Six seconds for Olympic glory: speed climbing wows Paris

PARIS – Imagine training for four years and your Olympic dream all coming down to six seconds of intense competition – welcome to the helter-skelter world of speed climbing.

Blink and you will miss it, speed climbing has a claim to be the most exhilarating sport at the Paris Games. The 100m sprint? Pedestrian in comparison, taking almost twice as long.

In many ways, speed climbing is similar to the Olympic blue-riband event, just vertical.

Competitors scramble up a 15m wall at a five-degree incline, straining every sinew to be first to tap a red button at the top.

In the knockout stages, which took place on Aug 7, two climbers race up identical courses side by side with 20 handholds and 11 footholds to help them to the top.

United States sprinter Noah Lyles famously showed in the men’s 100m final that Olympic glory can come down to thousandths of a second.

Speed climbing is no different, China’s Deng Lijuan scraping through her women’s quarter-final in 6.363 seconds, six thousandths of a second ahead of her rival.

With so little separating the climbers, one tiny slip means the end of your Olympic journey.

The bronze-medal match saw Indonesia’s Rajiah Sallsabillah lose her footing for a fraction of a second and with it her medal chance.

Aleksandra Miroslaw from Poland is the undisputed queen of speed. Like Swedish pole vaulter Armand Duplantis, she keeps breaking her own world record, performing this feat eight times.

The 30-year-old destroyed her old world record yet again in qualifying for the Olympic quarter-finals, setting a new time of 6.06sec. She cruised through the last eight and semi-finals relatively untroubled but faced a stiff challenge from Deng in the final.

Gold was won by a fingertip. Deng started marginally quicker but Miroslaw scrambled after her and stretched first for the buzzer, taking it in 6.10sec, the Chinese athlete coming home in 6.18sec.

Overwhelmed, Miroslaw sank to her knees sobbing before racing into the crowd to embrace her family, as a sizeable Polish crowd waved flags and shouted her name.

“I never thought about the time. I only had one thing in my mind – just run. I didn’t even look at the other side, I didn’t even know it was close,” she said.

Could she break the six-second barrier? “I really don’t know how fast I can go. The sky’s the limit,” she added.

First introduced at the Tokyo Olympics in a bid to attract a younger audience, sport climbing proved an instant hit and will feature again in Los Angeles in 2028.

“It’s a Gen Z sport,” said Fabrizio Rossini, spokesman for the International Federation of Sport Climbing. “You can fit the whole action into what would be the highlights for another sport, so it’s perfect for the younger generation’s shorter attention span.”

In Tokyo, the event consisted of three elements – speed, boulder and lead – the latter two being more methodical and difficult climbs, with athletes battling to get as high up the wall as they can.

For the Paris Games, organisers decided to separate out the speed element, undoubtedly the most spectacular of the three.

This meant the Aug 7 medals were the first in Olympic history, with Miroslaw the first-ever Olympic speed climbing champion – and also Poland’s first gold of these Games, alongside compatriot Aleksandra Kalucka’s bronze (6.53sec).

“The final, it was fantastic. It was absolutely amazing,” enthused Brandon Blaser, a spectator.

“Just those six seconds is the culmination of everything they’ve worked for. It was fun to watch.”

Elsewhere, Spain’s Alvaro Martin and Maria Perez took the gold in the mixed marathon race walk relay by nearly a minute as the event also made its Olympic debut.

The relay saw two athletes per team – one male, one female – each completing two legs that looped back and forth at the base of the Eiffel Tower to total the 42.195km marathon distance.

The Spaniards finished in 2hr 50min 31sec. Brian Pintado and Glenda Morejon of Ecuador took silver in 2:51:22, while Australia’s Rhydian Cowley and Jemima Montag claimed bronze (2:51:38).
AFP, REUTERS