Bouldering and Lead on Team France: What’s Making the Difference?

You have to go back almost a decade to find the last French win in a Lead World Cup. While France’s bouldering team has been tearing up the international circuit, what explains the drop-off in lead, the roped discipline where climbers try to get as high as possible on a route? A few people who know the game offer some answers.

French climber Sam Avezou in Seoul in September 2025 © Nakajima/Timmerman for World Climbing

Edinburgh, September 23, 2017. In the final of that Lead World Cup stop, Julia Chanourdie and Romain Desgranges pull onto their respective routes almost at the same time. The field is stacked with names that still carry weight today: Stefano Ghisolfi, Sean Bailey, Janja Garnbret, Jakob Schubert. And yet it is Desgranges who catches the commentator’s eye. At one point, he is even called “the Roger Federer of climbing.”

Stuck

It turns out the nickname was not a bad call. Chanourdie falls fairly early on her route, but Desgranges moves through his like a clean backhand down the line. He is the first climber to top. It is his third gold medal of the season, and that win helps him finish first overall in the 2017 Lead World Cup standings. Romain Desgranges’s breakthrough remains one of France’s last victories at a Lead World Cup stop. Almost ten years later, he has traded the competition bib for the coach’s shirt at the French Mountaineering and Climbing Federation, the FFME. In other words, Desgranges now coaches France’s lead team. That is the role in which Vertige Media reached out to him to talk about where France stands in the discipline.

On the phone, the former champion immediately draws a comparison with bouldering. Over the past decade, competition climbing has changed sharply. Lead was once the prestige event. Now it seems to sit slightly behind bouldering, which has pulled in a large part of the ecosystem around the sport. You can see it in the results of the French bouldering team, but also in the depth of French climbers regularly crowding international podiums. “There are engines in bouldering, like Oriane [Bertone] and Mejdi [Schalck], who pull everyone else up with them,” Desgranges says.

“Who wants to watch an Instagram Reel of an entire lead route, with a climber resting on holds for a third of the video?”

Guillaume Levernier, club coach in Massy

For Lucien Martinez, a high-level French climber and former editor-in-chief of Grimper magazine, the point is now obvious. “The French only look behind in lead because they’re performing at such a high level in bouldering,” he tells Vertige Media. Since 2021, those “engines” have been moving fast. Mejdi Schalck has taken more than ten World Cup podiums. Oriane Bertone has taken around fifteen. And they are not the only ones winning. Naïlé Maignan took gold in 2025. More recently, Zélia Avezou won the first stop of the 2026 World Cup season in Keqiao, China.

Arthur Rebollo, the 2025 U21 European bouldering champion, points to the same thing: depth. In his view, France is one of the best-stocked countries in the world when it comes to bouldering talent. Looking back on competitions in France, he says the pressure was enormous because the field was so strong. “Compared with the French team selection events, the European Championships felt like a party in my head,” he says, smiling.

Guillaume Levernier sees it another way. A coach at the Massy climbing club outside Paris, and an experienced climber himself, he reads the shift through a generational lens. He points to social media, which tends to push newer climbers toward a more consumer-friendly, more spectacular version of the sport. “Who wants to watch an Instagram Reel of an entire lead route, with a climber resting on holds for a third of the video?” he asks.

Another sign of the times, he says, is instant gratification. Levernier explains that he often starts a bouldering session on a problem that seems impossible, then eventually sticks the top-out after thirty tries. That is much harder to reproduce on a route. Working a crux—the hardest section of a climb—requires more setup, and linking the whole route after a fall usually means taking a serious rest before the next attempt.

