25 years since Güllich did Action Direct 9a

Planet Mountain has written a nice article in regards that today passes 25 years since Wolfgang Güllich did the FA of Action Direct. Previously, Wolfgang had done the world's first 8b, 8b+ and 8c between 1984 and 1987. In 1990, Ben Moon did the first 8c+ and in 1991, Güllich put up Action Direct giving it XI in the UIAA scale, which was 8c+/9a converted to the French and global scale. Milan Sykora had originally bolted it coming in from the right and later Wolfgang added a more direct start, hence the name. The FA came on the scene after just eleven days but Wolgang had spent numerous days on the campus board, which he invented in 1988, to get used to all the one and two finger pockets. What is not so known and makes the story even more impressive is that Wolgang did use the most direct sequence, which is believed to be harder, since almost all repeaters have opted for the right-side version. In total, AD has been repeated 19 times and in fact, as many top climbers had tried it without success, some, 8a among them, started to say it should be upgraded. In 2001, we made this official calling it a benchmark 9a when it had had just two repeats in ten years. Later, this made Alex Huber upgrade some of his routes as earlier he had based their grading on the assumption that AD was 8c+/9a. Today, due to the grade inflation, Ben Moon's Hubble from 1990 is thought to be the world's first 9a and AD is considered to be hard for the grade.