UKH

The first international lead comp in this country for years is underway. 23 Brits have entered. No live stream of the qualifiers that I know about but semis and finals are streamed live tomorrow.

Any favourites? Will be interesting to see how Ashima does. She said she was nervous at Arco, her first adult lead world cup. If she's more relaxed she could certainly threaten Janja's dominance. Ratho must be a good levelling venue in that it's never been used before so no one has an advantage there (except perhaps for Will Bosi perhaps). Would be good to see Molly Thompson Smith do well too. Very talented and climbed well at Arco too.

edit: Looks like Molly has already made it through. Currently in second place with top of one route and a 45+ in the other. I think she will get bumped down a bit but not enough to not make it through.

In reply to stp:

Thanks for the updates, shame there's no live stream for today. Are you just getting your info from soc. med? I was tempted to go through today but figured the parking & logistics would be a bit of a nightmare.

In reply to stp:

I was at the first one at Ratho. Went along through curiosity, thinking it would be a bit rubbish but actually really enjoyed the event.

In reply to Fraser:


Due to the World Cup taking over Ratho I'm thinking of going through to TCA Glasgow tomorrow for the first time ever! But I figure the parking and logistics might be a bit of a nightmare.......... And I wonder if I'll be able to recoup my entry and fuel costs from my Ratho membership

Actually, given the forecast, I now sort of wish I'd bought a ticket for the World Cup......

In reply to Fraser:

Just been looking at the IFSC pages which are updated in real time.

Now it looks like Molly is through in joint 8th place. Hannah Slaney got 14th and Will Bosi is in 11th place. So 3 Brits through to the semis tomorrow.

In reply to stp:

Rather a tall wall, isn't it? So likely to be subject to the 6-minute fiasco.

In reply to Robert Durran:

If you go to TCA, I'd recommend the train then just get the underground to Kinning Park and walk 5 minutes. The parking can be grim there now, but at least p/t access is good compared to Ratho!

In reply to AlanLittle:

Hadn't thought of that. Hopefully the routesetters will try to create routes that tend to climb quickly.

In reply to Fraser:
So was I but checked the website and it said sold out!

In reply to keith-ratcliffe:

Sorry, I meant when I heard it was coming, I'd thought about booking but decided against it for the reasons above. I also went to the first one back in 2003 (?) and enjoyed it a lot.

In reply to stp:

Is it just me or should the semi's not be streaming live now?

youtube.com/watch?v=LByqNWo_UwY&

In reply to Fraser:

Yeah they should be and no, it's not just you. I'm guessing there's a technical hitch somewhere. Hopefully it'll be working soon.

In reply to stp:
Alternative link (not great!)

https://www.olympicchannel.com/en/tv/livestream-4/

Edit: better res. now.

In reply to Fraser:

Nice one. Thanks

In reply to Fraser:

Working alright here. Thanks for the link. I've never watched comp climbing before. I'm pretty certain those rope buckets are the same as I bought from Aldi! I put washing in mine normally though.

In reply to TobyA:
The stream was fine for a while, but it's gone a bit stuttery now, although it could just be my connection which is pretty slow.

Edit: yeah, the instructors at Ratho do favour those buckets for some reason!

In reply to stp:

And indeed we just heard the dread phrase "if she doesn't fall off she'll time out". Jain Kim - who else?

This is simply ridiculous. I can understand the need for competitions to have a predictable duration, but the time limit should be sufficient that somebody has a reasonable chance of getting up a route on a decent height wall.

In reply to AlanLittle:

Fair point. My complaint is my connection (or their feed) - it keeps freezing and I have to return to the IFSC homepage and re-link to the Olympic channel. I've been lucky with when the freezes have occurred so far, but it's very frustrating.

In reply to Fraser:

Youtube working fine for me. (Although I only started half an hour or so ago)

In reply to AlanLittle:

Cheers, will re-check.

In reply to stp:

Thought that was a really good semi. Great effort by Hannah Slaney getting through, though a real shame Molly Thompson Smith just missed out.

Thought the top 3 men looked very strong compared to the rest.

In reply to AlanLittle:


Totally agree. Domen Skofic wrote something against the new rule when they first brought it in too. If you're fit enough to be able to shake out where no one else can you should be able to use that to your advantage.

