Climbing at the Olympic Games
After lobbying for inclusion into the Olympic Games for many years, sports climbing was finally accepted onto the program for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, along with four other new sports.
What is Sport Climbing?
The sport that is being held at the Olympics is not “rock” climbing, which most people would have an idea about, but “sport climbing”, which requires similar skills, though it is performed on an artificial climbing wall.
The climbing competition at the Olympics is divided into three disciplines - lead climbing, speed climbing, and bouldering, with events for men and women. The competitors will be graded on their combined results from the three events.
- Speed climbing - a timed race between two athletes on a 15-meter wall.
- Bouldering - a graded course with multiple routes of varying difficulty to be completed in four minutes.
- Lead Climbing - how high a climber can go in six minutes.
indoor sport climbingClimbing at Past Olympics
This is not the first time that climbing has been part of the Olympic Games. From 1924 to 1936, the IOC gave a gold medal for "alpinism", another word for mountaineering. See more about Alpinism at the Olympics.
Related Pages
- More about the sport of climbing
- About Alpinism at the Olympics.
- Climbing, is it really a new Olympic sport?
- POLL: Which sport should be next included in the Olympic Games?
- List of Olympic Sports
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