Should climbing be a sport in the Olympic Games? It’s a question that’s been debated for twenty years now since the first climbing World Cup in 1989. Competition climbing, no longer an infant sport, has made long strides toward legitimacy.

Later this month the city of Kaosiung, Taiwan will host the World Games, an athletic competition under the supervision of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), for all the fringe and niche sports that yearn to be included in the Olympic Games. Over 35 sports are included in this year’s sporting purgatory including such arcane pursuits as korfball, flying disc, orienteering, tug-of-war, and competition climbing.

The International Federation of Sport Climbing is pushing for climbing’s inclusion in the 2020 Olympic Games at a still undecided city. Will it get the nod? Hard to know. Squash will probably get a go-ahead for the 2016 games so climbing wouldn’t be included unless it was simply an exhibition. The IOC likes some of the alternative X-Games sports like snowboarding, which proved immensely popular at the Olympics, but climbing kind of flopped at the X-Games.

I worked for several years at the X-Games for Jim Waugh, the climbing organizer, and it was a constant battle for him to keep climbing in the mix. First lead climbing was dropped. The venue was too expensive and frankly the slow and steady pace didn’t make for great television. As more than one wag said, “It’s about as exciting as watching paint dry!”

Bouldering was adopted in San Francisco. It was exciting with hard problems and big plunges off the plywood boulders but it too was dropped like a screaming leader fall. Which left only speed climbing. Okay, speed climbing looks good on television. It’s also simple—just two climbers racing each other up a 100-foot wall. But the venue was just too expensive for the few minutes of air time it received so it finally got the boot too.

When I was a board member of the American Sport Climbing Federation (ASCF) in the 1990s, part of our mission was to work toward climbing’s inclusion in the highest competition, the Olympic Games. USA Climbing, now the governing body for competition climbing in the United States, holds the same goal, saying on their website, “The Olympic Games! They are within reach of USA Climbing. Just like the finish hold on a route, this is our sport’s ultimate goal.” A lofty aim, but probably not within reach in the foreseeable future, especially since USA Climbing only qualified two Americans, both women, for the World Games and no big names like Chris Sharma.

Climbing has always been participatory recreation rather than an overtly competitive sport so it remains to be seen how much interest climbers and more importantly, climbing companies with money like North Face or Patagonia would have to support competition climbing. In the 1990s competition climbing in the United States was dirt poor. There were few major sponsors for events. It’s hardly changed in the past decade.

If a flood of money did come into competition climbing, the big question is how would it be spent? Looking at the finances of other small sports, most of it would be spent on only a few athletes, coaches, as well as the administrators.

Richard Hunkler at Slippery Rock University wrote an article Seven Deadly Sins Leaders of Sports Federations Should Avoid! that was published in waterpoloplanet.com. His second sin is Lust, which he defines as “the disproportionate craving for the pleasure of satisfying one goal.” Hunkler says if a federation has a goal, it should be “then make it something that will truly benefit the entire membership day in and day out – say, a goal such as spending 100% of our time, money, and energy in trying to have as many youth in this country playing water polo as there are playing soccer.”

So lots of interesting questions about competition climbing and the Olympics. What is your opinion? Go to the Climbing Forum and let me know your thoughts. In the meantime, good luck to Mykael Ann McGinley and Tiffany Hensley, the two American climbers in this year’s World Games.

Photograph top: Are medal stands the future of climbing? Tori Allen after winning gold at the 2002 women’s speed climbing event at the X-Games. Photograph © Stewart M Green

This last May 23, 67-year-old Californian Bill Burke became the oldest American to reach the lofty summit of Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain and one of the fourteen 8,000-meter peaks. Burke made it up on his third attempt on the peak. His first attempt in 2007 ended a mere 300 feet from the summit when he turned around, afraid he wouldn’t have the strength to climb down if he continued.

The day after reaching the summit, he called his wife Sharon and told her about a horrendous storm on Everest. “I’ve never been in a storm like that in the mountains,” he said. “Snow, freezing, freezing cold, high winds, it was quite a wild ride. It was really difficult, a very hard mountain. There is nothing about it that is easy. But, thank God, we made it and we made it back safely.”

What’s ironic about Burke’s ascent is that on May 21, two days before Burke reached the summit, 66-year-old Dawes Eddy, a Spokane, Washington senior citizen, summitted the big boy and held the honor of oldest American to stand on the roof of the world for a scant 48 hours. Tough break for Dawes.

Another Spokane senior, 60-year-old Kay LeClaire, became the second oldest American woman to reach Everest’s summit when she topped out on May 22. The ascent, coming on LeClaire’s fourth attempt in five years, was also the last of her Seven Summits.

These three senior Americans were among the 300-plus people that climbed Mount Everest this spring. Unofficially there were five deaths on the mountain.

Good for these three oldsters. Instead of sitting around playing cards, hanging at the shuffleboard court, or taking a brisk walk around the local mall, they're getting out there and breathing thin air and suffering and having a great time redefining old age in the mountains.

Photograph top: Bill Burke and Mingma Sherpa atop Everest on May 23. Photograph courtesy Bill Burke.

View the big fall off Gaia

Sometimes you got to fall before you learn how to fly, or is it learn how to climb? Anyway, if you’re a climber and you’re trying to do a hard route, then you’re going to log some serious air time. It’s the nature of working a project. It’s one thing, however, to catapult off a bolted sport route at Rifle Mountain Park in Colorado and another to plunge off a sparsely gear-protected traditional route on a gritstone edge in England.

Check out this wild whipper that French climber Jean-Minh Trin-Thieu took on the grit testpiece Gaia (E8 7a UK or 5.12c US), a wild route put up in 1986 by the great British climber Johnny Dawes.  The route has been climbed, and fallen on, by lots of climbers including American Lisa Rands, but in 2008 young American climber Alex Honnold impressively flashed the route, that is he climbed it on his first try without falling. Alex noted after the ascent, “Not a true onsight since I’ve seen movies, but there was no chalk.”

This fall is from the late nineties climbing cult classic video Hard Grit about the toughest and wildest and most dangerous gritstone routes.

Buy Hard Grit

In May the speedy Swiss climber Ueli Steck free-climbed Golden Gate (5.13b), a 41-pitch route up the west wall of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley.

Ueli on-sighted or climbed the route for the first time and fell on only one pitch. Steck, 32 years old, did the route in four days on his honeymoon. His wife Nicole belayed him. Steck onsighted without falls three 5.13 pitches and five 5.12 pitches, but fell on a relatively easy 5.11 crack above El Cap Spire when he slipped on wet rock.

This impressive feat was done in impeccable style. Steck climbed from the ground up, didn’t rehearse any of the hard pitches or check out the sequences before climbing them. He also hauled a heavy pack after every pitch while Nicole ascended the rope.

Ueli Steck, while relatively unknown in the United States, is a very strong European rock climber and alpinist. He’s free-climbed routes as hard as 5.14a and free-solos, that is climbs without a rope, routes as difficult as 5.13b. He’s also an amazing alpinists who has set solo speed records in the Alps, including on the legendary North Faces of The Eiger, Grandes Jorasses, and Matterhorn. He climbed the Grandes Jorasses in 2 hours and 20 minutes; the Eigerwand in 2 hours and 47 minutes; and the Matterhorn in 1 hour and 56 minutes. Simply unbelievable times.

Photographs above: Ueli Steck on El Cap’s summit after his ascent. Photograph courtesy Nicole Steck/www.uelisteck.ch