New Lead competition format introduced in Sweden

Although Sweden got one gold and one bronze in the Youth World Champion 2014, the competition comitte announced last month that there will be no swedish lead cup in 2015. The commercial gyms loose money as they have to close down some walls for several days and the participants seem to prefer the bouldering format, which allows much more climbing. Based on an idea from 8a, everything has changed and now the competition committe hopes to run up to six events 2015, even if the gyms will not get any financial support. In short, the 8a idea is based on that during the qualification, it is just climbing like normal outdoors or in the gym with your own scorecard and without referees or official belayers. Any size of gym could use it and it works equally good for a beginner competition as for the best. In practice, the route setters just selects existing qualification routes which they could adjust. The comp can run for a whole semester, a week or during a specific day which could end with a normal onsight final for respectively category. Number of routes: 8 - 99 Number of scoring routes: The best 4 - 10 routes Schedule: Qualification 09.00 - 15.00 and finals from 17.00 Points: You get 1 point per clip and the top always gives 10 points Scoring: The points multiples with the grades; 5a = 10, 6a = 40, 7a = 70 and 8a = 100 Advantages Low cost for route setting, no closure of walls, less voluteers needed, a lot of climbing, less stress for competitors. Competitors selects personal challenges instead of sometimes climbing routes that are to easy or to hard. Further more, it is very easy to measure, analyze and compare the results. It will be possible to compete world wide, national, gym, age, female or against a personal record.