19 May 2008

Improvement of the competition format

Improvement of the competition format

Competition climbing struggles in strong headwind to attract participants, organizers, spectators and media attention. In most countries, the number of competitors in the difficulty discipline have decreased drastically and in some cases whole seasons have been canceled. The ICC is doing a good job with the World Cup, but it's still an European affair and surely the competition format could be improved as it is done in many other sports like; soccer, sailing, skiing, beach volley, ice hockey, boxing and basketball etc.

In difficulty climbing nothing has really happened since it was invented and the fundamental thought that it should be similar to outdoor climbing feels out-of-date and is in fact not valid. The hardest performed onsights outdoors take between 30 - 60 minutes, and surely we don't want to go there.

Further more, we do not want:
* the participants to be stuck in isolation for a full day,
* endless work for route setters and organizers,
* sensations, not the same winners over and over,
* to see 50 guys slowly making their way up identical moves, and
* 2 or 3 days competitions to decide a winner.


"Difficulty competitions is extremely boring" to put it straight, both for the participants, organizers and the spectators. The aim of this article is to create a discussion in the community and in our forum which hopefully can provide us with some good thoughts and below we present some ideas as a start for debate.

Flash in the qually
In the junior world they have for many years successfully qualified with two routes flash with reversed starting order and for-runners.
First of all this means a much faster comp and no boring isolation for a full day. In the end of the qually, everybody will know what is needed for making it to the final.

Grade and Time the route
Which hold mark the grade 7b, 7c, 8a etc and what's the grade of the route? Split time for different climbing styles could be interesting. Other sports are working with providing as much information as possible. In competition climbing, it's the opposite.

Let time decide tied results
The most frequented reason for antiklimax in comps is that the final route is to hard. The route setters are scared to death for a super final. Make the route one grade easier and everybody will enjoy more climbing. Often you end up with 5-10 climbers falling of the same crux. Let time decide tied results and top-outs. By doing so, you will not so often be bored by seeing climbers rest for minutes up on the wall.

No observation in the final
It's a time consuming procedure, making everybody go for the same solutions and it becomes boring.


OK, what do you think? Comment in the forum!
W
e also have some comments for the boulder format, stay tuned!

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