“], “filter”: { “nextExceptions”: “img, blockquote, div”, “nextContainsExceptions”: “img, blockquote, a.btn, ao-button”} }”>
Do you want to walk out the door? Read this article to learn about the new Outside+ app available on iOS devices for members. >”,”name”:”in-content-cta”,”type”:”link”}}”>Download the app.
My main memories of the 2020 Tokyo0 Olympic Sport Climbing competition are that it was (a) confusing and (b) a fucking mess. On the way home, I felt two completely different sports: speed climbing, which focuses on moving quickly over easy routes, and leading and bouldering, which focuses on pure difficulty. I felt that the organizers' inexplicable decision to cram them all together resulted in the following event. It was unfair to almost every athlete involved.
Fortunately, there are two major differences between the Olympic sport climbing competition (singular) that was first held in Tokyo three years ago and the sports climbing competition (plural) being held this week in Paris. .
First, speed itself has become important.
Paris 2024 will feature two sport climbing events, with speed athletes competing for one gold medal and boulder and lead athletes competing for the other. Is this a big deal? Emphatically yes. In a 2021 article, I argued that asking a speed athlete to compete in the Boulder & Reed is less like asking a 100 meter runner to compete in a marathon than asking a short track speed skater to compete in figure skating. I wrote that it is like asking for. These two fundamentally different sports just happen to involve ice. I still believe so. As proof of this, he points to the fact that in Paris there are no athletes competing in both the speed event and the boulder and lead combined event.
Perhaps one day the Olympics will emulate the IFSC World Championships and award four medals for sport climbing: speed, boulder, lead, and boulder and lead combined. But for now, it makes sense to simply shave off speed. Many athletes excel at both boulders and leads. Janja Garnbret, Adam Ondra, Jakob Schubert, Colin Duffy, Toby Roberts and Anrak Solato have all won both World Cup events, making the majority of Olympic climbers win both World Cup levels. is on the podium.
Secondly, this means that there is a new scoring structure in the combined format.
Since speed is no longer part of the combined event, scoring in the combined event in Paris relies intuitively on athletes accumulating points based on how well they climb rocks and lead walls.
In Tokyo, where speed was included, this cumulative scoring structure didn't work because nearly everyone reached the top of the speed wall. Instead, Olympic organizers devised a ridiculously confusing system in which at the end of each discipline, climbers were awarded points based on their finishing position. The results from each competition were then multiplied together to give a total score, with the three lowest scores winning medals. (For example, in the Tokyo Olympics final, Adam Ondra placed 4th in speed, 6th in boulder, and 2nd in lead, resulting in a total score of 48 (4 x 6 x 2). Alberto Ginés López I won the gold medal with 28 points (I was 1st in speed, 7th in boulder, and 4th in lead.) What's frustrating (but also kind of fascinating) about the multiplication structure is the small number of finishes. For example, every time one climber passes another climber's highest point on the lead wall, everyone else's score changes as well, making it very unsettling to track events. As I was writing that report for Climbing magazine, I was watching the game with a notepad and a calculator in hand, always wondering if I had made a mistake or not fully understanding the situation. I was half convinced that I had misunderstood.
In Paris, scoring is less complicated, but still complicated. In the TLDR version, your score is based on how far you climb each of the four rocks and the lead route each round. How logical! But it's actually not that simple. So, if you're not already familiar with it, read our article: How is Olympic Sport Climbing Scoring?
This is all very great (and good for the sport) for three reasons.
1. Speed climbers can't get shafts.
Prior to 2016, when sport climbing's inclusion in the Olympics was first announced, speed walls were extremely rare in commercial climbing gyms in the United States. Speed climbing was also generally considered a strange anomaly that was only popular in Iran and Indonesia and various post-Soviet countries. As a result, U.S. viewers were left wondering how Speed's participation in the Tokyo combined event could taint the results produced by the Boulder and Reed events, which we actually cared about. There was a tendency to interpret based on So we tended to forget that Tokyo was an utter disaster for speed specialists and their fans. The math was against them, as their discipline was not ready to perform well on the leads or boulders. This meant that only three speed climbers made it to the finals. Two of them won completely in the semi-finals, and the third (France's Anouk Jaubert) also cleared two boulders in the bouldering round. In the final, Aleksandra Mirosław easily won the speed category, but as she and everyone else knew would happen, she lost in the remaining two rounds, despite setting a new world record. I couldn't win any medals.
