Sport climbing is a modern sport that has become immensely popular over the past 20 years. It is a young, mixed-gender sport – with 39 per cent of climbers under 18 years old – practised both outdoors and in a more urban format indoors. There are over 25 million climbers in 150 countries all over the world.
In 1985, a group of climbers gathered in Bardonecchia, near Turin, Italy, for an event called “SportRoccia”, which became the first organised lead competition in which competitors climb within a certain time limit. One year later, the first competition event on an artificial climbing wall was organised in Vaulx-en-Velin near Lyon, France.
Brief overview of the rules
At the Olympics, sport climbing involves three formats : bouldering, speed and lead. In bouldering, athletes climb 4.5 m high walls without ropes, in a limited period of time and in the fewest attempts possible. Speed is a spectacular race against the clock in one-on-one elimination rounds that combine precision and explosivity. The best athletes scale a 15m high and five degrees inclinated wall in under six seconds for men and under seven seconds for women.
In the lead event, athletes climb as high as they can on a wall over 15m high in six minutes without having seen the route ahead of time. The routes for this event are more and more complex and challenging during the event, requiring all of the athletes’ physical and mental ability.
In Tokyo, each athlete competed in all three disciplines and the final scores reflected the combined results of the three competitions. The climber with the lowest score took home the first Olympic gold medal in the history of sport climbing.
In Paris 2024, two competitions will crown their own olympic champion in sport climbing. One will be a combined competition of bouldering and lead events, and the second one will only feature a speed event.
Olympic history
Sport climbing took its first steps on the Olympic stage at the Buenos Aires Youth Olympic Games, in 2018. The event had not been highly publicised but the public was impressed by the spectacle and the suspense of this exciting sport. A hit at the youth events, sport climbing then made its debut at the Tokyo 2020 Games, joining the Olympic programme as a new sport.
The originality of these events as well as the discipline’s visual, aesthetic and exciting nature make it a very popular and widely-practised sport for young people that can take place in very diverse environments, urban or natural. Sport climbing will also be one of the four additional sports of Paris 2024 alongside breaking (making its Olympic debut), surfing and skateboarding, and it also will be part of the programme for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games.