In reply to stp:

Finals have started and Youtube stream is working

In reply to AlanLittle:


Well that was a prescient comment. Thought the comp, particularly women's final, was a spectacular illustration of the idiocy of that rule. The results were completely confused and may well have been different if there'd been an extra 2 minutes on the clock. Ashima seemed to do really well but doubtless some of her effort was beyond the 6m deadline so simply didn't count. What a great shame. There's already a speed competition so why try to turn the lead comp into a speed comp too? I think this rule is worse than the axing of the 4+ rule in bouldering. All in all a very disappointing final.

Maybe they'll rethink it for next year but the IFSC doesn't seem to have much interest in what anyone else thinks so I certainly wouldn't bet on it.

In reply to stp:

Yes, women's final was totally screwed up by this 6 minutes rule in my opinion.
Must be frustrating for the athletes also, Anak Verhoeven certainly did give that impression in her interview.

In reply to stp:

Not the one who can climb the highest, but the one who can climb the highest without pausing. What's that got to do with onsight climbing?

Sadly, seems like TV is being allowed to dictate the nature of the sport for its own ends
Poor show IFSC.

In reply to john arran:
I spent some time today watching the streamed coverage of the IFSC event at Ratho and really enjoyed it.

I can put aside that it is a world apart from the climbing that I have enjoyed for 45 years but it was engaging and entertaining. Perhaps Competition Climbing is a new game to add to the Classic 'Games Climbers Play' list of Lito Tejada-Flores. However I have a few observations to make from the perspective of a non-climbing audience who might eventually watch this in the Olympics.

Firstly the Speed Climbing. This is the simplest format to watch - the person who gets to the top first in a knockout format is very appealing and immediately understood. The availability of a World Record (If only the wall was a registered eligible installation) adds to the viewability. The fly in this ointment is the false start rule (Recently changed I believe). To see the final won by a cruise because one competitor was eliminated detracted from its appeal. Perhaps a yellow/red card system would be better and easily interpreted by viewers.

The lead climbing is less easy to understand but could be made so with a few changes. Essentially this event is about the ability of a climber to read a route and then execute the moves on sight to complete it. This is quite straightforward but a couple of elements get in the way. Firstly the time limitation - the winner of the Women's event was clearly able to finish the climb but timed out before the top. She was higher than the rest at that point but it would have been far more interesting to see a win by completion - exercising the skills and having the physical attributes to do so - rather than a rather technical issue. The time limit needs to be more generous to allow this - anyone who can hang on for longer should be given credit.

The other aspect that a viewer cannot easily see is how high the climber has reached. This was very complex on the final section of the Ratho Women's final and was only really known to the judges with several climbers falling at a similar point but with different scores. Perhaps an on-screen read-out of the holds passed by climbers would give an audience a clearer idea of the competition.

I am reminded of the entry of Canoe Slalom into the Olympics when the rules were changed to make it easier for viewers to understand - I think that Competition Climbing needs to consider similar measures.

In reply to keith-ratcliffe:

Some very good comments there. My concern is that competition climbing should retain the essence of its parent sport, which it has done, by and large, thus far. A couple of fairly recent divergences give great cause for concern that TV audiences and accessibility may be becoming more important to the IFSC than is the maintaining the spirit of climbing in the competition, albeit necessarily transposed to an artificial structure.

One of these is artificially short time-out limits, as seen in Ratho to ludicrous effect. That simply isn't a factor at all in sport onsighting so really shouldn't be anything like a deciding factor in comps.

The other obvious one is the fixed format speed route. In countries with a tradition of speed climbing, comps were always on different routes in different locations, and so it should be now, except for the IFSC apparently being obsessed with mimicking other sports rather than being true to its own. There is absolutely nothing fundamentally real about the particular route selected; it really has nothing of the purity of a 100m race and should have no reason to be repeated ad nauseum around the world. A fair compromise in the current circumstances would be having two speed routes - a fixed one and an onsight one - and combining times from both. But the chances of reintroducing any semblance of climbing realism into comps right now seems like a forlorn hope.

In reply to john arran:

Agree with your comments on the speed climbing format, it would be much more interesting to see new routes each time being climbed at speed, head to head.

I don't really mind the time limit being set on the lead comp, it adds a certain additional factor to the proceedings. Perhaps 8 minutes would be a better time limit though.

One of the highlights for me was the very mature commentary from Kai Lightener who came over very well for such a young guy.

All in all, I though today's semis and finals were a great success.

