Everything Wrong with Olympic Rock Climbing Debut 

Underarm... to overarm...to squeezing... to fingerholds...

I havent found a worse debut than skateboarding, but this takes the cake. The fact that they knew to separate park, and street, but not bouldering, lead, and speed is baffleing me

They've announced in Paris 2024 they're pulling Speed out into its own event and having a combined Lead and Boulder event, which feels like a good step forward.

They should do it like gymnastics where there are individual events (Speed, Lead, Bouldering) and an all-around event where the points are combined

You didn't cover the awful commentary 😂😂 also when Jacob topped the lead it was so anti climactic because it was like the height of excitement yet it was crowning someone else the champion. Felt weird.

Totally agree with you! These are simply 3 different disciplines. You will never find someone in the pros who can run a 100m race and a marathon and achieve the best time. (I've never seen Bolt run a marathon) Anyone who climbs and bouldering knows that you can't peak in both at the same time. Respect to all the athletes who have managed to master both disciplines with a grueling training. However, the physical stress is so great in the long run that they can not stand it very long or we will soon see special diseases or doping as in other sports. Let's just hope that it remains a sport where the athletes are friends, train together and try to get stronger together and are happy when someone else makes a difficult boulder or tops the route, no matter what country they come from. That's why I love to watch the athletes.

solid video but disagree with your point on speed specialists just being allowed in. They all had to qualify following the same rules as the other athletes. Miroslaw reached the olympics by making it to the finals of a combined climbing world cup event as well as other achievements

I imagine there were a certain amount of medals dedicated to the climbing category and there weren't enough to split the disciplines. I don't think it's an issue of not being able to acquire physical meals. It would have been that the IOC limited the number of medals that could be given to climbers.

The real issue that you didnt mentioned is that they decided to scored by multiplying the scores????? So if you didnt come in first in one of the 3 events it was basically impossible to make the podium

Solid video man! You made your way into my algorithm, so I'd say you're on your way to getting bigger.

The biggest problem by far with Sport Climbing's Olympic debut was the terrible commentators they dug out of some random broadcast network for the event. That main dude was constantly yelling and blabbering generic crap at the audience, while the women would try to explain the physics behind the sport with clearly no actual knowledge of climbing or physics. Thankfully the format will be completely different in Paris 2024, with Speed being a separate event (still tournament bracket sadly tho), then Boulder+Lead comined, where climbers earn scores out of 100 based on successful moves, with the points from each discipline then added together to form the athlete's final points total, which determines their placement and medals. The max possible score for B+L will be 200 points, requiring flashing every boulder and topping the lead wall. This new format also includes 2 zones for bouldering, which I think is much more fair when the last few moves are fkin hard but you get no extra reward unless you top. It has been successfully tested and tweaked over the European and World Championships in 2022 and 2023, so I'm really excited to see it during the Olympics. What remains to be seen is if they will use the experienced and competent commentators that have been covering IFSC competitions for many years or if they'll call up some randos once again depending on the region and language of the broadcast. Ugh. I'm Canadian, so I sincerely hope we get the general UK-English coverage with Matt Groom and someone else, possibly Shauna Coxsey or Meghan Markle.

The speed climbing record setter not winning gold because she was quite specialized to being a speed climber reminds me of how a guy in the early modern Olympics set a long jump record in a similar kind of combination event and ended up not getting gold

No one let anyone in. How did speed specialists qualify? Well, largely they didn't. There were three speed specialists out of twenty for men, four for women. How did those qualify? Simple -- by being good at speed. Miroslaw and Bassa Mawem (who was the speed specialist, not Mickael) were both 7th out of 20 in the qualis, Anouk Jaubert was 8th, Khaibulin was 11th, Yiling was 12th. They all beat lots of top boulder/lead climbers. The scoring system simply favored being good at one discipline.

everybody seems to forget, that Adam, who was by far the worst speed climber, got served a 4th place finish in speed because of the DNS of Bassa he got to advance into the next round.... Seems pretty stupid to me, to give the free round in a KO format to the slowest competitor out of the qualifying. so therefore he shouldnt have got a medal anyway... All in all this was a rather stupid competition and EVERYBODY knew this beforehand!!

