When did climbing become an Olympic sport?
Climbing debuted at the Tokyo Games of 2021. Prior to that, the sport first made it onto the Olympic radar at the Buenos Aires Youth Olympic Games in 2018.
Climbing’s addition, along with skateboarding and surfing, was part of a movement to expand the program to include more urban sports with a focus on attracting more popularity among younger people. Sport climbing will remain on the program for the Los Angeles 2028 Summer Olympics.
How does Olympic climbing work?
Olympic sport climbing is broken down into three disciplines: bouldering, speed and lead.
Bouldering: Athletes ascend up a 4.5-meter wall (nearly 15 feet) without ropes in a limited period of time and in the fewest attempts possible.
Lead: Climbers go as high as they can on a 15-meter wall (nearly 50 feet) in six minutes in a single attempt.
Speed: One-on-one elimination rounds and also a race against the clock, climbers scale a 15-meter wall with a five-degrees 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 from each discipline during the 2021 Games were multiplied by each other to achieve a final score. But with speed climbing out of the equation, the new judging outlook for bouldering and lead involves a maximum of 200 points. Climbers score points in bouldering by advancing up the wall through various "zones" (5 points for the low zone, 10 points for the high zone) and for reaching the top hold (25 points). Points are deducted for attempts, and a perfect bouldering round of flashing four boulder problems is worth 100 points.
In lead, athletes score by successfully holding the top 40 holds – the number of points scored for each hold will increase as they move higher on the wall. If an athlete moves toward the next hold but fails to securely hold it, they will be awarded 0.1 points on top of their previous score.