Oceania Climbing Training Camp 2020

By Tom O'Halloran. All uncredited photos Tara Davidson

The weekend just gone (29 Feb, 1 March) was the Oceania training camp held at Villawood Climbing Gym in Sydney. The camp was a competition simulation for the Oceania Championships that will be held 28/29 March at the same location. Athletes attended to help with preparations for what may be the biggest climbing competition in Oceania history. Twenty athletes per gender, from Australia and New Zealand will compete together over two massive days. The winner from each gender is given a spot in their Nation’s Olympic team for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.

The format of the Olympic competition is unique, never before seen in climbing. All three competition disciplines, speed, boulder and lead, are combined into one event. The same format all Olympic climbing qualification events must follow. This format was a divisive decision when first announced. Many of the difficulty climbers weren’t psyched with speed being lumped in on the more ‘pure’ forms of climbing. The speed climbers, well they are specialists in that discipline and many are not particularly good at either boulder or lead. They were going to be severely disadvantaged. Opinions were divided.

Action blurs women’s speed. Cirrus Tan and Roxy Perry. Photo T O’Halloran

The controversy came about when climbing made it into the Olympics. The International Olympic Committee, when they accepted climbing into Tokyo 2020, awarded Sport Climbing one set of medals. So the International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC) had a tough decision to make. Which discipline do they put into the Olympics? Lead is arguably the most pure form of climbing but it can be pretty boring to the untrained eye, read, the general public. General public = advertising dollars. The new style bouldering format is a fantastic spectacle with its huge dynamic moves and down to the wire moments but can be a long event. Speed is definitely the most general public friendly, fast paced, wham wham wham action but has a stigma attached to it by most of the climbing community. Many with the opinion it doesn't represent the true core of our sport.

As an aside, I find this up turned nose attitude pretty contradictory. Fastest times on routes are a proud tradition across the world. The Nose speed record being the pinnacle of this. An achievement which apparently embodies the long proud history of traditional climbing? To ‘climb’ The Nose fast, you pull on more bolts, pitons and cams than I’ve had bleeding fingers and let me tell you, my skin is kitten weak! So really, competition speed climbers do more ‘pure’ climbing in their event than the Yosemite big wall guns.

But I digress. Essentially rather than selecting just one discipline, the IFSC decided to combine all three. The whole world will see everything climbing has to offer. Also making a more compelling argument in the future when we petition for another set of medals. IFSC won’t need to prove what another disciplines looks like. Just take what is already tried and tested and make it a stand-alone event.

I also like this format, as it truly is a test of the best climber. The question of who sits a top the throne of bestness in the world of climbing is thrown around often. What metric do we use? My favorite is who performs the best across all disciplines. This is what is truly being tested in the Olympic format. Who finishes the day with the best ranking after competing in three very different version of climbing.

The ins and out of the format are complicated and don’t need to be nutted out here, all you need to know is this. On finals day there will be 8 athletes. They will compete in a speed competition and are ranked from 1 to 8 at the end. They then do a boulder round and based on scores are ranked from 1 to 8 again. After that its lead time and rankings are awarded again. Your ranking in each of the individual disciplines is then multiplied together to give you a final ranking score. So if an athlete place 5th in speed, 3rd in boulder and 4th in lead, the math would be 5 X 3 X 4. Resulting in a score of 60. If another climber placed 2nd in speed, 2nd in boulder and 3rd in lead they will have a score of 12. All climbers are then ranked according to this final score and the winner is the climber with the lowest score. Happy days!

From an athlete point of view, the on-the-day complication with a format like this, is the on off process for your body and mind. Qualification day for Oceania will be a 10 hour epic! Maintaining energy, fuel and arousal levels is key. Plus the energy systems and parts of your body necessary to compete well in each event are hugely different. You need to get explosive for speed. Bouldering requires coordination, finger recruitment and a full body growl ready to go. Then lead, well you needed to get prepared to pump lots of oxygenated blood to coke bottled forearms. It's tricky.

You don’t want to overdo a warm up and be too tired for the next round. Nor do you want to under do it and get a flash pump or have shoulders that aren’t ready for an iron cross dyno. Then you need to make sure your nutrition is dialed in so you maintain energy levels across the two-day event. Not enough and you’ll bonk, experiment with spicy bean burritos and your guts might be doing back flips while you try and balance across a slab.

