While speed climbing, lead climbing, and bouldering are nothing new, Olympic Sport Climbing—the category under which all three sports are arranged—wasn’t a thing until 2021. So viewers can be forgiven for having questions about how the event works and what’s going on and why these large-forearmed people are doing what they’re doing. Here are FAQs that might help you better understand the event.
Bouldering is one half of the Boulder & Lead Combined event—and it’s all about testing the athletes on wildly difficult movements. The boulder rounds contain four “boulder problems,” each of which tests subtly different skills. There are strips of tape on the starting of holds of each problem, showing where exactly climbers need to place their hands and feet at the start of each attempt. After that, they can do whatever sequence of movements they want to get to the finishing hold—which they need to hold onto with two hands. In semifinals, each climber gets five minutes to solve each problem—with a five-minute break in isolation between each one. In finals, they’re given just four minutes per boulder and four minutes between them.
Each of the four boulders is worth a maximum of 25 points—which is what climbers get if they climb to the top on their first try. But there are two intermediate zone holds—the first worth 5 points, the second worth 10 points—that give partial credit to climbers who reach them. 0.1 points are subtracted from the climber’s score for each failed attempt if they do eventually reach a zone or top. This rewards climbers who do things fast and helps spread the competitors’ scores based on attempts. For example, if I were to flash Boulder 1 (25), reach the second zone on Boulder 2 on my third attempt (10 – 0.2), send Boulder 3 three on my fifth attempt (25 – 0.4), and then fail to get to the zone on Boulder 4 despite 11 attempts, my score in the Bouldering round would be 60.4 (25 + 9.8 + 24.6 + 0).
Lead climbing is a test of finger-strength, technique, and endurance. Climbers get only one chance on the lead wall—which they climb while connected to a rope for safety. On their way up, they clip the rope into quickdraws. When they fall (as most, if not all, will do) they fall twice the distance they’ve traveled from the last quickdraw. (Yes, it’s scary, and it can be a bit dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing, which is why we’ve written extensively about how to get started.) Getting to the top successfully requires being both strong and very efficient; mistakes tire the competitors out and make it that much harder to continue. The outside equivalent of this discipline is known as sport climbing.
The lead route (which changes every time) is set so that it contains more than 40 hand holds. The top 40 of these holds have fixed point values, which increase the higher you get on the route. The top 10 holds (holds 31-40) are each worth 4 points. The previous 10 (holds 21-30) are worth 3 points each. 11-20 are worth 2 points each. And 1-10 are worth 1 point. If a climber falls while moving between a set of holds, they’re given an additional 0.1 point. For example, if I fight all the way to the third to last hold but fall while reaching for the second to last one, I’d have a score of 92.1.
The Combined Olympic Sport Climbing event is pretty simple: it’s the sum of your scores in the Boulder and Lead rounds, with the highest score winning. To take my previous examples, my score would be my bouldering points (60.4) plus my lead points (92.1), which equals 152.5. But if I flashed all four boulders and topped the lead route, I’d earn the max score of 200.
Speed climbing, which is not part of the combined event, is pretty much just what it sounds like. Climbers start on the ground standing on a sensor pad. When they leave the ground, they climb the 15-meter wall as fast as they can and then slap the sensor pad at the top of the wall. Unlike the lead route and boulder problems, the speed route is standardized—meaning that it has been the same for 20 years. This gives athletes the ability to train on the route excessively, and embed every part of it in their muscle memory, which helps them get faster times. In the early rounds of the competition, athletes race alongside each other, one in the A lane and one in the B lane, but they are ranked by their times, not by how well they do relative to one another. This explains why you may see them both celebrating, or both crying, at the end of their parallel races. Later in the competition, however, the scoring switches to elimination rounds, with athletes actually racing one another. In these rounds, the athlete who wins progresses to the next heat; the athlete who loses is eliminated. (This is how Sam Watson, having lost an earlier race, set a new World Record but still only got bronze metal.)
Each of the three rock disciplines tests different skills. Boulder & Lead—which, for a series of geographical biases that I don’t have time to get into here, are what the vast majority of North American and Western European climbers think about when they think about competition climbing—rely first and foremost on hand and finger strength. Climbers are literally the strongest athletes in the world from the elbow down—with top climbing athletes often taking short breaks from the rocks to prove themselves in grip competitions against people twice their weight. But they are particularly impressive when you consider their body sizes. (You can normally tell who’s an experienced climber at the climbing gym based on the size of their forearms compared to the size of their upper arms.) Climbers train extensively for finger and grip strength, both by climbing and by working with hangboards and lifting blocks.
That said, there’s a lot of other strength involved. Almost every Lead & Boulderer, male or female, can do one-armed pull-ups and front levers with ease. Some can one-armed muscle-ups. Some can do one-armed front-levers.
