IOC Olympic Museum / Allsport / Getty Images
A gymnast competes in the rope-climb at the 1896 Olympic Games in Athens, Greece
Several months ago now the International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC)announced that it had been recognised as the the international governing body of competition climbing. Whilst this might seem like it has paved the way for climbing as an Olympic sport there is still much work to be done, in order to see climbing in the Olympics.
First there is an certain amount of political mess left in the the wake of the IFSC, as the UIAA was until recently considered the a international federation for Alpine pursuits like climbing and mountaineering. However their work was many in the domain of ‘real’ climbing rather than the ‘artificial’ competition climbing. Whilst I don’t know the exact catalyst, at some point the IFSC split from the UIAA.
At present the BMC expresses that it is ‘warm’ to the idea of having climbing in the Olympics, however, as the national representative body for mountaineers and ski mountaineers the BMC has a wider remit than simply competition climbing. Sadly though the BMC seems unable or unwilling to throw its total commitment behind a bid to get at least climbing in the Olympics for reasons of not being able to promote climbing. It might seem ridiculous to some people, but it is a BMC policy to only promote climbing to existing climbers. Which means that promoting an Olympic bid might well be seen as going against that policy.
When researching this I found that climbing already has an Olympic history, when in 2006 the UIAA were granted permission from the International Olympic Committee to run a competitive event in conjunction with the Turin Winter Games. It was possible this event that lead to the IOC recognising climbing as a sport. Previous and more interesting than that was that mountaineers have already been awarded Olympic medals, in awards similar to the Piolet D’or. It was decided in 1894 that at each Olympics a gold medal would be awarded for the best mountaineering achievement in the previous four years. The first medal was awarded 1924 to the British Everest Expedition where the whole team was honoured. Over the next few Olympics several medals were awarded for mountaineering including the first ascent of the North Face of the Matterhorn.
Eventually, the Olympic foundation felt that mountaineering wasn’t appropriate to honour, and we arrived at the situation we are in today. Now interestingly when I chatted to a guide friend of mine we start to chat about the possibility of not only indoor sport and bouldering competition, but also ice climbing and ski mountaineering races. I was unaware that people raced across the alps, but imagine an event as long an arduous as the marathon, but staged in alpine terrain. The words amazing came out of my lips, way more interesting than watching a bunch of emaciated climbers struggle up and improbably steep piece of fibre glass.
Which begs the question of if climbing goes through the process, which will undoubtedly be long and expensive to get into the Olympics the sports are kept in only if they are popular with spectators, both in the stadium and on the television. The problem that climbing faces is that whilst climbing is exciting for the participant, unlike events that have head to head races where observers at home have the jeopardy of will there country or chosen athlete qualify and/or eventually win, climbing simply doesn’t have that.
To make climbing gripping for the audience, we might have to design events specifically for the Olympics, bouldering might well be the answer, although a dyno competition might well be as interesting as the High Jump, unfortunately it might be hard to build a Big Wall to have a speed climbing event up!