Restricted access at the World Championships

On a side note to the World Championship report, we (the 2 journalist covering the event for 8a.nu, Esteban Diez Fernández and Ignacio Sandoval Burón) would like to point out all the difficulties that the organization (Top30 people) put onto us not letting us cover the event as some other ‘privileged’ media could. Hence, we were restricted to a corridor behind the IFSC officials and were chucked out from a grandstand zone as well as from the isolation area (sometimes quite rudely). The excuse they gave us was that only 2 photographers hired by the organization were allowed in: an independent one, David Munilla, and surprisingly, Dario Rodríguez from a well-known Spanish climbing magazine. We then argued that, in the latter case, he shouldn’t use the pics he was taking for the organization for his own magazine, which evidently was not what finally happened… Moreover, we found out this Spanish climbing magazine also had 2 more journalists in places such as the isolation which was ‘supposedly’ only for the official photographers mentioned earlier. Not to mention the 2 photographers from the Austrian team also in the isolation area. Later on, during the final, there were some other photographers crossing the ‘red line’ to take pics too, even directly underneath the routes. Of course, we don’t have any problem with people doing their work and we think the more pics and the more information flowing in the media, in the social networks, etc., the better. We only have objections when some are favoured over others… On a last note, knowing that 8a.nu was the only accredited international media in the comp and knowing that the IFSC is really up for the presence of climbing in the media in their aim to make climbing an Olympic sport, shouldn’t they have eased our work somehow…? Right before the final we expressed our complaints to Jerome Meyer, the IFSC Sport Manager. He was understanding and said things should have been different. Let’s hope this never happens again to anyone interested in promoting our beautiful sport.