During the competition all climbers will live in a isolation/warm up zone. A segregated area where no one from the public are allowed in. Climbers only emerge for route viewing and when it’s their turn to climb. Rules of what you can and can’t bring in there also apply. The main items you cannot bring in are phones, iPads, laptops, smart watches, essentially anything you could use to communicate with the outside world, or the outside world with you. I haven’t seen anything in the rules about carrier pigeons, but I’d assume they’re out too. The aim is to make it an even playing field for everyone. No cheating by having your coach send you beta updates or sneaky videos of what other climbers have done. If you are caught with any of these items you are immediately given a red card and are disqualified. Most climbers bring in iPod shuffles, magazines, books or cards. Things to keep your mind busy and maybe distracted from the intensity around you.

So back to the camp! Day one we had the simulation of a qualification round. Speed was up first as discipline one where you do two practice/warm up runs, to help get your eye in. Followed by two timed runs. There are no head to head races that day, but you are ranked according to your time with the other competitors.

Bouldering is next with four boulder problems. You can fall as many times as you like, however the least number of falls the better. You start from the designated start position each time and cannot touch any holds other than the start holds while you are on the mats. One at a time, climbers come out of the isolation zone and have 5 minutes to climb boulder one. After boulder one, you rest for 5 minutes with your back turned to the wall while climber two comes out of the isolation zone and attempts boulder one. After this you move to boulder two, while climber two rests and climber three attempts boulder one for the first time. This continues until all climbers have attempted all four boulders. Make sense?

After this it’s lead time. Climbers are given 6 minutes as a group to view the previously unseen climb and try to come up with a sequence. Then one at a time each climber comes out of isolation and has 6 minutes to climb as far as they can up the route. The higher you climb, the points you get. It’s a big day! On comp day, only the top 8 climbers, based on the multiplication math mentioned above, will make it through to finals day.

Day two of the training camp was a simulation of finals day. Speed started the day where the fastest climber from the top 8, raced against the slowest. Second fastest against the second slowest etc etc. Based on whether you won or lost your first race you moved into the top 4 bracket or bottom 4 bracket for round 2. Top 4 race through round two and three to decided placings and bottom 4 do the same for places 5-8. If you won race 1, won race 2 and won race 3, you are placed first. Three losses and you are 8th. Win, loss, win and you are 3rd. Hope this makes sense.

Bouldering is next, but this time it’s three boulders and only four minutes to climb them. However all climbers are given a group viewing of 2 minutes per boulder. Then climbers come out of isolation one at a time to try to climb boulder one. Once all climbers have attempted boulder one, they move to boulder two, then to boulder three.

Lead is the same as day one; six minute viewing, six minutes to climb. One climber at a time.

After the last climbers are off the wall, scores are multiplied and the winners announced.

Before climbing began on day two, Amanda Watts gave the athletes a nutrition presentation. Nutrition is what is going to fuel the machine on game day and having this optimised is a game changer. Everything consumed needs to be playing a role. Amanda broke down how athletes could optimally fuel themselves over the course of the two days. Not only looking at the science of the macro nutrients like carbs, protein and fats and their important roles in performance. But also how to practically put that into action on the day, depending on how you might like to eat. Can you sit down to a big sandwich and milk shake, or will you be snacking on bars and sipping sports drink? Nutrition is an often overlooked aspect in comp day planning, which seems crazy once you realise its importance. I think all the athletes came away from the presentation with a far clearer idea of what they will be doing on the day. It was an invaluable session.

Thank you to Villawood Climbing Gym and Sport Climbing Australia (SCA) for putting this camp on for the athletes. As I said before, being a new format, none of us are well practiced with how to prepare our bodies and minds for the course of the massive weekend. So the opportunity for a dry run of this was invaluable. I learnt a lot and feel a ton more comfortable going into the proper event.

When your’e on the wall, climbing is an individual sport. But it takes a team to get you there. Without the help from SCA, Villawood climbing gym, route setters and other volunteers this wouldn’t have been possible. They are the people that help elevate the athletes. I have a good feeling for the future of Australian competition climbing.

In less than a month, one male and one female from the Oceania region will be given a ticket to the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. It's history in the making and I’m damn proud to be a part of it.

Climber and coach contemplation. How will it all turn out? Lucy Stirling and Duncan Brown