Just How Hard is Olympic Sport Climbing?

Confession: sometimes I watch IFSC Boulder World Cups and think, “Man, I could probably stick those moves.” (I could not, in fact, stick those moves.) But in my defense, without grade estimates, and with only a few minutes of airtime on TV, it is hard to comprehend how difficult these problems really are. And the world’s most elite climbers tend to make V12 look pretty dang easy.

I spoke with Garrett Gregor, head Boulder routesetter for the Paris Olympics, to get some context. Gregor has worked as a professional routesetter for 25 years, first with USA Climbing and then with the International Federation of Sport Climbing. He was also a member of the setting team for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. In Paris he’s leading a five-person setting team, which also consists of Tsukasa Mizuguchi, Olga Niemiec, Tomasz Olesky, and Remi Samyn.

“There is this notion that maybe these routes aren’t that hard, maybe they’re just ‘showy’ or whatever, and I would like to dispel any myths about that,” Gregor said. “These routes are incredibly difficult.”

Although Olympic boulders aren’t formally graded, Gregor and his team’s problems are roughly between V9 and V12 for the women, and V10 to V14 for the men. (As head setter for just the Boulder category, Gregor didn’t give a precise range for Lead routes we’ll see in Paris, but guessed between 5.13d to 5.14c for women, and 5.14a to 5.14d for men.)

• Related: How Climbing Grades Work

Sending V9 to V14  is impressive for anyone, but even more so when you realize the athletes only have a few minutes to tick each problem. In the semi-finals, climbers must tackle four boulders, sight unseen, with five minutes per boulder. In the finals, they’ll have a two-minute preview of the problems, but will only have four minutes on each of the four problems.

Gregor said because athletes get a preview, the finals boulders will be, on average, slightly more complex and harder to read. However, from a sheer difficulty perspective, he said the semi-finals boulders are actually harder, both because they’re used to weed out the competition for finals, and because if there is a tied score, judges will countback to semi performances to determine a winner.

Setting an Olympic Boulder Problem

The process of setting an Olympic route isn’t much different from routes at a World Cup. He and his team will arrive at the venue a week before the event begins, and spend a day or two on each stage of the competition, refining each boulder through a trial-and-error process. Although all the problems are set before the competition begins, after semifinals he and his team will also take into account how competitors performed, adjusting finals problems as they see fit.

It’s almost impossible to plan sets well in advance, Gregor said, because although he and his team are aware of the materials list they’ll be using, the holds are shared between the Boulder and Lead teams, so not everything is available to everyone. “If you did plan that way, by the time you get onto the wall, you might realize, ‘Oh, that didn’t work quite as I thought it did.’ So the best thing a route setter can do is be adaptable. You may have some semblance of ideas you want to try, but it doesn’t mean it’s always going to happen that way.”

Routesetting is a collaborative process, Gregor said, more fluid and spontaneous than planned or structured. “I’m not sure if Percy [Bishton, Tokyo’s Head Boulder Routesetter,] is credited with this quote or not, but he used to say setting was like jazz. You riff off one another.”

The four boulders are also designed to target a certain skill set. One problem should be technically difficult, one should be powerfully difficult, one should focus on coordination, and the final should represent a style called “electric.” Technical and power-focused problems are fairly easy to understand. The other two styles are a bit more obscure. The coordination boulder, Gregor said, is designed to force the athlete to “generate momentum from a position, and then do multiple dynamic movements in a row to complete the movement.” Gregor explained an electric boulder as one requiring “dynamic movement out of a static position. Something where you have to explode out of a position.”

This isn’t to say that every boulder will exclusively involve movements of a single style, but that the overall “theme” of each boulder should differ, and all four guiding themes should be represented, one in each boulder.

The problems are designed to be completed, of course, but not by everyone. For Lead, the goal is a route where only one person can top,” he said. “The Boulder team has its ideal goal of one person with four tops, or very close to that.”

