Sean McColl has made it into the semifinal in both Lead and Bouldering and, as he was #37 in Speed at 8.65, he has secured the Combined title. The fastest Combined competitor was Manuel Cornu from France #31 at 7.85. Among the Combined female competitors, Elena Krasovskaia (15) was fastest with 9.83 and she together with Charlotte Durif and Andrea Ebner are in the best position. The winner will not be known until the semifinals in Lead and Bouldering.

A 15-year-old girl from Argentina was #15 in the Bouldering qualification. Later it turned out that she is too young as she will not turn 16 in 2016. For some reason, her application to compete in Paris has been approved by IFSC although she was born in 2001. The sad news is that she will not be allowed to compete in the semifinal tonight but a suggestion has been forward that she can be a pre-runner.

Extremely technical problems in the male semifinal with very few top outs. The World Cup winner qualified by doing just one problem. But once again, the commentary misled the audience by saying that Tomoa had to top the last problem to make it into the Final. Once the Japanese had gotten the bonus in the right number of attempts, they continued to say a bonus was actually enough but we did not know how many he used. Tomoa needed three attempts and he would have made it to the final if he had used five! Please IFSC, it has been like this for the whole season and now we have commentary misleading the audience in World Championships in a sport going for the Olympics! It is noteworthy that only one of the Top-6 in the qualification made it to the Final and this guy was #6. Complete results.

Complete results.

The third day in Paris starts with the Speed qualification including the participants going for the Combined. Kuba Glowka has helped us out to calculate the results, based on the ranking in each discipline, prior to the Speed. 1. McColl Sean CAN - 3,5 : Ebner Andrea ITA - 6 2. Firnenburg David GER - 8: Durif Charlotte FRA - 7 3. Cornu Manuel FRA - 9,5 : Elena Krasovskala RUS - 11 4. Barrans David GBR - 11 : Kazbekova Ievgeniia UKR - 11 5. Cho Seungwoon KOR - 15 : Miller Delaney USA - 12 The Live Streaming of the male Bouldering and female Lead semifinals starts at 19.30.

All the big female names topped both routes in the qualifications; Janja Garnbret, Jain Kim, Jessica Pilz, Mina Markovic, Anak Verhoeven and Magdalena Röck. If they have identical results in both semi and final, the ranking is established basing on who climbs fastest in the final. (c) Eddie Fowke

In Lead qualifications the coaches can quite easily estimate when the athletes are going to start as they just calculate the average time of the first starters. During the Lead qualifications in Paris, the organizer delayed the last competitors in order to have people climbing during the whole period of scheduled time. Several coaches protested saying that they could not tell their athletes when to start warming up etc. Sean McColl was one of the guys who had to wait one hour extra.

Planet Mountain has written a nice article in regards that today passes 25 years since Wolfgang Güllich did the FA of Action Direct. Previously, Wolfgang had done the world's first 8b, 8b+ and 8c between 1984 and 1987. In 1990, Ben Moon did the first 8c+ and in 1991, Güllich put up Action Direct giving it XI in the UIAA scale, which was 8c+/9a converted to the French and global scale. Milan Sykora had originally bolted it coming in from the right and later Wolfgang added a more direct start, hence the name. The FA came on the scene after just eleven days but Wolgang had spent numerous days on the campus board, which he invented in 1988, to get used to all the one and two finger pockets. What is not so known and makes the story even more impressive is that Wolgang did use the most direct sequence, which is believed to be harder, since almost all repeaters have opted for the right-side version. In total, AD has been repeated 19 times and in fact, as many top climbers had tried it without success, some, 8a among them, started to say it should be upgraded. In 2001, we made this official calling it a benchmark 9a when it had had just two repeats in ten years. Later, this made Alex Huber upgrade some of his routes as earlier he had based their grading on the assumption that AD was 8c+/9a. Today, due to the grade inflation, Ben Moon's Hubble from 1990 is thought to be the world's first 9a and AD is considered to be hard for the grade.

During the second day of the World Championships in Paris, we did not see any sensational results for the Male Lead and Female Bouldering. Four male of each group topped both qualification routes excluding Domen Skofic and Gauthier Supper. Complete results. Among the female, Akiyo Noguchi and Miho Nonaka, both from Japan, won each group. Complete results.