Purity of Ascension

2019.10.29

In 2020, the Olympic Games will include Sport Climbing as a contested event for the first time. Many climbers have criticized the event’s format since 2016 when it was announced by the International Olympic Committee. Detractions regarding which climbing disciplines were sanctioned, how points will be calculated, and myriad other issues spread rapidly after the announcement. Some highly ranked competitive climbers accused the IOC of artificially engineering a sport that is not “real” climbing. The backlash culminated in early 2019 when the IOC publicly stated the event would be completely re-formatted for the 2024 Olympiad. Those unfamiliar with climbing’s numerous disciplines and esoteric vernacular will undoubtedly find all this turmoil to be very inside baseball. Nevertheless, the turmoil is worth exploring because it offers a behind-the-scenes look at the politics of elite athletic competition that the spectator is not normally permitted. The climbing world’s reaction calls attention to an ambiguous schism between trad (short for traditional) and sport climbers that has existed for more than a century. Comparing the two sides of that schism will illuminate the response triggered by the IOC announcement.

Trad and sport climbers ascend with very different aims, and this is perhaps the best place to begin their comparison. Trad climbers ascend with the express purpose of reaching the highest point on a route in a natural environment. You do not need to be a traditionalist to understand the spirit behind such a purpose. One only need recall the numerous expeditions to conquer Mount Everest during the first half of the 20th century, and then consider that such expeditions continue every year, even though Sir Edmund Hilary reached the summit in 1953. Summitting a dangerous peak is sublime; that sublime experience motivates the trad climber. Sport climbers, on the other hand, are less concerned with reaching the top. They focus on the climb itself, placing a premium on difficult moves requiring gymnastic ability. The sport climber thus determines the beginning and end of a route arbitrarily in order to bias the specific skills she wants to exercise and to deliberately push the limits of her strength, endurance, and skill acquisition. As trad climbers are animated by a spirit of risk and exploration, so sport climbers are motivated by exploding the supposed boundaries of human biomechanical performance.

Because of their mutually exclusive understandings of climbing’s raison d’être, trad and sport approach competition very differently. A sport purist, especially one who competes in sanctioned events, self-consciously trains to ascend faster than somebody — his own past performance, a close friend, a famous climber. Whoever it is, the one-on-one mindset is always present. By contrast, a traditionalist’s mentality is more akin to that of a hunter or sailor; he likely understands himself to be pitting his skill against the natural world. This is not to say that trad lacks competition. There definitely exists a cadre of traditionalists who travel around the world attempting to set new time records on famous climbs. But these elite (and elitist) trad climbers share a light-heartedness and reverential friendship that is different from the mano a mano egalitarianism one observes in much of sport climbing.

Sport and trad’s different competitive psychologies derive from their different methods of employing protection, or ‘pro’, making those methods the logical next comparison. If a climber ascends more than a few metres, she must use equipment to protect herself from a fall, regardless of her discipline. Trad climbers place their own pro in the rock as they ascend. This makes trad a very slow, deliberate process because the climber must carry all that equipment while ascending and the pro itself is only as reliable as the climber’s judgment and the rockface will permit; thus, the traditionalist will often be reluctant to risk a fall in the name of accelerating her ascent. Conversely, sport climbers, because they climb pre-protected routes, do not have these limitations. Their pro is already drilled into the wall, meaning they do not need to carry any extra weight. And they can ascend more aggressively because bolted pro is far more resistant to the impact of a fall than the trad climber’s various wedges and camming devices. So, even though both climbers are relying on pro to enable their ascension, the technology they use and how they use it are nothing alike.

The different methods of employing pro also expose the most divisive issue between the trad and sport communities, namely, the impact of ascension on the natural world. Trad purists insist on ‘clean climbing,’ which means leaving the vertical environment as unaltered as possible. Such purists do not modify the rockscape to make it more amenable to their equipment. They have scorned sport climbers since the 1920s, when steel pitons became widely available and appeared on rockfaces all over the world. Pitons were infinitely safer to ascend on than the primitive technologies that were being used before, but unlike the earliest methods of protecting a climber from a fall, the piton deteriorates the environment since it needs to be hammered into the rock and is very difficult if not impossible to remove once installed. Some trad purists therefore consider the piton the original sin of sport climbing. Their vitriol for the piton has only been rivalled by that for the bolt gun — a type of handheld electric drill that became widespread in the early 1980s and allowed a sport climber to permanently affix steel bolts to the rock. Nevertheless, in a weird way, the issue that is most divisive also unites; the traditionalist’s argument for clean climbing has been so overwhelmingly endorsed by climbers of all stripes that most sport climbers have migrated to manmade surfaces.

The taxonomy of differences outlined above may lead one to think that trad and sport are two unconnected monoliths. They are not. They are the edges of a spectrum along which the many climbing disciplines fall. Some styles, like mountaineering, are on the far traditionalist end of that spectrum while speed climbing (a discipline that will be judged at Tokyo 2020) is clearly a sport discipline. But most fall somewhere in the middle and most climbers migrate between disciplines. As a result, the climbing world is fractured by constantly diverging views regarding the most basic nature of its activity. The IOC members, principally concerned with sanctioning a sport that has “youth-appeal,” were certainly unaware they would dredge up enduring controversies over ascension’s purpose, technique, equipment, and venue when they made their announcement. As a spectator, however, I cannot wait to see how future Olympiads attempt to appease the global climbing community’s many impassioned and conflicting sensibilities.