After one month of projecting Stephane Hanssens has done Ramon Julian Puigblanue's La Reina Mora, which seems to have been upgraded from 8c to 9a. The Belgian focused on comps as a youngster, then he did some expeditions and now he is back with a focus on sport climbing and World Cup comps. His best results in 2015 were #13 in the Euro Bouldering Championship and #9 in the Imst Lead WC. (c) Guillaume Lion "This is by far, the path which asked me the most efforts. Really happy and what amazing line. Thank you to all the people who helped me in this project."

The big sensational result from the qualification in the first Boulder World Cup 2016, which is taking place in Meiringen in Swizerland, was that Dimitri Sharafutdinov and Anna Stöhr did not make it to the semfinal Top-20. At the same time as seven male climbers made four out of five boulders, half of the field did not do even a single one! Complete qually results In total, 84 male and 59 female participated. The live streaming starts on Saturday with the semifinal 11.00 - 14.00 and the final 18.30 - 20.30.

Whenever there is a knee-drop solution, my friends always out-climb me. What to do to improve this skill? Climbers who are bad at knee-drop opt for other solutions meaning that they almost never train knee-drop. The fastest way to improve this skill is just to create some boulders where you can practice it over and over again, in combination with some stretching. One way of combining this is simply to just start sitting and repeatedly do the same knee-drop move like ten times. Then you set up a new knee-drop move. I would say that, out of all climbing skills, knee-dropping is the fastest to improve following this advice. Within some weeks, your body, instead of avoiding the obvious knee-drop, will take the advantage of it but it might be several years until you can do it as Adam Ondra. (c) Pavel Zvire

Black Diamond: "Voluntary recall for inspection of Easy Rider and Iron Cruiser Via Ferrata lanyard sets, Index Ascenders, Camalots™ and Camalot™ Ultralights"

Kevin Aglae reports on Facebook that he has done the FA of L'Enfumette 9a in St Leger. (c) Jan Novak

Ryuichi Murai has done the fifth ascent of Dai Koyamada's Hydrangea in Shiobara, which actually was his third 8C in a month. "Finally I send this problem! This is ''Hydra 8B'' + 6 moves 8A/A+. It took me 4 days to climb it. When I joined ''Hydra'' after the 6 moves, I felt it's quite another thing. So, I was fell many times at the part of ''Hydra''. I'm so happy to complete all problems of ''Nodate roof''! Next, I'm going to try Epitaph 8C in Hourai or Project of ''Nodate roof'' in Shiobara." How do you train? I don't particularly training, but I do sometimes ''ABC chin-ups"which is a training that I was taught when I went to the camp in Austria before. ''ABC chin-up'' which I repeat many times. 1. To chin-up three times. 2. To keep 5 seconds with the arm full bend. 3. To chin-up three times. 4. To keep 5 seconds with the arm open 90 degrees. 5. To chin-up three times. 6. To keep 5 seconds with the arm open 120 degrees.

In the IFSC calendar 2016 there is only one Euro Youth Lead Cup whereas there are four Boulder events planned. The trend of decreasing interest in Lead and increased interest in Bouldering has been going on for several years and during the last years only Austria has organized Euro Youth Lead Cups. This means that in practice it will be more difficult for Euro youngsters to start competing in the Lead World Cup. Furthermore, as it is widely known that the focus on Bouldering in an early age is dangerous for the growth plates in the fingers, four events might create such injuries and therefore not be the best idea.

The Boulder World Cup starts on the 15.4 in Switzerland and there are 147 people on the starting list. Later the circuit continues in Japan, China, India, Austria, USA and Germany. Here is the 8a ranking for the first event but as some of these guys do not plan to do all mileage the overall is hard to speculate at this point. Who do you expect? 1. Jan Hojer - Janja Garnbret 2. Alexsey Rubtsov - Anna Stöhr 3. Jongwon Chon - Akiyo Noguchi 4. Dimitrii Sharafutdinov - Megan Mascarenas 5. Jakob Schubert - Shauna Coxey 6. Jernej Kruder - Katharina Saurwein 7. Rustam Gelmanov - Fanny Gibert 8. Alban Levier - Margo Hayes 9. Martin Stranik - Melissa Le Neve, Miho Nonaka 10. Sean McColl - Petra Klingler 11. Jorg Verhoeven - Stasa Gejo 12. Tyler Landman - Giorgia Tesio