“Too Hard! Too Reachy!” The Olympic’s Routesetters Think These Criticisms Are Unfair
The Paris Olympics are in the rearview, with Slovenia’s Janja Garnbret smashing her way to a women’s victory (again), and relative unknown Toby Roberts taking the United Kingdom to a men’s gold.
Though Garnbret has reigned supreme twice now, Olympic sport climbing has proven extremely hard-to-predict, even with the exclusion of Speed from the Combined format. Some of the world’s leading rock gurus—Alexander Megos, Adam Ondra—have never made a podium, and names many climbers aren’t even familiar with—Alberto Ginés López, Toby Roberts—have come away with gold medals. This is perhaps because climbing is an unusual sport, since the stage is not fixed. Save for Speed, there is no regulation “route,” and athletes are not given a chance to forerun each line as athletes do in other course-variable sports, such as skiing, snowboarding, golf, or BMX. In finals, sport climbers only get a couple of minutes to look at the routes immediately before they climb. This means that success is not so much down to overall projecting strength or skill but how well a climber can read a route and perform under pressure on a given day.
Routesetting is a similarly ephemeral game. As Head Boulder setter Garrett Gregor explained to me in the lead-up to the Games, these routes are not planned months ahead of time, vetted by suit-and-tie committees or lapped by dozens of testers. Even at the Olympic level, setters show up a week before the event, bust out their lines, and pull the trigger, relying on a mixture of experience and luck to ensure their creations align with climbers’ performance.
When I called Gregor—along with Martin Hammerer, Head Lead setter—last week, he said it was hard to look back and see successes and mistakes. “We had plenty of things that went well, and plenty of things that could have gone better,” Gregor said. “But we only get one chance. It’s impossible to know how athletes are going to perform.”
The men’s Boulder semifinal, in particular, was an extremely hard set that saw lots of zones but few tops. Out of the 20 competitors and four problems (80 total competitor-problem match-ups), the event saw a mere seven tops. This is one area where things clearly could have “gone better.” But Gregor and Hammerer said the idea that there is a “right” and “wrong” in routesetting is missing the point. “While it didn’t go right, it also didn’t go wrong,” said Gregor, speaking of the men’s semifinal boulders. “Our estimation of what we thought competitors were capable of was a little bit outside of where the climbers climbed that day. But that isn’t to say that on another day, they might have performed differently. It’s also not to say it didn’t work well. 50% of setting is skill, 50% is luck.”
As a setter, Gregor said it’s generally easier to err on the side of making a route too hard as opposed to too easy, and in most cases this is the best way to tilt, even if it can go too far. “If it’s too hard, at least we’re not going to end up with everyone topping everything. Then the competition feels empty.” To his point, although overall the competitors didn’t perform as well as expected—and some of the names atop the leaderboards weren’t as well known as some of the names near the bottom—even men’s semifinals did produce relatively predictable results.
Toby Roberts, the United Kingdom’s gold medalist, isn’t all that well known—but that’s because he’s 19 years old. Same with Japanese silver medalist Sorato Anraku, who is just 17 years old. But though both Roberts and Anraku are early in their careers, they’ve each won multiple World Cups, defeating far more established names in the process. Their performance was not particularly surprising to people in the know. The women’s podium was a bit more predictable. Garnbret (gold), American Brooke Raboutou (silver), and Austrian Jessica Pilz (bronze) are all tried-and-true crushers.
“If we look over the span of years and years of competition, I don’t think it’s luck that makes the great great,” said Gregor. “There’s a reason Janja consistently outperforms her competitors.”
Unlike the Tokyo Olympics, where a problem perceived to depict the “Rising Sun” flag of Imperial Japan generated a minor fracas online, there were no major controversies with the routesetting in Paris. Some online pundits, however, were vocal about a perceived height discrimination in the women’s finals, with Japanese competitor Ai Mori, who’s 5’1”, unable to stick the holds for the jumpstart on the first problem. Viewers on X took issue with the set, calling it “bullying” and “discrimination.” On Instagram, philosophy professor and self-professed “climbing ethicist” Kimbrough Moore went as far as to ask whether Olympic bouldering was “a height competition?”
It’s hard to see truth in these claims. For one thing, Mori did touch the holds. She just couldn’t manage to stick them during the outward swing. Raboutou, just a few centimeters taller than Mori, landed the move with relative ease and went on to place second in the Boulder comp, netting silver medal in the Combined event. As noted by Impact Routesetting, “the way the boulder was set, even the taller climbers had to jump. If the start was brought down, there was a real risk that the taller climbers would not have to jump at all, creating a much bigger disparity in difficulty for competitors.”
Gregor shed a bit of extra light on this problem, explaining that one of his testers, a very short female, was able to not only reach the start holds, but hit the wall 10 centimeters higher than where the holds were set. At a certain point, every movement will be biased toward a given body type, which is why there are a diversity of problems in each Boulder round and a diversity of moves on each Lead climb. “Many people, even us as setters, can fall into this delusion that one move can be the same for every single person,” he said. “Quite frankly, that’s just not true. Our team was very conscious of trying to balance the discrepancy between what was hard for someone who was tall and what was hard for someone who was short. A lot of talk went into trying to create that balance and offer solutions for those of different size.”
Hammerer felt similarly about his Lead routes. “It’s hard to say if anything went wrong. They climb and they fall, or they don’t fall,” he joked.
Similar to the Boulder semis, women’s Lead semis offered a generally diverse contest, but men’s Lead semis was over-difficult. No men topped the semifinal route, which isn’t abnormal, but a whopping third of the competitors misread the same move near the beginning of the climb, which is far from ideal. “We wanted to create tension lower down to make it more exciting to watch the lower part of the route,” said Hammerer. “But [the competitors] already arrived quite stressed, because it was the Olympics, and they weren’t quite sure what to do. It gave them a lot more trouble than we expected.”
Despite this, Hammerer felt that overall his team did a “good job,” and that many viewers might not realize the painstaking and intensely collaborative effort that went into the setting, both from the multinational IFSC team and the French national routesetters who assisted them.
The idea that variance lies exclusively with the competitors, and that there is no such thing as a routesetting “mistake” is clearly illogical. But it makes sense that after a certain point, things come down to a coin toss. Gregor and Hammerer said believe if a route is set generally fairly (i.e. not a bunch of jugs in a straight line, or a 20-foot dyno no human could stick) and within the IFSC guidelines, then it’s impossible, based on competitor performances on a given day, to retroactively analyze and propose changes to “fix” a mistake.
“They say hindsight is 20/20,” Gregor said. “But in the case of routesetting, hindsight is only, like, 20/100. There are too many variables. Let’s say we did make a change to a route. Even if you replayed the competition, we can’t guarantee the change would have the desired effect. The same athletes could show up and perform differently.”
“We did the absolute best we could,” Gregor concluded. “There was no shortage of conversations about heights. No shortage of conversations about people being nervous. No shortage of conversations about difficulty. The idea that we can control the outcome of a competition is fundamentally at odds with what ’sport’ is.”
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