What to expect of 2019

The Olympic qualification will be at focus during 2019. Many of the best athletes like Adam Ondra will most likely reduce their climbing on rock and instead replace it with competition training including Speed. During the last years, Japan has started to dominate and that goes especially on the bouldering scene. The dilemma in 2019 is that it is all about Combination and only the best male and female Japanese in the World Champion in Tokyo are guaranteed a position, as long as they are Top-6. This means that the overall World Cup is not so important for the best Japanese so they might cherry pick which comps to go for. This in fact opens up for specialist, who is not going for Tokyo, to win the overall World Cups, especially among the male. However, in general most likely to trend with more Japanese domination will increase in 2019. When it comes to route climbing, there will most likely be a stagnation, after the record year 2018, as most of the best focus on Tokyo. In regards bouldering, 2018 was also a record year and 2019 has indeed strengthen this progress trend with Charles Albert doing a 9A FA barefoot and Jimmy Webb, Daniel Woods and Nalle Hukkataival doing 8C+. Charles and Jimmy are working on two other possibly 9A projects in Fontainebleau and Daniel is going for Burden of Dreams 9A this spring. In total, there will probably be around ten guys doing at least one 8C+ or harder in 2019. At the same time, the female level continues to raise and possibly ten girls, including 13 year old Oriane Bertone, just might do 8B+ or harder.