On the left, Romain Desgranges, and on the right, Guillaume Levernier © Courtesy of the FFME and Guillaume Levernier

Lead Is Complicated

In 1985, the first climbing competitions were held directly on real rock, at the end of a rope. At the beginning, the height itself made the spectacle compelling. Lead remained the flagship discipline for two decades, until bouldering, and to a lesser extent speed, began cutting into its dominance. It is hard to put an exact date on the shift. But Romain Desgranges also sees an explanation in the public and private infrastructure that can produce elite climbers. New climbing gyms are overwhelmingly bouldering-focused. “It’s much more accessible,” the coach says. “A bouldering wall is easier to build than a 16-meter wall. It costs less, it’s easier to run. In lead, there are more constraints. A route is not five holds, it’s fifty. You don’t need a ladder, you need a lift. Everything is heavier to set up.”

“The movement range in bouldering gives the discipline its own appeal, and you find much less of that in lead”

Arthur Rebollo, 2025 U21 European Bouldering Champion.

Looking back at the development of climbing over the past two decades, Lucien Martinez is convinced that the boom in commercial gyms freed bouldering from its old limits. In his view, private gyms chose lower walls to make climbing more accessible, “so everyone could find something in it, so a beginner could have fun in their first session and not get too frustrated.” Counterintuitively, that accessibility helped produce a more technical style of climbing.

“The difficulty of a climb shifted toward the smart use of technical skills rather than purely physical ones,” Martinez says. “Coordination moves, technical slabs, and so on. More or less what we call modern climbing.” The result? France excels in that style. French slabs, in a sense, have become a training ground recognized around the world. The level of some elite French climbers in that specific style only reinforces the point.

Commercial gyms changed the way people think about climbing and helped create a new generation of climbers. Add in the large number of French routesetters, and some people see France as having played a pioneering role on the international circuit. Still, it can look as if that ability to ride the evolution of the sport has come at the expense of French lead climbing.

As a young athlete, Arthur Rebollo says bouldering simply offers more ways to perform.

“The movement range in bouldering gives the discipline its own appeal, and you find much less of that in lead,” he says. “Slabs, dynos, coordination moves — they’re almost nonexistent on a route.” That also means there are more ways to stand out. Because climbing styles are more varied, more climbers can specialize. Depending on the way a competition is set, that gives more athletes a real shot.

“Lead World Cup walls are too short. It’s so intense, so violent, and not that long. The climbers with the most raw power will always be the ones who express themselves best on those routes”

Lucien Martinez, author and former editor-in-chief of Grimper.

Rocher canon

On February 11, a 17-year-old French climber completed Bombé Bleu in Buoux. Erwan Legrand had just made the first ascent of one of the last legendary projects in world climbing, graded 5.15b, or 9b in the French system, after some of the sport’s biggest names had tried and failed on it. Before him, Seb Bouin became the second climber in the world to climb 5.15d, or 9c. Jules Marchaland, meanwhile, keeps showing he can get close to the hardest rock climbs on the planet.

In short: the French are thriving outside. So why are they not standing on the top step of the podium in competition? “It has nothing to do with it,” Martinez says flatly. “The reality is that international competitions are not, or are no longer, suited to outdoor sport climbers — those endurance climbers who know how to rest on bad holds.” In his view, “there simply isn’t a competition made for them.” He continues: “Lead World Cup walls are too short. It’s so intense, so violent, and not that long. The climbers with the most raw power will always be the ones who express themselves best on those routes.”

The media coverage of climbing, and the need to produce more spectacle, are not incidental. World Climbing, the international federation, has had to adjust formats accordingly, favoring faster, more dynamic sequences, adding time limits, reducing rests, and pushing the sport toward a different rhythm. “The physically strongest climbers are the ones dominating the lead circuit,” Arthur Rebollo confirms. “A few less physical profiles can still find a way through, but you can count them on one hand.”

Last year in Bali, a young French athlete with a slight build managed to climb onto the second step of the podium at a Lead World Cup. Max Bertone, Oriane’s brother, won a welcome medal for French lead climbing. Before the international season began, Romain Desgranges told us that performance was “a sign of what’s coming next.” On May 9, at the most recent Lead World Cup stop in Wujiang, China, two French climbers — Sam Avezou and Victor Guillermin — made the final.