Don’t mind me while I have a little rant …
Competition climbing may be many things, but it is NOT swimming!
It may be hot it may be cold; it may be in an air-conditioned hall, held at a steady temperature of 20 degrees. It may be outside with the hot midday sun baring down on black holds, in Asia, during the monsoon season. The wall could be steep, or it could be slabby, but one thing is for certain, most of the climbers will not have seen it before, let alone climbed on it. The experienced elder statemen and women of the sport, may have an advantage here. But even they are unlikely to know each hold on the wall, expertly placed by the route setters who are each season challenged to “make something new”. A move or sequence of moves we haven’t previously imagined, that will require even the most experienced athletes to dig deep in their technique catalogues, filed away in their movement repertoire mind palaces.
Young athletes come bursting onto the scene, full of exuberance and promise. They soon learn that consistency of performance is like a diamond, hard-earned, it will only be fully formed after years of hard graft and pressure. One week on top of the world, the next down and out. But that’s ok, each experience helps them to start to create their own filing system, organising the techniques they have practiced so they can quickly select and optimise their performance under that magical thing, pressure.
I say it again. Climbing is NOT swimming.
The length of the route does not say the same, the number of moves is not standard, neither is the difficulty nor the challenge. Our environment is not designed by organisers to maximise the physical potential of the athletes, to allow for World Records or personal bests. In our sport we have no such thing. In our country we have no comparison.
Why then do our national governing bodies, insist we should “do it like swimming”?! Is it because its easier? To put the athletes in pretty boxes, with neat edges, that can be taken off the shelf when needed and discarded when they don’t quite meet expectations? Is it to toe the line with funding bodies in the hope of some big pay day that the athletes will never see and will instead be funnelled into developing a system that the powers that be recognise, “like swimming”?
Our sport is unrecognisable in the current terms that dictate successful performance. It is yet unquantifiable. There has been more than one young woman, who has become World Champion before they did their first 1 arm pull-up and many more who can do multiple and never produce a career defining performance. The potential list of performance variables is infinite and unique to the athlete, the individual, the person.
I hope our sport stays this way, surrounded by a fuzzy haze, to all but those with a very clear understanding of its depth, its intricacy’s. For those people, it’s like looking into a deep blue ocean teeming with life, colour, and possibilities. A reality worth protecting, climbing is NOT swimming.