James Webb made the FA of La Rustica in 2013 calling it a hard 8B+. Nalle Hukkataival thinks that it merits 8C and have also, instead of the original crouched start, made a full SDS to the extraordinary line. "Well safe to say it’s 8C as shit and also likely the hardest boulder problem in Switzerland. And exceptionally rad."

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Ett inlägg delat av Nalle Hukkataival (@nalle_hukkataival) 4 Okt 2018 kl. 12:39 PDT

In 2004, Chris Sharma put up Practice of the wild in Magic Wood and even if he did not grade it, 8C has become the official grade. It took four years until the stunning supersteep and long line got repeated and another three for the third ascent. Then it quickly became one of the most repeated 8C's in the world and in 2016, Gabri Moroni was the first, as he has been for more routes and boulder, to give it a personal downgrade. Including three more such personal suggestions and most others say it is "soft" as well as most do very quickly, 8B+ seems to be more correct based as of the 2018 standards and training possibilities. In 2004, supersteep and very long boulders were rare both indoors and outdoors. When the boulderers, with poor such training facilities, tried it I bet it felt like a hard 8C. Even in the 8a yearbook of 2008, Björn Pohl picked it out as one of the Top-10 hardest boulders on the planet. As of today, with much more focus and possibilities to work on such supersteep and long boulders, the community seems to think it is easier in comparison to more vertical 8C'. In other words, Sharma was right in 2004 but new and improved training facilities have probably grade wise made him wrong as of 2018. 8a Grade Article from 2008 explaining it in theory. "Many years ago, climbing activities took place on vertical trad routes giving climbers certain abilities to succeed and grade these routes. Today, on the opposite, most training occurs in steep indoor gyms giving other prevailing skills for climbers. This has changed the community's time/success ratio on different type of route/boulders, and grades have to be changed. In practice this mean that some steep old routes should be in the risk-zone of being downgraded." The good part of such grade changes, due to training or population changes etc, is that grades loose their correctness and thus importance. It just might be that with more smaller and taller climbers getting into the community, confirmed benchmark 9a's or 7A might just need to change to correspond better to the up-to-date community perception.

The World Games Association has awarded Janja Garnbret as their athlete of September. World Games presentation video. (c) Eddie Fowke The 19 year old Slovenian has won three out of five Lead World Cup events in 2018 and in Bouldering she has won two out of three. In the remaining three events she did not win this year, she was #2. During the last 20 WCs or WCHs, since she was 17 years old, she has not missed the podium once. Interestingly is that during the years since she made her debut on the World Cup scene in 2015 being 16 years old, taking the two silvers in Chamonix and Imst, she has skipped many WCs. Also this year, she did only take part in three out of seven Boulder WC's andit is the same story every year more or less. Long term progress instead of winning more overall titles.

Sport Climbing will be represented in the Youth Olympic Games in Buenoires in between 6-10th of October. All rounds will be live-streamed. The first two days, female and male will have their qualifying day and the the final for the Top-6 ranked will take place the last two days. Starting List and more info from IFSC. Here is the 8a prediction who will make the final and their ranking. 1. Sam Avezou FRA - Laura Rogora ITA 2. Shuta Tanaka JPN - Elena Krasovskaia RUS 3. Keita Dohi JPN - Vita Lukan SLO 4. Filip Schenk ITA - Sandra Lettner AUT 5. Peter Ivanov BUL - Mao Nakamura JPN 6. Martin Nathan FRA - Lucka Rakovec SLO

Vadim Timonov has done two more 8B+', which originally was 8C, in Magic Wood; Ill Trill and New Base Line. This means that the Russian has done five 8B+' in Magic just the last ten days. On his Insta there is also a short video of New Base Line.

Ema Seliskar has done two 8b+' in Kotecnic, Agresija and Katakombe. Earlier this summer she also did her first 8A boulder. Fascinating is that in most Euro Youth Cups this summer she has mainly been #3 among the Slovenian girls. "I started climbing when I was 7 years old and from that day I love climbing more and more every day. I like both outdoors and comps, but on comps am I very nervous and I need to work on that. Outdoors I just climb and I don't think about nothing else only about next move and top and I enjoy. Rock climbing helps me to get my confidence for comps and comps helps me to train harder and harder, so I can be better on rock too. I train 5 times in a week 3 or 4 hours a day. I love training because every training is different and fun also because of my teammate Lucija Tarkuš and my trainer Boštjan Potočnik."

Vadim Timonov, #25 in the WCH in Innsbruck, has done three boulders in Magic Wood which he all think could be 8B+, including Practice of the Wild. (c) Kwtrio "At the first day I thought that I can send it pretty fast. But I injured my knee and tried to find a new sequence. I think for me it is the easiest 8C in Magic wood and it’s more 8B+ than 8C."

The guidebook covering all the sport climbing in the area, has been completely revised and updated since the previous edition came out in 2013. The development of new routes has been constantly going on. Therefore, new routes have been opened in existing sectors such as Grand Face and Nitshapa. In addition, 2 completely new sectors are now available in the book: Plein Sud and Papillon. In total, more than 200 new routes can be found in the guidebook compared to the previous version. This new guidebook is another great contribution to the constant development of sport climbing in one of the world's best sport climbing areas. Here you can buy it for Euro 26 also including a free download code for the Vertical-Life App. In total, 3 700 different topos are now available from Vertical-Life.

In most sports where you can set new standards, we see stagnation. This was also the case in climbing until 2015. For some reason, during the last years, we have since seen progress when it comes to achieved grades. In fact, 9a for male is not cutting edge any more and we do not report all. The only category where we do not see strong progress is onsight. Ondra is still extremely superior. The picture is drawn on free hand in order to show the trends, including further speculations showing 9b will be, for the Top-10, will be the new standard, in comparison to 9a+ in 2015.