NEWS

Tomoa Narasaki won the Combined qualification stage through 1 - 4 - 12. In fact, his Speed time out of the remaining Top-20 is #3. In order to win for Adam Ondra, Jakob Schubert and Alex Megos, who are much slower in Speed, any of them need most likely be at worst 1 & 2 in Lead and Boulder. Interesting is also that Italy and Germany both got three to the Top-20. Complete results Here is the 8a prediction who will get an Olympic ticket: Tomoa Narasaki, Adam Ondra, Jakob Schubert, Alex Megos, Ludovico Fossali, Sean McColl and Jongwon Chon.

207 boulders up to 7C+' in a month by Keegan Sullivan (9)
Keegan Sullivan's father Brandon reports. "This July our family took our first trip to Squamish. It was amazing. We were there for a month and enjoyed all the crags we visited in Squamish, Whistler, and Pemberton. The family topped 415 boulder problems! I contributed 1 top, my wife Heidi sent 42 problems and the boys teamed up for the rest โ€“ Keegan sent 207 problems at 9 years old, Killian sent 103 problems at 7 years old, and Lochlann sent 62 boulders at just 6 years old." Keegan's 7C+' were Zero-Zero and Jim Carrey. In total he has now done five 7C+' out of which the first more than a year ago. More info at Sullysends.com.

Great semi finals where Alex Megos did get the highest among the male ahead of Tomoa Narasaki. Interesting to see that most of the male just used some 3 minutes and fastest of them all was Sean McColl ahead of Adam Ondra. Japan got four male Top-14. Among the female, nice to see Anak Verhoeven was back in good shape after a long injury but she was timed out that put her out of the final. Interesting to see that Slovenia, with 2 million inhabitants, got three in Top-4 and five Top-12 with Janja Garnbret winning the semi. Japan had four girls Top-14 with Miho Nonaka skipping the semi due to her shoulder injury. Complete results

16 August 2019

Combined ranking

Here is the Combined ranking prior to the Speed event. It should be mentioned that among the Top-12 female ranking, all but three are from Japan or Slovenia. Among the male, there are five from Japan. In total there are 72 female and 84 male doing the three disciplines. The complete Combined ranking can be found in the Hachioji App. The Speed specialist with the best possibilities to get Top-20 are Anouck Jaubert currently #41 with 1 500 points and Bassa Mawem #53 with 2 800 points. Last year you made it to the Top-20 with 7 770 respectively 11 880 points. As it stands, most probably 2 or 3 female and 1 male will make it to the Top-20. That would also in reality mean that there will be at least one male and one female Speed specialists getting the Olympic ticket. The Top-7 will get an Olympic ticket but as there is a country max quota of two, beside Japan max one, it could be that Top-12 is good enough for the female and Top-10 for the male. 1. Janja Garnbret 1 - Tomoa Narasaki 4 2. Akiyo Noguchi 10 - Adam Ondra 6 3. Mia Krampl 33 - Jakob Schubert 6 4. Shauna Coxey 43.5 - Alex Megos 41 5. Ievgeniia Kazbekova 52 - Kokoro Fujii 52 6. Chaehyon Seo 52 - Kai Harada 56 7. Futaba Ito 82.5 - Sean McColl 65 8. Ai Mori 82.5 - Yannick Flohe 99 9. Miho Nonaka 105 - Rudolph Ruana 105 10. Lucka Rakovec 108 - Keita Dohe 120 11. Vita Lukan 137 - Meichi Narasaki 144 12. Nanako Kura 168 - Jernej Kruder 207

Ondra comments his victory in Lead
โ€œTo be honest, I did not expect to win tonight. After a very exhausting program of bouldering and lead climbing right after, I felt pretty tired and it was quite hard to believe in myself. It was especially hard during qualification, it was a bit better in the semi-finals, and then in the finals, I was reconciled to the fact that I had to put everything into it,โ€ says Ondra right after the competition. Despite the excellent form of Ondraโ€™s two main competitors, Jakob Schubert and Alexander Megos, Ondra made almost no mistakes, and in the end, it was one hold that decided about his World Champion title. โ€œI made a few mistakes today, but my competitors made more. I was very lucky in that final step because I was able to do one step more than Alexander Megos and Jakob Schubert and thanks to that, I became the World Champion,โ€ commented Ondra enthusiastically his final steps. (c) Lukas Biba

Audrey Sniezek, who the last five years has not done any routes harder than 8a+, is back in the game with The Sickness 8b+ in Little Si. "An exciting line with incredible moves. Why someone would go out right to the jug, is beyond me. Stay true to the line and fight the pump to the chains. Thanks go out to luke stefurak for fixing a better rope line for the start."

Jorge Diaz-Rullo has done his third 9a+ during the last month, No pain no gain in Rodellar. The 19 year old needed 13 tries over six days to take down the classical Dani Fuerte's route. (c) Javi Pec "One of the best routes I have done! An authentic route I will never forget. More than ever thanks to everyone for the encouragement!" Including also a 9b he did two weeks ago, Jorge is #2 in the 8a ranking game.

Male bouldering semi/final an anticlimax
Jakob Schubert got the silver in the World Championship by, in total during the semi and the final, doing one boulder. We can rest assure that IOC will put IFSC to the wall wanting a guarantee avoiding such anticlimax during the Olympics. Possibly solutions, that have been pointed out previously here, is to give instructions to the route setters to aim for some 12 tops even if this might turn out that number of attempts will be used for separating the podium. Further more, with two zones, the route setters will have to do less long coordination/jumping sequences and instead be forced to do more straight forward pulling moves increasingly more difficult. From the athletes perspective these coordination/jumping moves will badly affect all finalist during the Lead qually tomorrow as they will have really bad skin that in some cases need tape. One more thing, on the bottom left of the picture, you can see that the judges have the updated results on their screen. How come is this not transferred to the live-streaming? With out any digital results on the screen it is very hard to follow the updated ranking and what is needed to advance to the podium etc. It should be mentioned that although the female final did get more tops, it had more or less the same problem making it clear that something has do be done.