the US a decade later. Now, it is gaining a following in other parts of the world.
In a competition, participants are given just a few minutes to analyze a route up a face pre-determined by organizers. Climbing one at a time, whoever gets the highest in the time allotted captures the gold medal.
Unlike traditional climbing, sport climbing relies on permanent anchors like bolts fixed to the rock.
Alex Honnold is widely considered the world’s best free climber. The 30-year-old American said he expected to spend the two weeks of the Tokyo Games doing a solo ascent somewhere on a remote part of the planet.
This was not because he did not care for the Olympics, Honnold told Reuters in an interview last year.
“The real reason I wouldn’t compete in the Olympics is just because I wouldn’t even be able to qualify. Competitive climbing is basically a whole different sub-sport,” he said. “I’m more of an adventurer: lots of travel, lots of new routes outdoors, not so much training inside. I can’t climb at nearly the level required for competition.”
While Honnold enjoys scaling the famed El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, California, or tackling Borneo’s formidable Mount Kinabalu, he says a timed ascent of an artificial mountain does not interest him.
“Last season in Patagonia we attempted a traverse of the Torres that wound up taking 53 hours to get back to camp,” he said, referring to a particularly tricky climbing site. “That kind of fitness and experience does not help at all when a competition lasts a few minutes and takes place on one extremely hard route. It’s like asking an ultra-marathoner if he’d like to win a 100m sprint. Sure, it sounds cool to win the Olympics, but I’ve already gone down a different path.”
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