The Climbing Event at the 2024 Paris Olympics Explained
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When did climbing become an Olympic sport?
Mountaineering debuted at the 2021 Tokyo Games. Earlier, the sport first made it onto the Olympic radar in 2018 at the Buenos Aires Youth Olympic Games.
The addition of climbing, along with skateboarding and surfing, was part of a push to expand the program to include more urban sports with a focus on gaining more popularity among youth. Sport climbing will remain on the program for the Los Angeles 2028 Summer Olympics.
How does Olympic climbing work?
Olympic sport climbing is divided into three disciplines: bouldering, speed and lead.
Bouldering: Athletes climb a 4.5 meter wall (about 15 feet) without ropes in a limited time and with minimal effort.
Lead: The highest a climber can climb on a 15-meter wall (about 50 feet) in six minutes in one attempt.
Pace: In a one-on-one elimination round and also a race against the clock, climbers scale a 15-meter wall with a five-degree incline. The best athletes can do it in less than six seconds for men, and the top women typically break seven seconds.
What is different about these Games compared to Tokyo is that speed climbing has been separated into its own event, while bouldering and lead remain combined. This structure allows climbers to focus on their specialties.
The scoring system is also different from the one used in Tokyo. The scores for each discipline during the 2021 Games were multiplied together to arrive at the final score. But with speed climbing out of the equation, the new judging outlook for bouldering and lead includes a maximum of 200 points. Climbers earn points in bouldering by advancing up the wall to reach different “zones” (5 points for low zone, 10 points for high zone) and the top hold (25 points). Points are deducted for attempts, and a perfect bouldering round for clearing four boulder problems is worth 100 points.
In the lead-up, athletes score by successfully holding the top 40 holds – points increase for each hold the higher they are on the wall. If an athlete advances to the next hold but fails to hold it safely, they will be awarded 0.1 points on top of their previous score.
Twenty men and 20 women compete in bouldering/lead.
In the speed discipline, there are 14 competitors for both men and women. All climbers participate in two sprints (on two different walls). They will then be ranked 1-14 based on their fastest time, which will decide the matchups for the subsequent elimination rounds.
Top Team USA athletes for climbing at 2024 Paris Olympics
Sam Watson: With a time of 4.79 seconds, 18-year-old Watson currently holds the men’s world speed record. He entered 2023 ranked eighth in the world in men’s speed and won gold at the Pan American Games in Santiago last year.
Natalia Grossman: She finished No. 1 in women’s boulder last year, and fifth in the combined boulder and lead category. Grossman won the gold and lead in Boulder at the Pan American Games.
Brooke Rabeauteau: Finished fifth in Tokyo and is the daughter of former mountaineering World Cup champions Ruben Erbisfeld-Rabeauteau and Didier Rabeauteau, who are from France (Brookee speaks French fluently).
Top international athletes for climbing at 2024 Paris Olympics
Slovenia’s Janja Garnbret, the reigning women’s gold medalist, is back and will compete on the lead/bouldering side.
Poland’s Aleksandra Miroslav will be one to watch on the women’s speed side, and Japan’s Ai Mori is a force in the women’s boulder/lead.
In the men’s sprint, Indonesia’s Rahmad Adi Molyon and Vedrik Leonardo will challenge Watson for the podium.
Australia’s Jacob Schubert is a four-time world champion and podium contender in men’s lead/bouldering.