In reply to john arran:


Quite. If Janja had been one hold short of Jessica Pilz at the bell, she wouldn't have won despite being able to climb higher, ergo, the better climber.

Not to mention that if we're going to have absurdly tight time limits, then surely it can't be completely in the realms of science fiction to display a clock on the screen?

In reply to keith-ratcliffe:


I had wondered about numbering the holds on the wall, but on reflection that might detract from the onsight aspect be giving away too much of the intended sequence to the climber. As for showing it on the screen, well - see my previous reply to John. Even a clock appears to be too challenging.

In reply to john arran:
I see the points that you make and agree with many but I think we are both burdened with the belief that Competition Climbing should relate to what we know as Climbing. You use the term 'Parent Sport' - I would probably say Sibling Sport emanating from a Parent Activity. Rock Climbing in my eyes is not a Sport - whoever adopted the term Sport climbing for climbing bolted routes created a can of worms that still haunts us. Sport refers to overt competition and although few climbers would deny that outdoor climbing has competitive elements it is not a regulated Sport. IFSC Climbing competition is however such.

Bouldering and Lead Climbing relate more closely to what takes place in the outdoors but converts the covert rivalry into an overt competition. Generally I think they do it quite well - in both disciplines the time element is false and needs to be better managed - the skill and physical prowess are under scrutiny here. A few tweeks to presentation and clarity would create a good watch that relates closely to climbers & non climbers alike.

Speed climbing is the anomaly in the three disciplines. Having said that if you Google 'speed record El Capitan' you will get a result (The record currently belongs to Alex Honnold and Hans Florine, who broke the previous record by almost 13 minutes, with a time of 2:23:46 (2 hours, 23 minutes, 46 seconds) on June 17, 2012). However you won't get a result for Flying Buttress Direct on Stanage which is closer to the size of the Standard Climb used for the competition. I think here the draw of the Head to Head race and the presence of a World Record are too appealing for a TV audience to be ignored. I doubt that a two stage race - Standard & tailored route would ever be accepted so I think we are stuck with the route that we have (Does anyone know where it came from?). Perhaps a change of route every Olympics would give a 4 year span to World Records that would balance their appeal with a more creative approach that relates to the more natural climbing exprience that we enjoy.

In reply to stp:

I was at Ratho today. Was a great day out. The female semi were a bit uncomfortable to watch while lots of the girls fell at the same early crux but thankfully some of the stronger ones saved the setters blushes. The female final was marred by the 6min limit. The strongest girl won in the end but I think some of the placings would have been different had it been an 8min limit. Pretty sure Janja would have topped if she'd been able to shake a little longer before the top volumes so in a very real sense the fans were robbed of that spectacle.

In reply to keith-ratcliffe:


Watching it today at the World Cup was really entertaining but I think it is an event that is going to need some tweaking. I think that fundamentally the course is too fast and arguably too dependent on training for the specific route rather than transferable athletic ability.

a. The times are getting to be just too fast for the audience to properly get into it. Something like Olympic 100m, a classic short event is about ten seconds. Speed climbing can be over in just under 6 seconds. When the really fast guys are running it's a bit of a blur.
b. There isn't enough time/distance for the best competitors to reliably diverge. The measuring equipment is allegedly good for 1/100 of a second but even that couldn't split one of the fastest races today. If speed gets more popular and standards improve there will be more dead heats.

It doesn't seem practical to change the height or angle of the wall so maybe they need to look at how good the best competitors are getting and tweak the dimensions of the holds or the pattern so it takes them a few seconds longer to get to the top.

In reply to JLS:

Also: Say what you like about Liam Longsdale's event compairing but bloody hell that was some shift he put in. New found respect...

In reply to douwe:

I think even the commentators thought it was shite. Obviously they can't say so being paid by the IFSC but Mike Langley's use of the word 'interesting' to sum up the final round was not exactly a term of praise.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:


Randomly attach a couple of the holds with blu-tac instead of screws.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Interestingly in the early days of comps the speed climbing routes were much harder (around 7c+) and changed at every event. This not only made the event a bit more like real climbing, the split between reaching the tops was much bigger and more obvious. The times were also slower. It also encouraged normal climbers (rather than speed specialists) to compete more too. So essentially got round all the problems you highlight.

The idea to shift to the ubiquitous, never changing 6a+ route was yet another poor decision, in history of poor decisions it seems to me.

