Why Olympic Sport Climbing is Actually Pretty Cool This Time

My main memory of the Olympic Sport Climbing event in Toky0 2020 is that it was (a) confusing, and (b) a shambling mess. I came away feeling that the organizers’ incomprehensible decision to jam two totally different sports together—speed climbing, with its emphasis on moving quickly up an easy route, and lead and bouldering, with their emphasis on pure difficulty—ended up creating an event that was unfair to just about every athlete participating in it.

Luckily, there are two major differences between the Olympic Sport Climbing event (singular) that debuted in Tokyo three years ago and the Sport Climbing events (plural) that we’re watching in Paris this week.

Speed Is Now its Own Event

Paris 2024 has two Sport Climbing events, with speed athletes competing for one gold medal while Boulder & Lead athletes vie for another. Is this a big deal? Emphatically yes. In a 2021 article I wrote that to ask a speed athlete to compete in Boulder & Lead is less like asking a 100-meter runner to compete in the marathon than asking a short track speed skater to compete in figure skating—two radically different sports that happen to involve ice. I still believe that. And, as evidence, I point to the fact that no athlete in Paris is competing in both the Speed and the Boulder & Lead Combined events.

Someday, perhaps, the Olympics will emulate the IFSC World Championships and give Sport Climbing four medals (Speed, Boulder, Lead, and Boulder & Lead Combined). But for now, simply carving Speed off makes sense. Many athletes excel at both Boulder and Lead. Janja Garnbret, Adam Ondra, Jakob Schubert, Colin Duffy, Toby Roberts, and Anraku Sorato have all won World Cups in both events—and a majority of the climbers in the Olympics have podiumed in both at the World Cup level.

The Combined Format Has a New Scoring Structure

Because Speed is no longer part of the Combined event, the Combined event’s scoring in Paris relies—intuitively—on athletes accumulating points based upon how far they climb up the boulders and lead walls.

In Tokyo, where Speed was included, this cumulative scoring structure couldn’t work, since nearly everyone gets to the top of the speed wall. Instead, Olympic organizers devised a ridiculously confusing system in which, at the end of each discipline, climbers were given points correlating to their finishing rank. The combined score was then reached by multiplying the results from each of the disciplines—with the lowest three scores earning medals. (For example, Adam Ondra placed fourth in Speed, sixth in Boulder, and second in Lead in the Tokyo Olympic final, so his combined score was 48 (4 x 6 x 2). Alberto Ginés López won gold with a score of 28, having placed first in Speed, seventh in Boulder, and fourth in Lead.) The frustrating—but also sort of fascinating—thing about the multiplication structure was that scores changed drastically with slight variations in finishing order. Whenever a climber passed another climber’s high point on the lead wall, for instance, everyone else’s scores changed too, which made following the event intensely anxiety provoking. Reporting on it for Climbing, I watched with a notepad and a calculator at hand, always half convinced that I’d made an error and was entirely misunderstanding the state of the competition.

In Paris, the scoring is far less convoluted—but it’s still got complexity. The TLDR version is that scoring is based on how far you get up each of the four boulders and the lead route in each round. How logical! But in reality it’s not quite so simple, so if you’re not familiar with that yet, read our article How Is Olympic Sport Climbing Scored?

All this is very cool (and good for the sport) for three reasons:

Speed Climbers Don’t Get Shafted

Before 2016, when Sport Climbing’s inclusion in the Olympics was first announced, Speed walls were quite rare in commercial climbing gyms in the United States—and speed climbing was generally considered some weird aberration popular only in Iran and Indonesia and various post-Soviet nations. As a result, U.S. viewers tended to interpret Speed’s inclusion in the Tokyo Combined event based on how it might pollute the results generated by the Boulder and Lead events that we actually cared about. We tended to forget, in other words, that for the speed specialists and their fans, Tokyo was a total disaster. Since their discipline did not prepare them to do well in Lead or Boulder, the math was against them, which meant that only three speed climbers made the finals—two by winning semis outright, the third (France’s Anouck Jaubert) by also topping two boulders in the bouldering round. In finals, Aleksandra Mirosław easily won Speed, but—as she and everyone else understood would happen—was trounced in the other two rounds and therefore, despite setting a new world record, did not medal.

