Climbing reached the Olympics only in the Tokyo 2020 Games
Climbing scales everything from eight-thousand-metre peaks to gym boulders using hands, feet, and gear. Sport climbing’s safer bolted routes, indoor walls, and competitions surged from the 1980s. Tokyo’s 2020 Games (held 2021) debuted Olympic climbing combining lead, boulder, and speed formats.
People climb to get around, for fun, for competition and for work in trades such as construction and military operations, on natural rock and ice or on artificial walls. Guides and guidebooks helped outdoor climbing catch on. Early stars included Riccardo Cassin, Gaston Rébuffat, Walter Bonatti and Hermann Buhl, followed by Reinhold Messner and Doug Scott and later Mick Fowler, Marko Prezelj and Ueli Steck. The bolted-route and gym boom produced professionals such as Lynn Hill, Wolfgang Güllich, Catherine Destivelle, Chris Sharma, Janja Garnbret and Adam Ondra.
A single-pitch route fits within one rope length, up to about 50 metres, while multi-pitch and big-wall routes can stretch to 1,000 metres. Aid climbing hauls upward on pitons, aiders and other devices; much early rock climbing worked that way, and into the 1970s big walls like the Salathé Wall and The Nose still could not be done without it.
Sport climbing, begun in France in the 1980s, is free climbing protected by permanent bolts and now hosts the hardest routes, such as Silence. Traditional climbers place removable nuts and camming devices that the second climber takes out, on celebrated routes including Cobra Crack and Indian Face. Free soloists use no protection at all, so a fall can kill, except in deep-water soloing over the sea; an unroped ascent of Freerider in 2017 was the subject of the Academy Award–winning documentary Free Solo.
Top-roping hangs a fixed rope from above so a falling climber simply dangles, making it a safe introduction common in gyms, though it does not count as free climbing. Bouldering tackles low rocks with no rope, highball problems reach about 10 metres, and Burden of Dreams, Dreamtime and Midnight Lightning count among its milestones. Competition ice climbing is not yet Olympic.
Source: Climbing