The issue with medal is not the cost of making more medals, but the fact that the number of medal in the Olympics is supposed to be constant. Meaning that adding a new sport implies removing one medal elsewhere

A gold medal cost about between 800 to 1300$ at current silver and gold price based on its size. Not cheap but the IOC could definitely afford some spares for all 3 disciplines

Well.. the olympics handled climbing as i handled my first time. No idea what they were doing, trying to be creative and ultimately ended up disappointing everyone involved. But there is always the second time to make up for initial fuckups.

Combining climbing disciplines makes about as much sense as putting all the combative arts together. Strange that they seem to be able to comprehend how dumb it would be to make wrestlers also compete in judo, karate and taekwondo, but can't figure out that there are specialties in climbing. Now if they just want to make all the combatives one big cage match battle royale, I'd watch.

The commentary about the actual climbing is insightful, but most of your questions about why and how things were done, how people qualified, why heats are used, etc are well documented.

"We arguably have been climbing much longer than we've been swimming, since swimming is probably relatively new to us as humans". Unbelievably bad argument. Do you know where all life came from? Long before apes? Few prehistoric humans were doing such needlessly dangerous things like climbing up a cliff. What we WERE doing was crossing rivers and lakes, and catching fish. If almost all humans can swim, but only a small proportion can even do a pull-up, what does that tell you?

They got two gold medals(w&m) to award. This limitation is based upon the scale of the organisation effort needed. If you would ask me, this is unfair. Just look at swimming how many disciplines there are. At that point the climbing association had to make a decision which discipline to show to the world and because it would be unfair to the other ones they decided to show them all at the cost of huge compromise and because it was first and only time this combination would exist, they made some mistakes. That is all. No need for this drama. Next time it will be better.

That whole section about the amount of medals is pretty poorly researched. I did not get much into the weeds, but even I know that the amount of medals given to new disciplines is limited. Yes, some disciplines seem to have medal for god damn nearly anything, while others have like 1 or 2. But when you look into it. It's pretty clear the sports that have the longest Olympic history. AKA have been featured in modern Olympics for the longest. Simply have more medals. Swimming is one of the OG sports and so it has multiple disciplines and multiple medals. You can argue against the bureaucracy, but argument such as "Humans have climbed for centuries". Are dumb. Not to mention if you really want to go down that route all organisms have originally came from the sea, so no. We did actually swim for longer than we climbed.

0:23-0:35 It's quite easy to find the answer. The silver medals are silver, gold medals are silver with a few grams of gold on the surface (so like gold plated, but using much more gold), and bronze medals are really cheap because they're made of... Yes, you guessed it, bronze.

I personally really don't mind the combination of lead and bouldering because that gives people with slightly different specialties the possibilities to compete with each other. Besides, the two disciplines really compliment each other, so I believe the current format is perfectly fine.

1:50 that can happen in many sports. You can be the fastest to ever run the 100m, do it in the semis and lose the final

As a swimmer, I found it confusing and weird why my sport was thrown under the bus. But after watching Miroslaw get the world record and not even podium. Damn.

I think the idea of outdoor climbing in the olympics might be cool, but there are definitely an insane amount of factors to consider as opposed to indoor. It would be nice though to see, and I think it would be a great way to showcase the rock / boulder styles that each country has to offer.

It wasn't that they couldn't produce enough medals, it's that climbing was on a trial run and they tend to ramp up the number of medals based on how well it goes. Climbing gets more medals next time, and that was always going to be the way it happened based on my knowledge

You got me at the monke swimming

The fact that Ondra didn't make first place or at least podium just shows how broken the scoring system is. It's like failing Einstein in physics. But tbh i think it's good that there are boulders that can't be solved even by current champions in the given time. It gives the viewer the "even the best have room for improvement" feeling that will get them to watch again the next time.

I understand your points but I find interresting too to compare the different skills of the climbers. I'm thinking to powerlifting where there is 3 movements, each athlete can be specialist of one but the goal is to be a complete powerlifter, like strong with every muscle. There is a medal for each movement but the winner remains the best of three. I just find very interresting to also consider versatility as a true athletic quality, maybe we could find a format to reward as much climber ho chose to specialise than those who are good in any type of climbing.

