Grades are very important!

Chris Sharma put up Era Vella in 2010 and he actually did it as his warming up and thought it was a soft 9a. The super nice route very quickly became the most repeated 9a and during 2015 it was repeated seven times. At the same time, some climbers that wanted to stay anonymous said it was 8c+ and we forward this message also saying that the statistics suggested it might be too soft to be 9a. In the 8a forum several climbers did complain that we commented on the grade and we answered that we just want to give as accurate news as possible. During 2015, Jonathan Siegrist and Magnus Midtbö were the first two who officially come forward saying it is not 9a. What is very interesting is since the grade discussion two years ago, Era Vella has only been repeated once in 2016 and once in 2017. In other words, climbing grades are very important when top climbers choose which project to take down. In the 8a data base, all 14 that have star rated it, have given it 3 stars and some have said it is one of the best route ever. The brutal fact is, in other words, that the quality is less important in comparison to how soft or hard graded the route is. Climbers should focus on the beauty of the climbs and "never mind all that (grades)", as Jonathan Siegrist so nicely hint in is blog and leave the grade to the media who want to report as correct news (grades) as possible. On the picture is Magnus Midtbö. It should be mentioned that 8a several times, based on anonymous comments and statistics, has forwarded down grading speculations and as a matter of fact, later the climb or actually whole areas have been down graded; Ticino, Rocklands, Lleida and Kalymnos are examples of this.