22 May 2015

Dai Koyama and the dilemma with grades

Dai Koyamada has in relation to his FA of Horizon 8C written an interesting and thoughtful blog regarding grades, which starts. - I want to talk about the grade here, but to be honest, I don’t have the right answer. No doubt the Super Project was the hardest problem I’ve ever done and that probably means it’s a V16 (8C+). However, I’m not quite sure because I don’t have enough references to compare with. I would be able to fully understand what V15 (8C) is like exactly if I did more than fifty or so of them, but my accomplishments don’t even come close to that. I simply want to focus on climbing, not bothered with the grading. If I were not a professional climber, I would be climbing like that for sure." We will follow up this with follow up e-mail comments from Dai as in practice Dai has previously suggested 8C+ for two FAs and the problem for the media regarding reporting and focusing on grades. In general, 8a agrees on everything Dai says and we think it is good that Dai is so straight forward trying to move from the quantitative aspects of climbing into a focus on quality. © Ikuko Serata
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