An American's Guide to Olympic Climbing

Olympic climbing turns the suspense of watching Tom Cruise hanging off the side of a building into a sport requiring stunning physical—and mental—flexibility.

This is part 3 of RINGS RODGE, a roughly 15-part series where Olympics obsessive and journalist Rodger Sherman breaks down a different sport every day heading up to the 2024 Paris Olympics. You can probably get serious previews of the most popular sports on other sites… here, we’re doing unserious previews of sports that aren’t regularly on TV in between the four years between Olympics. Rodger didn’t really time things right so he’s not going to be able to get to all the sports BUT HE’S GOING TO TRY HIS BEST TO DO AS MANY AS POSSIBLE.

Today: CLIMBING!!!

Why should I care about Olympic climbing?

There’s nothing more suspenseful than watching someone hanging on a sheer wall with everything in the balance—there’s a reason it happens in every action movie. (And, sadly, The Lion King.)

Olympic climbing bottles that suspense and turns into a sport we can watch on TV. The stakes are a little bit lower than when Tom Cruise is escaping some shadowy international supervillain, but still: You’re watching someone’s career come down to desperate swings and flings between flimsy finger-holds.

You know what makes it even more suspenseful? When the person hanging off the side of a wall is not simply hanging, but actively contorting their body into a shape that should only be achievable by silly putty or an MMA fighter being put in a submission hold by a better MMA fighter.

(Picture is from the 2020 Pan-American Olympics qualifiers in Los Angeles in 2020—a deeply normal time to host an international sporting event.)

So hold on, “climbing” is an Olympic sport?

Yes, and it’s here to stay.

The 2021 Olympics seemed kinda hallucinated, I get it. (Same with the NBA bubble and the weird Rays-Dodgers World Series in Arlington, Texas.) But climbing debuted at the Tokyo Olympics as an “optional” sport chosen by Tokyo hosting committee. Paris used one of its optional slots on climbing too. And I guess after two hosting committees used an “optional” slot on climbing, the IOC just decided to add the sport full-time, meaning sport climbing will be in every Olympics from now on

How does this sport work?

There are two main categories of Olympic climbing: One based on pure speed, the other based on overall climbing ability.

The easiest to understand is the speed event. It’s a head-to-head race where two competitors scurry up a 45-foot wall in about five seconds. Across all sports, it’s probably the quickest Olympic event—unless one of the racers falls off. Then it takes a while.

The speed event has cheap thrills and big crashes—but to watch people hang on for dear life, check out the other event. It’s a “combined” competition featuring boulder and lead climbing, which are two separate events on the World Cup circuit but just one at the Olympics. In both events, climbers are shown a course they’ve never seen before, and graded on how far they get on that course. Boulder courses are short but extremely tricky, and the climbers are allowed to fall off and re-try the course as many times as they want within a time limit. Lead courses feature one absolutely massive wall, and contestants are eliminated when they fall off—thankfully, they’re strapped to ropes so they don’t fall to their deaths.

Both boulder and lead are heavy on a problem-solving element which doesn’t exist in speed climbing, where the course is the same every time. Climbers are proud to be both physically and mentally flexible—they don’t just have to get to the top, they have to figure out how to get to the top. They have a few minutes before the competition to look at the wall and figure out how to get to the top—you’ll often see competitors talking it through together, even though they’re trying to beat each other.

In Tokyo, all three climbing styles were lumped into one medal event. Not only was this a raw deal for speed climbers, who little shot at winning the medals, but the speed results also altered the standings among boulder/lead climbers. American Nathaniel Coleman was first in the bouldering competition, but a fall in the speed competition left him well behind Spain’s Alberto Ginés López in the overall standings, bumping him from gold to silver. Now everybody can focus on what they’re best at.

So that guy from Free Solo is going to win the gold medal, right?

No, he likes to stay outside. I sense beef between the outdoor adventure folks who consider climbing to be more of a   ✨lifestyle✨ and the indoor competition climbers who have turned it into a graded sport—and there’s nothing more vicious than outdoors hobby beef, so I have to no-comment.

Are there any GOATs in the Paris Olympics?

Slovenia’s greatest athlete, Janja Garnbret. (Sorry, Luka!)

I almost don’t recommend watching her highlight videos, because she makes the sport look too easy.

Trust me, all the other competitors are flailing and falling on these same courses where Janja casually reaches the top. She’s like a video game character pre-programmed to balance on every railing and latch onto every overhang, except she doesn’t glitch.

Garnbret has won 18 IFSC World Championships and World Cup seasons; nobody else in history has more than 12. And that number is going to go up. Since winning the gold medal in Tokyo, Garnbret has entered 25 IFSC events. She’s won 21 and finished second in the other four. Bronze? Never heard of her.

As the best boulder climber alive and the best lead climber alive, it’s almost impossible to imagine somebody beating her in the combined boulder/lead climbing event. The best chance for anybody else to win gold in Paris came when Janja broke her toe last year… but she simply kept training on one foot, and now feels her left foot is stronger than her naturally dominant right foot.

When she’s not competing, she likes dominating seemingly unclimbable outdoor boulders. In May, she became the first woman to ascend the Bugeleisen boulder in Austria, then decided her coach/cameraman didn’t do a good enough job recording it, and climbed it again.

Can Team USA medal?

It took 3 parts of this series, but I finally reached a sport where Team USA has a shot at medaling.

America’s best chance at gold is 18-year old speed climber Sam Watson who is, conveniently, speedily climbing up the world rankings. In April, Watson broke the world record with a 4.85-second climb in a qualifying round of a World Cup event in Wujiang, China… then came back 45 minutes later in the second qualifying round and broke his own world record, lowering it to 4.79. Here are both world record runs:

“Does breaking my own record count as getting [the world record] twice? I don’t know,” Watson asked.

But speed climbing is a fickle sport: Championships are decided in a single-elimination bracket and each head-to-head race is decided by split-seconds. Despite setting two world records, Watson actually lost the Wujiang event in the finals to Chinese climber Peng Wu. At his best, he’s the fastest in the world and should win gold… but a single slip can derail the dream.

Team USA also has a gold contender in speed on the women’s side in Emma Hunt, the silver medalist at last year’s World Champs—and again, anything can happen in 5-second long races. In the boulder/lead event, Colin Duffy and Brooke Raboutou medaled at last year’s World Champs, so it’s entirely plausible that Americans medal in every climbing event in Paris.