According to chatgpt - Total Cost: When combining material costs with production costs: The cost of a gold medal can range from $1,000 to $1,500. The cost of a silver medal can be around $500 to $800. The cost of a bronze medal can be around $10 to $20. You can buy a chalk bag for a bronze medal

You really forgot to mention that the belayers were really bad and Adam Ondra mentioned both he and other climbers got shortroped several times during the competition.

They always do it. It's easier to push it in as a combined event at first and decouple later, than try to introduce it as three different disciplines from the beginning. People who did it probably recognised that it's bad, but deemed it necessary

I don't see it as a bad debut. Just room to grow. Do it like in weightlifting: individual and overall medals! That rewards the specialists AND the Overall best climber! 🙌

The speed climbers qualified the same way the other lead and boulderers - finish top 8 in the world champs or Olympic qualifier. They weren’t just chucked in. Also Mawem wasn’t the only male speed climber, Rishat from Kazakhstan and Luduvico from Italy were as well.

It's so sad seeing arguably the worlds best speed climber getting completely shut down on on these boulders. Hopefully now that speed climbing is split off for 2024, she'll podium.

It's not about the cost of the medals. It's about the numbers of events in the olympics. You can't have to many events as a new sport.

This take is really disingenuous, mostly because of omission and disrespect towards speed climbing. first I get it, I don’t like speed climbing, it’s completely different to boulder/lead and I know most climbers think less of it, but it is its own discipline that’s just as difficult in its own way, and despite not liking the fact that they joined it with the other two, it did not and should not count for less. The arguing against the bracket format without disclosing that that is how all speed climbing comps are is disingenuous. It doesn’t matter who had the fastest time in one of their goes the entire comp, this is a race vs format, not time trials round robin or some shit. Like in football and other match sports the team that wins is not the one that had the match with the most goals, it’s the one that wins its matches and eliminates its competition. The route is the same even outside the comp, if you only care about their fastest time with no regard for matches might as well skip the comp and just rank them by their all time best. That’s the other disingenuous part, the spaniard didn’t “basically get 5th” and combined with his other mid and bad results somehow got 1st. Be honest, he got 1st place in speed, he won all of his races including the final, and he also received a mid and a terrible result in the other two disciplines. All the other climbers who did great in one category either did even worse in the other two or did better on average, but didn’t get first place in any category. The reason he won and ondra failed is that the committee gave first place in all disciplines a disproportionate amount of points specifically to favor competitors who won at least one of the disciplines in order to decrease the likelihood of having a gold medalist who simply managed to do average to good in all categories without winning any of them. by being displaced from first in lead ondra didn’t get any 1st place and suffered as a result. Again, even knowing this was specifically to prevent mid-good resulta all throughout from winning you gold you phrased it intentionally to make it seem like the guy got terrible placings on all 3 and somehow still won. Also, the issue is not the number of medals, it’s the number of participants. Separate medals means separate participants, in other words more olympic spots, which is harder to get and is actually what the IFSC is hoping to get more of in future olympics. Luckily in Paris only lead/boulder will be combined, and in the future likely 3 separate medals will be had and hopefully more olympians too, and this format might have been a necessary evil, but there is no need to lie at the expense of one of the disciplines and the gold medalist.

I'm looking at these standings, thinking the simplest way to see who wins the overall event is to just add up their finishing places and see who has the lowest number. At first that seems to work out, the first two add up to 12, the third adds up to 13.. but then we get to fourth place. His positions add up to 11, and everyone past him adds up to 12. So it seems pretty clear to me that while I don't know how you would break down all the 12s, but Narasaki Tomoa, who's positions added up to 11, definitely had the number one position. Idk how these scores in the final column are actually calculated, maybe Narasaki committed some technical foul, but I say he got robbed.

Wow I forgot how bad the olympics were for the men. You know when Tomoa and Ondra can't even medal that there is a massive issue with the format. Paris should do it a lot better. Definitely need an extra boulder problem and to get rid of the gimmics. That final boulder was just ridiculous.

Best discussion of Olympic Rock Climbing debut in Tokyo. Thank you.

