9a onsight again by Alex Megos

Alex Megos, who did the first ever 9a onsight four years ago, reports on Facebook that he has done it again and this time in Gravere. The name of route is TCT which was put up by Stefano Ghisolfi, who commented, "I want to dedicate this route to Tito Claudio Traversa (that's why I called TCT), because I want everybody will remember him forever." TCT is chipped link-up of an 8c and an 8b+ but it was not Stefano who chipped it. Adam Ondra has also onsighted it before and is one ahead of Megos with three 9a onsights. Amazing is however that Megos has onsighted 100 % of the 9a's he has tried to onsight. Wow! How was it? How many 9a's have you tried to onsight but failed? It was great! Kinda funny because I didn't expect it at all. I felt really bad warming up, got pumped very fast on the warmup routes and felt my finger a little bit which is normally a sign that I climbed a little bit too much too soon. So first I thought I will not try it at all but then got talked into it and decided to just give it a go. It was anyway a totally unplanned thing that we ended up at Gravere. We were planning on going somewhere else but then the evening before Stefano's car didn't work anymore so we had to find someone to go climbing. Marcello Bombardi said he was going to Gravere so we went with him. At the crag they told me that there is a 9a here that Adam onsighted a couple of years back so they were really excited and told me I should try it. Despite feeling not very good I thought I might as well just give it a go. And then it worked out! I'm not totally sure but I think that was the first 9a I really tried to climb onsight. It never worked out for me that I had a proper chance to try it. In the Frankenjura I've done already everything and it's super hard to onsight routes, and then all the other times I climbed a 9a either there were no quickdraws in or no chalk or I just bailed. So I ended up never really preparing and trying."