But climbing is also a skill sport, like gymnastics, pole vaulting, or skiing. Flexibility, creativity, and technique are very important—and some climbers (Adam Ondra being a famous example) get away with being relatively weak by being incredibly good at climbing movements.
Speed climbing, meanwhile, is completely different, rewarding explosive power in the legs and arms—something that most twig-legged Boulder & Lead specialists avoid training for fear of increasing body mass. That’s why the Tokyo Olympic structure, in which all three disciplines were lumped together, ended up with such awkward results—and why Paris 2024 is so much more fun.
The speed route is incredibly easy. Though shorter and less explosive climbers may find it harder, it’s generally graded easy 5.10—a grade that most moderately fit people are good enough to climb indoors after just a few months in the sport. What makes it hard, of course, is doing it fast.
The boulder problems and lead routes at the Olympic and World Cup level, on the other hand, are absolutely heinous. We recently ran an article about this, but the short version is: The boulder problems range from V9 to V12 for the women, and V10 to V14 for the men. The routes are probably in the 5.13d to 5.14c range for women, and 5.14a to 5.14d for men.
Personal aside: I remember watching a 2009 World Cup in Barcelona in which one of my friends—by far the strongest climber I knew personally—was competing. He made it about five holds up the 50-move qualification route. Adam Ondra and Jakob Schubert, both of whom are still competing 15 years later and have qualified for the Men’s Lead final in Paris, made the route look like a warmup.
Olympic Sport Climbing isn’t anywhere near as dangerous as, say, climbing an 8,000-meter peak or imitating Alex Honnold on a free solo circuit. But, as Climbing’s Contributing Editor Owen Clarke noted in a recent piece, “pulling plastic at the highest levels has risks, too.”
He writes:
Although we often think of multi-pitch trad routes as “riskier” than shorter lines in controlled indoor environments, a 2024 Czech university study actually found “direct correlation between time spent bouldering and lead climbing and increased injury frequency” while injury incidence actually decreased with time spent traditional climbing.
Simply put, the movements demanded by modern competition-style routes put the human body under an immense amount of stress.
For more info: Olympic Sport Climbing Is Dangerous. But Not How You’d Think
Though the Bouldering and Lead disciplines are quite different from each other, both, at root, are concerned with difficult movements. Speed is not. While I’d ultimately love to see four Olympic Sport Climbing medals (Speed, Boulder, Lead, and Boulder & Lead Combined) as they do in the World Championships, the fact is that many athletes excel at both disciplines. Janja Garnbret, Adam Ondra, Jakob Schubert, Colin Duffy, Toby Roberts, and Anraku Sorato have all won World Cups in both events—and a majority of the climbers have podiumed in both at the World Cup level. Speed climbers, on the other hand, are good at something radically different—climbing an easy route fast. If you think that prepares them to excel on harder things, take a look at the Speed climbers’ scores in the Boulder & Lead round of the Tokyo Olympics.
Climbers have two primary points of contact on the climbing wall: their hands and their feet. Since athletic endeavors and stress both increase perspiration, and since perspiration decreases friction, climbers use chalk to keep their hands dry and the friction good.
Rather than answer that, I’m gonna kick you over to Matt Samet, author of The Climbing Dictionary, who put together a list of 40 climbing terms you might want to know when watching the Olympics.
All climbing shoe models are slightly different—with different use cases in mind. Some shoes are better on overhanging problems that require hooking with your heel or dragging against other holds with the top of your foot. Other shoes are stiffer and better for standing on small footholds on less steep “slab” walls. While most competitors wear shoes that they think will be good enough at everything to get them through a full round of bouldering, you will notice some climbers bringing two pairs—one stiff, one soft. You may even see them wear different shoes on their left and right feet. Here are 12 Climbing shoes competing for Olympic gold.
The real answer is that they hate it and wish it was colder. (Climbing is a cool or even cold-weather sport: with most climbers feeling that ideal temperatures for outdoor bouldering in the 35-55℉ range and for outdoor sport climbing in the 45-65℉.) To offset the heat, you’ll notice some climbers wearing cooling vests in isolation between bouldering rounds. Others use cold water bottles. Before Tokyo 2020, Adam Ondra—arguably the world’s best all around climber, who loves climbing in the cold—built a climbing wall inside a sauna to better acclimate to the temperatures.
Climbing shoes lose friction when they’re dirty—and since falls can be catastrophic in the lead, and reduce your score in bouldering, competitors often want to either (a) clean their shoes before stepping on the wall, or (b) keep anything on the pads from getting them dirty in the first place. The only thing about socks: you’ve got to remember to take them off.
Competitors in Lead and Boulder are unfamiliar with the routes and problems they’re about to climb. While they’re waiting for their turn, they’re kept in what’s called “isolation” (iso for short) and are not allowed to use phones or headphones that might be able to connect with outside sources of information. Athletes generally don’t know the exact state of the competition while they’re competing—though they can get a sense based on the crowd’s cheers.
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