One of the world’s most intense sports made its debut as a solo event for the first time at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
Speed climbing involves two climbers competing at the same time, with one athlete standing on the left side of the wall (lane A) and the other on the right side (lane B). Once the buzzer sounds, they shoot up the 15-meter wall as fast as humanly possible.
Poland’s Aleksandra Miroslaw won gold in the women’s speed climbing on Wednesday, reaching the summit in a stunning time of 6.1 seconds as hundreds of fans cheered her on and held Polish flags aloft.
But now that the sport is getting so much attention, coaches and athletes who have been doing it for years are warning about the “horrific” damage professional climbers are doing to their limbs, often leaving their hands looking like they’ve been run through a cheese grater.
Albert Ok, an experienced speed climbing coach, says it often gets so bad that he has to “prescribe” superglue to his students to keep their fingernails from being ripped off.
Team Poland gold medalist Aleksandra Miroslaw poses on the podium during the medal ceremony after the Women’s Speed on Wednesday
Aleksandra Miroslaw of Poland (left) and Deng Lijuan of China (right) race against each other. Miroslaw took the gold, beating Lijuan by 0.08 seconds
“You’re destroying your fingers and knees all the time,” Ok said The Wall Street Journal“It’s pretty gruesome.”
According to the rules of the sport, there is a standardized route for all global competitions, meaning the ledges remain in the same places on the wall.
This means that speed climbing involves muscle memory and a small mistake can cause a climber to hurt their knees, twist their toes, or cut their fingers.
And when such terrible injuries do happen – and they do often – they are made worse because climbers are expected to persevere and finish the ascent.
“Normally the finger splits,” said Matt Maddison, Team USA strength and conditioning coach.
“All you have to do is miss the finger hole by a millimeter or two, and then you can undo all your work, take out the superglue, and put your fingers back together.”
Because climbers expose their fingers to constant wear and tear, Ok recommends his athletes take lidocaine to numb the pain.
Miroslaw (left) takes on Aleksandra Kalucka, also of Team Poland, in the women’s semi-finals
The women’s speed climbing medalists pose together on the podium. Miroslaw (center) won gold, Deng (left) took silver, and Kalucka earned bronze
Technically, speed climbing made its debut at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but it was combined with bouldering and lead climbing into an all-encompassing discipline called Sport Climbing.
Key differences between bouldering and lead climbing are that they cause much less damage than their competitors.
Bouldering is more about endurance than speed. You have to climb ‘challenging routes’ that you don’t know in advance.
Without a belay rope, climbers scale multiple 15-foot walls. It’s more of a puzzle and there’s no time element. Athletes simply get a certain number of attempts before they’re disqualified.
Lead climbing is similar to bouldering. The main differences are that there is a six-minute time limit to climb the unique route on the wall and that climbers use a belay rope.
Speed climbers don’t have the luxury of taking their time to figure out how to get up the wall like boulderers or lead climbers, nor do they have the time to deal with a sudden injury.
To develop the muscle memory they need to succeed, dedicated speed climbers often train four hours a day in the gym, using the same worn-out and worn-out body parts over and over again.
Climbers’ hands also become very calloused after years of practicing the sport
Sam Watson, a student of Albert Ok, broke the men’s world record in speed climbing with a time of 4.75 seconds
Piper Kelly, a 24-year-old speed climber for Team USA, has been training on the same route for about 10 years and qualified for the Paris Olympics.
She finished twelfth overall.
She recently looked at her training logs to see how many times she had actually placed her fingers and toes on the same ridges.
“I’d guess 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 the same path up.
Climbers develop their own ‘betas’ – the technical term for the specific route they take – and this is determined by their aptitude for moving vertically up the wall.
The fastest way to the top is the most linear, but also the most challenging.
There is no escaping bloody fingers and knees as climbers spend years perfecting their exact route, often sending them crashing into the wall at incredibly high speeds.
One of Albert Ok’s students, Sam Watson, is a rare exception to this rule.
Watson, another speed climber for Team USA, set the men’s world record on Tuesday with a time of 4.75 seconds.
His coach boasted of Watson’s superhuman accuracy, which allows him to avoid the cuts and wounds so common to others in the sport.
“Other people aren’t as lucky,” Ok said.