1:13 we began as fish so unfortunately no

They should do it similar to like the IM in swimming, or the pentathlon in track, so that each discipline is it’s own event but there’s the 3 as one to see who’s most well rounded between all of them as a 4th event

That adam ondra move was actually insane tho at 6:07. hes so good

The Olympics has been obsessed with keeping the number of Olympians down, and they think the best way is to either keep the number of medals down, or only add medals that can be competed for by competitors already at the Olympics - so swimming having 37 medal events is fine, because the same people compete in most of the events (a 100m and a 50m with almost exactly the same field, etc). Apparently (for most sports, ie anything that can use a regular soccer/football style stadium or an arena and doesn't need a custom building like cycling needing a velodrome or baseball needing a stadium of a non-standard shape), the cost of putting on the event is pretty small compared to the cost of making the Olympic village bigger to house the extra Olympians. The medals, since you mentioned them, the bronze and silver medals are actually bronze and silver, the gold medal is solid silver and coated in gold. But they're not a big factor in the costs. If they had added bouldering, lead and speed as separate events, then there would have needed to be many more climbers at the Olympics, as few of the climbers would have qualified for multiple events. The IFSC did the right thing, though - by putting on the event, they demonstrated the problem with a single medal to the IOC, and they've got a second medal for 2024, so speed climbing will be separate from a combined lead/bouldering event. They may be able to go to four medals at some point if they can convince the IOC that most of the entrants into the combined, lead and bouldering events will be the same people: one of the criteria the IOC uses to assess a sport is number of competitors per medal; the fewer the better (so the more you can get competitors to enter multiple events, the better).

Tomoa deserved the gold. I'm glad climbing made it into the olympics, but seriously, why did they have to screw it up this badly.

Swimming isn’t relatively new to humans lmao all mammals have a diving reflex hard wired into us but you are right, climbing isn’t exactly a recent discovery lmao

Man, this is humiliating! Going like "hey, you‘ll get a chance to compete in the olympics for your sport, but only if you also compete (and probably humiliate yourself on live tv) in two other sports that you are a novice in"

the "not enough medals" issue comes from the olympic committee, they only allotted one medal set for men and one for women, so the ifsc had to adapt. Not sure why they kept speed included still, though.

Let's be honest, your research about the Olympics could not have been more than reading through one reddit thread. Stick to climbing commentaty or put in some actual work

They love to minimize the number of events for some reason. Even in swimming where there is obviously a large amount of medals, they still don't feature even close to all of the events that are done at the swimming worlds championships.

They need to do it like gymnastics and have individual event medals and an All-Around medal

I’m psyched for the Olympics…as long as a certain retired UK ex-Olympian climber who really loves to chat…is “not” commentating 😬🙏

We’ve been climbing longer than we’ve been swimming? Cuz, in the womb we develop the skins between our fingers of our sealiving ancestors

Also something nobody seem to notice is how frigging hot and humid japanese climate is during summer!! Climbing under those circumstances is far from ideal, way less friction on the wall and so much energy loss. I'm psyched tor Paris 2024, i was rooting for mickael mawem, he was a great all rounder and deserved gold imo

Thanks Climbing Stuff, helps a lot!

There was not much disparity between bouldering and lead climbing, but there was between speed climbing and everything else. Which just goes to show how different speed climbing is that it shouldn't even be considered rock climbing. It is climbing but it's more about pattern memory and muscle memory than it is about climbing technique and strengths. Join bouldering and lead all you want but make speed it's own thing.

Still salty over the Olympics climbing debut.

well done video. I thought you were a big youtuber. im surprised. subbed

Can't be mad at the dude that won, it was a result of the format. However, I disagree that he earned a gold medal. He placed in the bottom half in all disciplines and somehow that makes him the best climber, presumably in the world? Nah give me a break that is ridiculous.

I just hope there is a change in commentators to accompany the change of format. The commentary was so terrible

I’d recommend listening the Climbing Gold’s podcast to understand why the points structure was so. With a proper source. Thankfully seems to be slightly fixed for the next Olympics.

Crazy how swimming gets the medals and climbing doesn’t. The strokes, as different as they are, are basically identical when compared to the differences between like speed climbing and bouldering.

I agree ... however, it being the first time is no excuse to f**k up the format as badly as they have. I looked at it for 2 minutes (before the start of the tournament) and was like "this is bad, this is REALLY bad" okay, I do statistics for a living, but how the hell can 10+ organisers in a year not see that the granularity of that format is absolutely unusable? You don't even need to understand the math behind it, just play out some examples and you see how messed up the dynamics is.

There's so many different styles of climbing, so hopefully that will be reflected in the number of events similarly to what happened with swimming.