In reply to stp:

Maybe they should do it like the Arco Rockmasters Duel. It's great fun to watch and the route is around 8a.

In reply to john arran:

I completely agree with all of that but I would add that even if the IFSC don't give a f*&k what climbers want or think and only care about TV ratings I really can't see cutting the time helping there. Firstly if people don't like watching lead comps they still won't like them just because they're shorter. That's an absurd way of thinking. Would more people go to football matches if the time was cut to 60 minutes?

Secondly and more significant though is having a comp that ends where you have no idea who the winner is. Even the commentators didn't know who'd won the women's event. That can't make for good, exciting viewing for anyone.

In reply to stp:

From a judges point of view.......

The weekend was, as described, not without its challenges, but having speed, para, and lead in that arena, one after the other, was excellent.
The crowd was, for the number (600 ish I believe) incredibly noisy. Liam did his usual superb job of keeping everyone engaged, informed and entertained.
The lead routes were super hard and super varied. The ladies semi however had a kind of height dependent stopper move at 13+ / 14, but there was a way through it - unfortunately if you didnt read it, it was virtually impossible. Ad if you were too short, then no way....but then again, Ashima did it......At 17, there was again a specific sequence (Hannah Slaney got it). Without that sequence it was possible, but mega hard.
The final route did show that the 6 min rule is not good. We used to run 8 mins for the final, which would have been superb here. The sequence where Janja / Jain / Jessica / Ashima came off looked great on paper; there were a number of ways of doing it, but it came down to slapping for extra holds close to each other. Between there and the top was extremely well thought out, and would have challenged them all, and it came down to how coordinated the judges were with the stopwatches. However everyone came to see how well the climbers could climb, not to see how well the judges could judge, and while the result was a fair one, it would have been nice to see it decided on distance climbed.

In reply to Ian W:

I didn't really have problem with the setters for the women's semi. It didn't work out great but surely very difficult to estimate what percentage of climbers will read one specific sequence correctly. And it made it all the more exciting when and how the better climbers did get through it. In general I thought the setting was superb.



Not so sure about that. Since they were running out time rather than endurance if they didn't stop because of the time limit they most probably fell through rushing the last few seconds. I thought it was a real shame as that big black barrel feature at the top of the wall was really interesting and also because I would have liked to see Ashima have a proper attempt at climbing and not stopped because of the damn clock.

Do you think they'll bring back the 8 min time after this?

In reply to stp:


Do you think bears will hold it until they find a public convenience?

In reply to stp:

I hope so. I've not got a problem with a change to 6 mins, but it clearly took something away from this final. Whether this is a function of the Ratho wall height, which is at the top end of the range of comp walls, or maybe its something the setters need to think about more carefully, but whatever, if the 2 mins extra was available, the womens final would have been tense beyond belief at the top of the wall. I think the best climber won, but I wouldnt bet much money against Jain Kim when it comes to strength, endurance and technique combined, as it would have been at the very top of that route.

Anyway, the event report will no doubt highlight this, and it cant be ignored, as I'm pretty certain its not the first time. You could put forward the argument that the athletes need to develop a quicker climbing style, but i'm not sure thats really progress; its the battle between differing styles that is so fascinating and is something to be preferred over everyone climbing routes in the same way. Allowing time also allows the setters to produce routes that are more varied, and allow the climbers to show what they can really do.

In reply to Ian W:


They should ask the setters to specify the time limit for the particular wall and route within the 6 to 8 minute range. It's silly to have the identical time limit for every competition when the walls are different heights and the setters may have 'special' features they want to use like those huge black volumes at Ratho. It would be more balanced over the whole series to have some venues where you've got to be able to keep going for longer.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Ye, I can see that being workable - so the timing rule would be something like " the time allowed will be no less than 6 and no longer than 8 minutes, this to be advised by the route setter / Jury President". All suggestions to the rules commission, i.e. Tim Hatch, c/o IFSC, Turin.

In reply to Ian W:


I have a strong feeling of déja vu.

In reply to john arran:

Has this idea been tried before?

In reply to Ian W:

I may be getting confused with observation duration, but one or both of those used to be specified by the jury president in advance of the comp starting.

In reply to john arran:

Either are possible I suppose, as its a logical way to deal with routes of differing lengths. I shall ask the font of all knowledge on things technical....

Graeme, are you there?