Avoiding Downward Jumps, Bleeding, and Designs

There are a few rules that the routesetters have to follow. A specific one carries over from the IFSC: no downward jumps (due to risk of injury). Another, more vague, rule is  the setters must “always have the athlete’s safety in mind.” Gregor said this comes into play in a variety of ways. He and his setters try to avoid cracks that could jam competitors’ feet and cause them to fall head first, and avoid overusing knee bars or other moves that could cause bleeding.

Another rule is that the setters aren’t allowed to set anything that could be construed as a “design” on the wall. “If you have a bunch of yellow holds, for example, we can’t make a design like a Pac-Man. We have to avoid any sort of aesthetic or recognizable designs.”

This rule is of particular importance following a mini-controversy in the Tokyo Olympics, when a problem in the men’s finals was construed by a commentator to depict a “rising sun,” the flag of Imperialist Japan. Korean female climber Jain Kim took notable issue with the design, writing on Instagram that it “symbolizes Japanese militarism,” and “To the victim countries, the Rising Sun Flag is no different from Hakenkreuz, the symbol of the German Nazi for the victim countries.”

Gregor, who helped set the problem, said this wasn’t intentional, and that no one recognized it as a rising sun when they were setting the problem, but regardless, the team in Paris is taking extra caution to avoid any recognizable designs in their sets this year.

Do Setters Need to Complete Every Move?

In order for a problem to go up, some might imagine that at least one setter might have to send it, or at the very least that each of the moves would have to be completed in isolation. Gregor said this isn’t the case. “Having done this as long as I have, sometimes you’ll do a move and nobody will do it [in the competition] and sometimes you won’t do a move and ten people will do it. So there’s no hard and fast rules for me in terms of how many people need to do a move. And certainly you can’t ask any setter to do it from bottom to top, just because the workload you go through, that process of refinement, is so up and down. On top of that, the level these climbers climb at nowadays is just so high that it’s unrealistic.”

Beyond sheer difficulty, Olympic routesetting has a few other differences than traditional IFSC setting. Competition climbing has long (and increasingly) been accused of leaning too heavily into gymnastic movement, and straying from sequences that would be encountered on actual rock.

Gregor admitted that, at least for the Olympics, there is an obligation to make the sport accessible to a wider audience. “It’s no longer just climbers that are watching. You’re broadcasting this sport to the entire world. So there’s a guiding principle that we don’t want to set something that is hard for people to understand.”

The other big difference about setting for the Olympics, compared to an IFSC event, is that the problems are designed with the Combined format in mind. Paris athletes are competing in both Boulder and Lead, winning a single medal based on an aggregate score. “At a World Cup, you’re typically only setting one discipline,” he said. “The athletes are training for that discipline, specializing in that discipline. You don’t have to worry about balancing the two.”

This was particularly difficult in Tokyo, because Gregor and the other setters not only had to balance the blend of Lead and Boulder specialists, but Speed climbers as well. “There was a consideration of what the best Speed athletes might accomplish in Boulder and Lead in Tokyo,” he admitted. But because Speed has been split off into a separate medal category for the Paris Games, the Boulder-Lead competition will feature a much more refined pool of athletes. “There is still a broad range of skills and abilities represented within the athletes qualified here,” Gregor said, “but it is much more consolidated and focused than Tokyo.”

Advice for Olympians

Gregor, who coached the legendary Team ABC Boulder (which included three of the four 2024 U.S. Olympians: Colin Duffy, Brooke Raboutou, and Natalia Grossman), said beyond strength and skill, there are three pieces of advice he’d give to an Olympic qualified climber.

His first piece of advice is pretty obvious: be prepared. “There are so many things outside of your control, so focus on what you can control,” he said. “Prepare in terms of your training for individual technical skills, in terms of what you bring out with you on the mats.”

Second, he says to be present and in the moment. One of the things he and the other setters noticed the most in the Tokyo Olympics was the immense pressure the athletes were under. “Even without spectators in Tokyo [due to COVID-19], the Olympic pressure under those bright lights is really noticeable,” he said. “It’s on another level from World Cups. The more you can stay in that moment, stay focused, the more you can perform and the less you doubt yourself.

His third tip is simple. “Enjoy it,” he said. “This is ephemeral. It’s not going to be here forever. Take it all in. To perform at this level is a really incredible thing.”

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