25 February 2018

8a database shows late blooming possible in climbing

Chris Ring has done some analysis based on the 8a.nu database to see if age has any impact on the reached peak climbing grade for U.S. climbers. R & I has found Ring's analysis interesting and published a long article. In the diagram, we can see that in between 18 - 36 age, the hardest reached grade is almost the same. Even more interesting, Ring tracked the change in the maximum reached grade from year to year and he actually found a late blooming tendency. "The model estimated that a person’s hardest grade will gradually increase between the early 20’s and the early 40’s, on average." Looking practically on which ages perform the hardest grades in climbing we can see that for the female, it varies from 13 - 39 (Shiraishi and Sarkany). Among the male we have had 14 year old' that perform on the highest level and just now Yuji Hirayama (49) is close to send La Rampla 9a+. This means that climbing is unique when it comes to a wide age gap performing at the highest level for physical sports.
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