Alexey Rubtsov, the World Champion 2009 and #3 in the World Cup 2016, has done his first 8C, From Dirt Grows The Flowers in Chironico. It has been a long time project for the Russian but interestingly he did it just over four attempts on this trip. "From the beginning of 2016 I don't work, so now, for the first time I consider myself professional. So I feel myself better now, and climb better! I will try to get a ticket to Olympics, but I still don't decide if I will change my training program to become overall climber or to stay just a boulderer, that might be enough! This year I will go on all Boulder World Cup stages, World Games, maybe will try to compete in Lead once.My nearest plans are to go to ABC nationals in USA and little bit rock climbing there. After again training, because soon will be first WC!"

peter dawson has had a great trip to Spain again. He has done his first two 8b flashes and also his first two 8c+'s, Blomu R3 in Santa Linya and Joe Blau in Oliana. In the Junior 8a ranking game the 18-year-old is #6. "The most valuable lesson I can take from this trip is to enjoy the process. If it was easy it wouldn’t be worth doing. If it’s hard there is doubt and worry but you must keep going. Sending the route is only half the fun!" Full report on his blogspot.

Katharina Saurwein, one of the best female climbers in the world for the last ten years, has been training Austria Paraclimbers for a year in preparation for the World Championsihip in Innsbruck 2018. In order to increase their possibilities, she has started a Crowdfunding project for them. "Climbing always gave me so much joy, I found a lot of new friends, it created a lot of new goals for me and I had something to look forward to. Also it helped me over hard times, for example when my mum died. While I was climbing was the only time I could forget or at least not think about it for some time. All the Paraclimbers had hard strokes of fate and I hope that climbing will help them forget about it and their handicap, even if it's just for minutes. That's why I'm training them and why I'm so motivated for it."

Jakob Schubert, who has done two 9a+'s in Oliana during the last two weeks, reports on Facebook that he has done Seleccio Anal in Santa Linya, calling it 9a (+). "an amazing goodbye gift after another very fun catalunya trip." (c) Elias Holzknecht What are your 2017 and Olympic plans? "I'm never 100% sure about my plans since I like spontaneous decisions, but right now I'm planning to go back to bouldering Worldcups this year. There are more reasons to it, first I'm enjoying bouldering a lot too and kind of wanna take the challenge to get back into it, it seemed to have changed a lot over the last years and I had troubles to adapt. Second I really want to travel to some crags that are best in summer and fall and that is why I probably want to skip most lead worldcups for the first time. I'm talking about Rocklands but also have some others in mind, we will see. I do have the goal to make it to the Olympic Games in 2020, still waiting for the final decisions how the qualification for it and the actual format will look like. Obviously I'm not very psyched to start training speed, but it's a sacrifice that I will take nevertheless."