Not so this year. Aleksandra Mirosław is back, and she's still the best speed climber in the world, and if she performs like Monday's semifinal in the quarterfinals and finals (she'll break her own world record twice and improve her time) (Mark) who is pushing towards the 6 second mark), she will definitely have a medal on her wall.
2. Randomness is removed (and reliability is added) from the binding event.
At the Tokyo Games, France's Bassa Mawem, a speed specialist, was the only one to reach the finals, but after winning the early speed rounds and securing the final spot, he tore his biceps on the lead route in the semi-finals. did. As a result, Mawem was unable to advance to the finals. So the remaining seven were all expert boulderers or lead climbers who suddenly realized that their speed skills actually mattered and ended up throwing a ton of balls. Adds randomness to the event. In the end, Alberto Ginés López, who finished 4th in the lead and 7th in the boulder, won in speed and won the Olympic gold medal, while Adam Ondra had a surprisingly good performance in speed (4th place). ) It was from. In the fight for the gold medal.
Because of the important role that speed ultimately plays in the men's field, viewers are left with the impression that there is a real disconnect between the ostensible purpose of the event (identifying the best climber of the day) and the test that the climbers were subjected to. It felt like there was. For example, if we had subtracted the velocity events, we would have gotten completely different results and would have needed a different way to identify the winners. (Nathaniel Coleman won in Boulder and took 5th place in the lead. Jacob Schubert took 5th place in Boulder and took the lead. Colin Duffy took 4th and 3rd place respectively. Is it?)
Of course, speed is a part of competition whether people like me like it or not, and randomness (sometimes in the form of injuries) is actually one of the more interesting elements, so speed is part of competition. It would be particularly unfair to exclude them retrospectively. of the contest. Without it we would be bored. However, because of the structure of this competition, many people have completely misunderstood this result, the Olympic bureaucrats who have structured the competition in such a way that the results cannot really reflect who the best climbers are. It has come to be virtually ignored as a byproduct of a mechanical fluke. It was. “Cool,” they thought. “Now, let's get back to evaluating the World Cup.”
However, such critics, in the defense of Olympic officials, say that the situation is much better in the women's field, with two speed specialists Aleksandra Mirosław and Anouk Jaubert managing to reach the finals. It is noteworthy that they took first and second place in the speed category. This meant that the bouldering and lead rounds were more or less run as their own competitions, as the organizers had intended. While speed climbers pretend to take on far more difficult rocks and routes than they've ever climbed, we turn a blind eye and, as expected, Janja Garnbret absolutely crushes everything. I saw you do it.
3. Makes contests easier to understand and more enjoyable for all spectators.
As mentioned above, one of the big problems with the Tokyo Games was that it was very difficult to understand the overall context of the competition while watching. This was an annoyance for climbers like me, but could have been uncomfortable for non-climbers. To endure watching a strange (to them) sport explained in strange (to them) vocabulary and scored with a scoring system that is incomprehensible (to everyone). Thanks to the new scoring format, it's now much easier to keep track of the competition. Sure, if you're an English major like me, you might want to keep a calculator handy, but for everyone else, it's just adding up. How difficult will it be?
Note: If you are interested in a more in-depth analysis of why the Tokyo Olympics sucked in a fascinating way, check out my 2021 article “ How to set a world record without winning a medal at the Olympics Please see “Is it?” It tells the story of how Adam Ondra went from winning the gold medal to sixth place, where he was second instead of first in the lead thanks to a spectacular climb by Jakob Schubert. It also shows that, as the title suggests, speed specialists were even more disadvantaged by composite construction than top climbers.
