One of the most intense sports in the world made its debut as an individual event at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
In speed climbing, two climbers compete at a time: one athlete on the left side of the wall (lane A) and the other on the right (lane B). Once the bell rings, they launch themselves at full speed down the 15-metre-high wall.
Poland’s Aleksandra Miroslaw took gold in the women’s speed climbing on Wednesday, reaching the top in an impressive 6.1 seconds as hundreds of fans cheered her on and held Polish flags.
But with the new attention the sport is receiving, coaches and athletes who have been practicing it for years are warning about the “horrible” damage professional speed climbers do to their limbs, with their hands often looking as if they’ve been run through a cheese grater.
Albert Ok, a veteran speed climbing coach, said it often gets so bad that he needs to “prescribe” superglue to his students to stop their nails from tearing off.
Gold medalist Aleksandra Miroslaw of Team Poland poses on the podium during the medal ceremony after the women’s sprint on Wednesday.
Aleksandra Miroslaw of Poland (left) and Deng Lijuan of China (right) compete against each other. Miroslaw took the gold, beating Lijuan by 0.08 seconds.
“You’re destroying your fingers and your knees all the time,” Ok said. The Wall Street Journal“It’s quite scary.”
According to the rules of the sport, there is a standardized route at all world competitions, which means that the cornices remain in the same places on the wall.
That means there’s an inherent element of muscle memory in speed climbing, and any small mistake can punish a climber’s knees, twist his toes, or cut off his fingers.
And when these horrible injuries occur (and they happen frequently), they are made worse because climbers are expected to push themselves and complete the ascent up the wall.
“Normally the finger splits,” said Team USA strength and conditioning coach Matt Maddison.
“All you have to do is leave the finger hole untouched by a millimeter or two. Then, you can undo all your work and get out the Super Glue to reattach the fingers.”
Because of the constant wear and tear that climbers voluntarily subject their fingers to, Ok recommends his athletes take lidocaine to numb the pain.
Miroslaw (left) competes against Aleksandra Kalucka, also of Team Poland, in the women’s semifinals.
The women’s speed climbing medallists pose together on the podium. Miroslaw (centre) won gold, Deng (left) took silver and Kalucka bronze.
Speed climbing made its technical debut at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but was combined with bouldering and hard climbing into a comprehensive event called sport climbing.
The key differences between bouldering and climbing in difficulty mean that they don’t do as much damage to their competitors.
Bouldering relies more on endurance than speed and involves climbing “challenging routes” that the climber does not know beforehand.
Without a safety rope, climbers scale several 15-foot walls. It’s more like a puzzle and there’s no time factor. Athletes simply have a certain number of attempts before being disqualified.
Head climbing is similar to bouldering, with the main differences being that there is a six-minute time limit to climb the single route on the wall and that climbers have a safety rope.
Speed climbers don’t have the luxury of taking their time to figure out how they’re going to get up the wall like boulderers or hard climbers do, nor do they have time to heal a sudden injury.
To acquire the muscle memory they need to succeed, dedicated speed climbers often train in the gym for four hours a day, using the same worn-out and abused body parts over and over again.
Climbers’ hands also become very calloused after years of practicing the sport.
Albert Ok’s student Sam Watson broke the men’s world record in speed climbing, clocking a time of 4.75 seconds.
Piper Kelly, a 24-year-old speed climber on Team USA, has been practicing on the same route for about 10 years and qualified for the Paris Olympics.
She finished twelfth overall.
Recently, he reviewed his training logs to see how many times he had actually put his fingers and toes on the same ledges.
“I would estimate it’s about 30,000 times,” Kelly told the Journal.
Just because the ledges stay in the same place doesn’t mean every climber takes exactly the same path up the wall.
Climbers develop their own “betas” (the technical term for the specific route they take) and it is determined by their ability to move vertically up the wall.
The quickest route to the top is the most linear, but also the most challenging.
There is no escaping bloody fingers and knees because climbers take literally years to fine-tune their exact trajectory, leading at many points to crashing into the wall at incredibly high speed.
One of Albert Ok’s students, Sam Watson, is the rare exception to this rule.
Watson, another speed climber on Team USA, set the men’s world record of 4.75 seconds on Tuesday.
His coach boasted of Watson’s superhuman precision, which allows him to avoid the cuts and wounds that are so common to everyone else in the sport.
“Other people are not so lucky,” Ok said.