This year, that’s not the case. Aleksandra Mirosław is back, and she’s still the best speed climber in the world, and if she performs in quarter finals and finals like she did in Monday’s semis (where she broke her own world record twice and is pushing the time down toward the 6 second mark), she’ll certainly have a medal to hang on her wall.

The Combined Event Gains Credibility

In Tokyo, only one male speed specialist, France’s Bassa Mawem, qualified for finals—but after winning the early Speed rounds and ensuring his final slot, he ruptured his bicep on the semifinal lead route. As a result, Mawem wasn’t able to take place in finals, which basically meant that the remaining seven men, all of whom were specialized boulderers and/or lead climbers, suddenly found that their speed skills actually mattered, which threw a ton of randomness into the event. Ultimately, it was by winning Speed that Alberto Gines Lopez—who finished fourth in Lead and seventh in Boulder—took Olympic gold, and it was by doing surprisingly well in Speed (he placed fourth) that Adam Ondra was, for about 15 seconds, in gold medal contention.

Because of the important role that Speed ended up playing in the men’s field, viewers were left feeling like there was a real disconnect between the event’s ostensible purpose (identifying the best climber on that particular day) and the tests to which climbers were submitted. If you’d subtracted the Speed event, for instance, you’d have gotten very different results, and would have needed a different way of identifying victors. (Nathaniel Coleman won Boulder and came in fifth in Lead; Jakob Schubert came in fifth in Boulder and won Lead; Colin Duffy came in fourth and third respectively; who would have won?)

Retroactively removing Speed from the competition isn’t particularly fair, of course, since Speed was part of the competition whether people like me like it or not, and since randomness (sometimes in the form of injury) is actually one of the more interesting elements of competitions. Without it we’d get bored. But the event’s structure did lead a lot of people to essentially dismiss the results as the fluke byproduct of an Olympic bureaucracy that categorically misunderstood what climbing was about and therefore structured a competition such that it was impossible for the results to actually reflect who the best climber was. “Cool,” they thought. “Now let’s go back to valuing World Cups.”

Such critics should note, however, that, in the Olympic bureaucracy’s defense, things went far better in the women’s field, where two speed specialists—Aleksandra Mirosław and Anouck Jaubert—managed to qualify for finals and then took first and second place in Speed. This, as organizers no doubt intended, left the Bouldering and Lead rounds to operate more or less as their own competition. We turned a blind eye while the speed climbers pretended to try on boulders and routes far harder than they’ll ever climb, and then we watched Janja Garnbret crush absolutely everything as expected.

The Competition Is Easier to Watch—and Understand

One of the great problems with Tokyo, as noted above, was that it was incredibly hard to understand the state of the overall competition while watching it—which was annoying for climbers like me, but potentially off-putting to non-climbers, who had to endure watching a strange (to them) sport described via a strange (to them) vocabulary and scored via an incomprehensible (to everyone) scoring system. Now, thanks to the new scoring format, it’s pretty easy to follow the state of the competition. Sure, if you’re an English major like me, you may still want to keep your calculator handy—but for the rest of you, it’s just addition. How hard can it get?

Note: If you’re interested in an in-depth analysis of why the Tokyo Olympics kinda sucked in a fascinating way, check out my 2021 story, How Can You Set a World Record and Not Medal in the Olympics?  It describes how Adam Ondra went from probably winning gold to taking sixth  place when, thanks to some brilliant climbing by Jakob Schubert, he came in second rather than first in Lead. It also, as the title suggests, demonstrates how the speed specialists were even more disadvantaged by the combined structure than the lead climbers.