Exclusive - Sport climbing star Janja Garnbret on being more resilient after career's first injury: "I learned a lot from it"
The Slovenian Olympic champion is looking to reclaim her combined world title after four years, and also secure a ticket to her second Olympic Games when the boulder & lead event starts in Bern on Wednesday (9 August). Olympics.com spoke exclusively to the seven-time world champion ahead of the competition.
Sport Climbing
Janja Garnbret’s first-ever injury could not have come at a worse time.
Breaking her toe at the start of the Olympic qualifier season, the defending Olympic champion and seven-time world gold medallist in sport climbing needed all her mental strength - and a dash of workout creativity - not to get dragged down by the circumstances.
The extra challenge also made her success at the 2023 IFSC Sport Climbing World Championships this month even more special.
Already with a gold in women’s boulder and a silver in lead, Garnbet is now looking ahead to the new Olympic combined Boulder & Lead event, which serves as a qualifier for Paris 2024.
“I never take it for granted, so I'm always super grateful to be able to compete and to be consistently on the podium," Garnbret told Olympics.com ahead of the boulder & lead semi-final.
“I think I started off pretty well. I can go confidently in the second part of the World Championships. I feel really excited for the combined format, to try it out. I had an opportunity to try it out already last year, the European Championships in Munich, so this will be the second time for me. But I think I can go and climb confidently there.”
"I was able to overcome the fears"
The most complicated routes, aching muscles and the toughest opponents could not stop Garnbret from seizing her seventh world title in Bern on Saturday (5 August).
What almost did stop the most successful competitive climber in history, however, turned out to be as small as a toe.
“I was basically climbing in a slab and my toe broke. So that was it. It was my first-ever injury so it was mentally definitely very hard, but I had that luck that it was just a toe," Garnbret said of the injury she suffered in February at Slovenia's first team training of 2023.
Determined not to skip any training in the crucial Olympic qualifier season, Garnbret adjusted her workouts to take the broken toe out of the equation.
"I could still train the upper body so I didn't miss out on training so much," she said. "I was climbing with one foot or no feet so I could still do something."
The recovery took longer than expected. At first doctors told Garnbret it would take three to four weeks for her foot to heal completely, but later they discovered there was a torn ligament too, which delayed the recovery.
Rather than get disappointed, Garnbret approached the situation as a learning opportunity.
"It took longer to heal and it was mentally very hard to overcome that fear, to get the trust back, to get the strength back in the toe. Recovery, it was long, but it was all worth it," the champion climber said. “This was my first ever injury in a year that you don't want injuries, so it was far from perfect, but I managed and I learned a lot from it. And I think I will use this for the rest of my career. If something like this happens again, I will know how to react to something like this."
"I was able to overcome the fears, the doubts, the negative thoughts and I learned something from it,” Garnbret told Olympics.com of her career's first ever injury.
Climbing for a ticket to her second Olympics
Garnbret won the gold medal in the women's event when sport climbing made its Olympic debut at Tokyo 2020. The next Games, at Paris 2024, will feature a new format and therefore a new challenge for the climbers.
Instead of one set of medals awarded in the combined speed, boulder and lead event, there will be two sets of medals, one in speed and the other in the combined lead and boulder. The change suits Garnbret, who is a boulder and lead specialist.
“I love to compete in both," she said. "It was changing over the years. I started off as a lead climber. I enjoyed lead competitions more, then I switched to bouldering and I enjoyed bouldering competitions a lot more, but now I equally love both disciplines. Each has their own game, so in bouldering you have four boulders. You have to be really on point for 40 minutes, but lead you have only one try, so it’s again a different game. But I love both games.”
Garnbret's first chance to qualify for Paris 2024 is through this week's IFSC Sport Climbing World Championships. The top three athletes in the men's and women's combined events will secure quotas to the next Games, and the Slovenian climber is in solid position to be among them.
The women's combined semi-final takes place on Wednesday (9 August) with the final to follow on Friday (11 August).
“All the girls are super well prepared. They are hungry. They want to win. They want to get the Olympic spot," Garnbret said of her competition, which includes defending champion Jessica Pilz of Austria. "Some are better in lead and maybe a bit less in bouldering, some are really good in bouldering and a bit less in lead. I think it can change so much and it depends also on the route setting. So I guess we will see. I just have to do my best and be completely focused.”