I had to mute the sound while watching this... "she is older than the walls she is climbing on" finaly did to me...

Indoor comp stuff seems too flashy and more dynamic than static most the time

Your point is absolutely correct. I for some reason didn't think of the absurdity. Now you've pointed it out, I'm feeling pissed off about it. It's ridiculous, and needs amending immediately... Either that or give just one medal for all events on track... 1 medal 🏅 for all of swimming 🏊🏽... And all cycling should be just one medal 🏅 band so on and so forth...it's stupid...

It is truly like handing out medals for an event combining the 100m dash and the marathon, because "it is both running". The elitist mindset of the olympics is just ridiculous. Just because something is around forever doesn't mean it deserves 10 times as many medals. They allow so many cool new sports, why not also take them seriously?

the medals are made of silver that has a gold plating over it.

1:06 If you're going with some sort of evolution based argument, even with a middle-school education you should know all life evolved from aquatic life originally.

They can have different events for shooting rifle and air rifle but not climbing...

You know something is flawed if someone topping a climb makes the difference of someone else getting first or 6th place

The medals (Silver and Gold) are made of silver, but the gold one has 6 grams of pure gold.

Solid video, but evolutionarily, our ancestors had been swimming for much longer than they have been climbing. It doesn’t really change the point of the video, I just wanted it to be noted

I really appreciate this perspective and this guys eyebrow raise! Damn! 😂

Just a scientific point: no climbing is not an older human skill t han swimming. All mammals (all animals in general actually) have evolved from some form of aquatic species. Our first common ancestor with cetacean is about 95M years old. While the common ancestor with chimpanzee is about 7M years old. That said, the "medals" excuse for having all 3 disciplines in one was clearly bullshit and just disrespectful toward the sport. Personally I would have 3 different disciplines with 3 different set of medals for climbing.

I see it as pentathlon, you look for the best combined climber

Dude; sorry to be mean but you can train anyone to speed climb 🤷

Swimming has been in the olympics for a LONG time so obviously they’re gonna have medals for all the disciplines. 🤦🏽‍♂️

Its the number of athletes not medals. Swimming has a lot of multi-event athletes and a low max team size for the number of events than can leave qualified swimmers at home for teams like the US.

I loved the hype of the olympic climbing but the placement was indeed ridiculously terribly bad. The multiplication system also scked.

I don’t see how this is a problem. They combined the events and who ever scored the most point from all three disciplines was crowned the champion. They wanted the best ‘overall’ climber to win gold. This could been seen as something similar to Athletics in the Hemptathalon. Where setting a WR in one event doesn’t guarantee you a medal in the final standings.

it should've been like gymnastics one all around event and individual finals too to be fair to everybody, otherwise, it's just a mess

I agree with the main sentiment of this video in that the combined event was a big misstep and should have been separated. But you do come across as very condescending to the specialist speed climbers, despite saying several times that you don't intend to. Especially with the conspiracy theory that they were somehow "let in" undeservedly. They qualified by the same rules as everyone else and Miroslaw made it to the Olympic final on a the combined score, same as all the other finalists and a huge achievement.

3:05 - dispairancies?

my friend olympics is money. For the first year the sport didnt have the commercial power to seperate the disciplines. All your comments are from the naive side. Everything was set to make the sport commercially attractive. Thats the intent of the IFSC and of course the athletes as well since they are professionals.

I hear ya big guy

This was such a joke I stopped watching climbing comps altogether.

0:22 why dont you just look it up and tell us? kinda weird to ask questions in your video that can be easily answered

I like parkour and I like bouldering. But to me those are two vastly different sports. I

Analogy: Lets have the olympic decathlon fought over by guys who are only good in one discipline.

The medals: its all do with the face the IOC want more sports at the olympics but don't want to increase the number of events. So sports like cycling for example have lost events to cater for other sports. & yes it is silly.

Colin Duffy deserved the gold medal...never been 6th or 7th

We came from the oceans

NO SPEED OFFWIDTH!

Speed climbers are incredible in their craft, but they are doing the same eout over and over again... boukderers and lead climbers are (sorry to say) the real climbers who are used to solve problems. They don't go through one route again and again just to run it up. They are aiming to climb harder and harder routes/problems...

You don't know what you're talking about

4th, 5th and 7th!!?!