Santa Cruz native Natalia Grossman built confidence, reached new heights as climber

PARIS — Natalia Grossman may be one of the only athletes who credits her confidence in competition to not making an Olympic team.

The year was 2021. The world was just emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, Grossman was just emerging, at age 19, as one of the world’s best climbers. She won her first World Cup bouldering event in Salt Lake City that May. The following week, she repeated the feat, this time handing Slovenian legend Janja Gambret, who missed the previous Utah contest, her first loss in three years.

Yet, when roll call was taken for climbing’s Olympic debut a few months later, Grossman wasn’t there. The Santa Cruz native hadn’t had enough success during the qualification window, which closed about six months prior to the Games, to warrant her inclusion.

Rather than being salty over a lost opportunity, Grossman said she’s appreciative of it. Focusing on World Cups when much of the world was consumed with the Olympics, she said, built her confidence. Since then she’s worked her way through the world ranks almost as fast as she can work her way around boulder problems.

This Olympics, there was no way she wouldn’t be competing for Team USA.

“It hadn’t even been a goal of mine to go to the Olympics,” Grossman said of the Tokyo Games. “So I was kind of chillin’, and it was fun.

“I think because a lot of people weren’t doing World Cups, especially in the summer, that gave me a time to kind of get used to it without all the field being there and just have that confidence of, ‘I can podium. I can win. I can do well.’ And then once they came back, once everyone was there, I had that belief in myself already.”

Grossman, 22, has lassoed that belief and her talents to the top of the sport with no top-out in sight.

First she rode the momentum of that hot start in Salt Lake City to the women’s boulder overall World Cup title in 2021. Then, she won it again in 2022 and 2023. In the overall lead standings, she wrapped up 2021 in second and 2022 in third. The two disciplines have been combined for the Paris Olympics competition.

After finding her fingerhold in the sport too late to make the Tokyo Olympics, this time Grossman reserved her spot early. Really early. She nabbed it by taking the gold medal at the 2023 Pan American Games in Santiago, Chile, last October. Her qualification dovetailed with another accomplishment — graduating from the University of Colorado — as well as a move to Salt Lake City, the site of USA Climbing’s headquarters. All that meant she had plenty of time to train.

Maybe too much time.

“That was kind of a challenge at first,” Grossman said, “because I went a little ham last year and overtrained a bit.”

She also had plenty to work on, though. USA Climbing coach Josh Larson said despite Grossman’s fledgling success on the World Cup circuit, her training regime was completely revamped to prepare her for Paris. The focus, Larson said, has been on finesse and precision, rather than the power climbing favored in the United States.

“As soon as she moved to Salt Lake, that’s where we focused all of our training was on World Cup prep,” Larson said. “Athletes were exposed to that pretty quickly. (And the reaction usually was) ‘Wow, this is very different and very hard, not forgiving at all.’ ”

The change doesn’t seem to have affected the confidence Grossman built during that Tokyo Olympics year. She showed immaculate precision in taking down a boulder during Tuesday’s Olympic semifinals.

“That was a demonstration of accuracy,” two-time World Cup winner Shauna Coxsey remarked on the NBC broadcast.

Grossman enters Thursday’s lead semifinals in fifth, just below leader Garnbret. She’s also on the heels of Brooke Raboutou, a 2021 Olympian and Grossman’s good friend (and the daughter of Grossman’s personal coach), who wrapped up the round in third with France’s Oriane Bertund in second and Australia’s Oceania Mackenzie in fourth.

After Thursday’s lead results are factored into the scores, the top eight climbers will advance to Saturday’s combined boulder-and-lead medal round.

So far, the immense attention and sold-out crowds climbing has drawn in Paris hasn’t seemed to rattle Grossman. Then again, she’s been building toward her Olympic moment for seven years now.

“She’s very dialed,” Larson said. “She knows herself really well.”