“I mean, it was five one-thousands of a second away from a legal start,” Colin Duffy ruefully reflected. “Just unlucky.”
Costly false starts are an inevitable component of every Olympics, but this one stood out: the athletics track was six miles away. This was sport climbing, and if the concept of climbers being up against the clock and judged by the millisecond seems oddball to the uninitiated, wait until you wrap your head around the scoring system, which seems designed to drive everyone up the wall.
“The way the format works with multiplication it didn’t go my way,” said Duffy, who ended the men’s final in seventh place after a tantalising few seconds when it appeared that had he just been able to rise a couple of metres higher in the last discipline, lead, then the gold medal was in reach.
Instead, in a method only a maths teacher could love, the American finished far behind the winner, 18-year-old Alberto Gines Lopez of Spain, despite besting him in two of the three tests. “It is crazy when I think of the three podium finishers, I beat them in two of the three disciplines,” said Duffy, a 17-year-old from Colorado, who was visibly upset at the outcome. “So … I don’t know. But they earned it, they climbed amazingly.”
How to replicate, compress, codify and score climbing for a mainstream audience in its Olympic debut? The event is a sort of greatest-hits mix tape of three disciplines: speed, bouldering and lead.
Climbers in Tokyo are ranked by multiplying their position on the leaderboard in each of the three disciplines and the lowest overall score wins. So Gines Lopez claimed gold by virtue of finishing first in speed, seventh in bouldering and fourth in lead: 1x7x4 = 28. Nathaniel Coleman, who hails from Utah, took the silver for Team USA with 6x1x5=30. Duffy scored 60 (5x4x3).
The system undeniably made for a thrilling climax, as Austria’s Jakob Schubert, the last to go, became the only man to reach the top of the wall and pipped Tomoa Narasaki of Japan to bronze.
Adam Ondra, who finished sixth, would have been entitled to wonder if all this was progress.
In 1492, by order of Charles VIII of France, a captain named Antoine de Ville climbed Mont Aiguille using ropes and ladders. The feat is often cited as the birth of mountaineering.
And here we were, 529 years later, watching the world’s best competitive climbers scamper up a 15m-high artificial wall to a soundtrack of Robbie Williams’ and Bryan Adams’ most banging tunes on a stage seemingly borrowed from Glastonbury.
But Ondra, while a master at navigating his way up, is not especially quick. While it makes for an exciting television spectacle – which is very much the point – asking him to scamper up a 15m-high wall at an angle of 95 degrees in a head-to-head race that takes less time than the 100m track final is a bit like demanding that Novak Djokovic play table tennis for the first set.
“The fact that you can climb in five seconds or six seconds has nothing to do with climbing,” he told The New York Times in 2020. “It’s a circus.”
As music blared and strobe lights swirled, all surveilled by a nearby 20m high statue of a Gundam anime robot that glowed an ever-more menacing shade of red as night fell, you could see his side of the argument.
Speed will be split from lead and bouldering to become its own medal event at Paris 2024. “So much better,” Ondra said afterwards. “It makes much more sense and it’s much more compliant with the history of the sport.”
Britain’s top female climber, Shauna Coxsey, was interviewed during a break in the action and then gently teased by Eric Idle’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life in reference to her failure to make the women’s final. This led to what was presumably another first, unless there has been a previous Olympic event at which the lyric “life’s a piece of shit” has aired over the public address system.
But such quirks are why the International Olympic Committee (IOC) invited youth-oriented action sports such as skateboarding, surfing and climbing into the Games: to slice the crust off this grand 125-year-old festival, to forestall irrelevance with irreverence.
Noticing the surge in climbing’s popularity and the proliferation of indoor gyms, climbing was added to the programme for Tokyo in 2016 and the IOC were no doubt delighted when Free Solo, the documentary film about Alex Honnold’s attempt to climb El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, won an Oscar in 2019.
Regardless of how climbing is paced and packaged, it is an almighty test of agility, strength and problem-solving. Technical and tactical, bouldering sees competitors scale as many novel fixed routes – known as problems – as possible in four minutes on a 4.5m-high wall. Lead involves using safety ropes to rise as high as possible within six minutes on a 15m-tall wall.
Ondra, a 28-year-old from the Czech Republic, has been at the summit of his sport since he was a teenager. After finishing a lowly 18th out of 20 in the speed segment of qualifying he fared much better in Thursday’s final but could only manage sixth place out of seven in the bouldering, as climbers leap, grab, tread, lunge and often fall from a wall studded with fantastical protruding shapes: jagged greys, kidney-bean blues and yellow holds resembling bananas.
Everyone struggled with the third problem, a puzzle shaped as if resembling wind-blown dandelion florets, as fiendish as it was pretty. “Impossible,” Ondra later declared, especially within the time limit and in hot and humid conditions that caused the sweat-soaked climbers to dip frequently into the chalk pouches on their waists. Scrapes and sore fingertips are an occupational hazard.
The scratches on Coleman’s ruptured skin stood out, vividly red on a hand coated with chalk. “Once you start to get close to the blood and nerves it’s all that’s on your mind,” he said.
The pain was worth it. “Oh my gosh. I never dared to acknowledge the dream that I could medal,” he said. By dint of his physical prowess and clean-cut looks he is nicknamed Captain America; an honorific the modest 24-year-old seems to find slightly embarrassing. “Nowhere in my regular life am I referred to as Captain America,” he clarified.