India’s Vertical Equation: Olympic Dreams, Thin Margins
- Pierre-Gaël Pasquiou
- 6 hours ago
- 7 min read
Driven by the rise of private gyms and a handful of fiercely committed athletes, climbing is gaining ground in India. But behind the speed records and Olympic ambitions, the country’s top climbers are still up against a brutal reality: little funding, limited infrastructure, and a competitive ecosystem that is only just beginning to take shape.
In a country where cricket dominates the media, the money, and the cultural imagination, breaking through in another sport is never simple. And yet climbing is finding a foothold in India. Colorful bouldering walls are appearing in the middle of major cities. Young urban climbers are packing gyms for fun, fitness, and community. And a few standout athletes are trying to turn that early momentum into an international future.
Deepu Mallesh is one of them. At 28, the Indian climber has his eyes fixed on the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. He recently smashed India’s national speed climbing record, stopping the clock at 5.39 seconds. The current world record is 4.54 seconds. It is a striking number, and a clear sign of the talent coming through. But it also hides a much harsher truth: India’s best climbers are still largely on their own.
The Cost of Going Vertical
According to estimates from the Indian Mountaineering Foundation, tens of thousands of people are now trying climbing in India, a boom fueled in large part by the opening of roughly 15 major gyms over the past decade. The problem appears when you look at the competition pipeline. Out of that growing base, only about 3,500 athletes compete on the national circuit. Internationally, barely 60 make it abroad each year. For a country of 1.4 billion people, that bottleneck says a lot. The talent is there. Since 2002, Indian athletes have brought home nearly 70 medals from Asian championships. But a few isolated results do not build a sustainable system.
In our conversations with Deepu Mallesh, he laid out the numbers behind one elite international season. Between flights, lodging at World Cup stops, registration fees, visas, sport-specific nutrition, and gear, a year costs him between 8 and 12 lakh rupees, roughly €9,000 to €13,000. In India, for an unsubsidized sport, that is an enormous amount of money. Mallesh told us that in 2023 and 2024, his climbing career was kept alive by crowdfunding. In plain English: the public paid for his plane tickets.
“Financially it is a prohibitive sport, so only those who can afford it will have access initially”
Shaiv Gandhi, directeur technique de The Indian Bouldering Company à Mumbai
His recent selection for the national team has brought some help from the IMF, including a valuable chance to train with Indonesia’s national team. But the balance remains fragile. Even now, Mallesh says every decision he makes, including which competitions he can enter, depends first on the state of his own bank account.
That financial strain reaches all the way down to the most basic tools of the sport. Quoted by Pakistan Today, Joga Purty, a 19-year-old rising climber, pointed out that essential gear is a recurring major expense. A good pair of climbing shoes and a harness each cost around 10,000 rupees, a little over €100. A chalk bag can run up to 5,000 rupees, around €50. At an elite training load, technical climbing shoes rarely last more than three to six months.
Without support from Tata, one of India’s largest industrial conglomerates, Purty said she would have had to quit, like many others before her. Shivpreet Pannu, a member of the junior team, told the same outlet that she had to compete for three years before she could afford her first pair of personal climbing shoes.
The Gym Floor
The real engine of Indian climbing is not yet a national high-performance system. For now, it is private gyms. In Mumbai, The Indian Bouldering Company, or TIBC, represents a new generation of urban climbing spaces. These gyms are making climbing more visible, more appealing, and sometimes more accessible.
Speaking with Vertige Media, Shaiv Gandhi, the gym’s technical director, described a customer base still made up mostly of beginners, fitness enthusiasts, and young professionals. With summer break, more children are coming in. Over time, he hopes to reach more students as well.
Indian climbing is expanding, but first among those who can afford the entry fee. Gandhi does not try to hide that limit. “They’re making the sport more accessible to those who don’t have access to the infrastructure,” he says. But that access is still partial. “Financially it is a prohibitive sport, so only those who can afford it will have access initially.”
For Gandhi, real growth may come through volume: more gyms, lower prices, more familiarity with the sport, and eventually more reasons for public or private sponsors to step in.
“To keep that dream alive, the coming year is crucial I need consistent international exposure, structured training, and financial backing”
Deepu Mallesh, professional speed climber
Until that shift happens, private initiative is filling part of the gap in a very hands-on way. At TIBC, the three instructors are former national-level athletes. They remain connected to the local climbing community, including young climbers training in smaller, cheaper, more competition-focused facilities. When they spot someone with promise, they bring that person to the gym’s attention.
“We do what we can to help facilitate their growth,” Gandhi says. In practice, that can mean free access, coaching, mentoring, or gear. The idea is simple: if someone has potential, they should be able to climb. But that simplicity also reveals how fragile the system is. In a structured pipeline, identifying a talented young climber should trigger a pathway. In India, it still depends heavily on the watchfulness of a gym, the goodwill of a manager, and the ability of a few private actors to absorb, at their own scale, what the public system does not yet cover.
A Technical Ceiling
Indian climbing faces another limit, quieter but just as important: the shape of the walls themselves. During our interview, Gandhi made a sharp technical observation. In his region, he says, almost every competitor is exceptionally strong on overhanging terrain, but struggles badly when problems move onto technical slabs and vertical walls. In climbing, a slab is a low-angle wall where balance, footwork, and precision matter more than raw power.
The reason is architectural. Local training walls are built almost entirely around steep, overhanging profiles. And in climbing, infrastructure shapes the body. It shapes technique. It shapes style. If athletes do not have access to complex route setting, varied angles, or modern volumes, that gap shows up immediately on the world stage.
Gyms like TIBC are doing a lot for beginners and intermediate climbers. But Gandhi is clear about the limits. Past V9 or V10, bouldering grades that mark a serious advanced level, his current facility simply lacks the space and the wall features needed to prepare athletes for international competition.
“For me, this journey has never just been about competing. It’s about proving that athletes from India can reach the highest level if given the right support”
Deepu Mallesh, professional speed climber
A city-center commercial gym cannot replace a high-performance training center. Then there is the real estate nightmare of India’s megacities. In Mumbai, finding an industrial building with more than five meters of ceiling height and no central columns is almost impossible. Renting one is wildly expensive. In other provinces, where land is more available, a different problem appears: there are not enough qualified people to set routes and boulders at an international standard.
Olympus, or the Status Quo?
Still, the energy is real. Climbing is spreading beyond the most obvious cities and finding space in Chennai, Hyderabad, and Kolkata. Rock climbing is also helping tell a broader story. Hampi, in Karnataka, is a vast granite bouldering area set inside a UNESCO-listed landscape and already a touchstone for traveling climbers. Sethan, near Manali, connects Indian climbing to the wider imagination of the Himalaya. Indian climbing is not growing only indoors. It is beginning to tell its story outside, too.
For now, climbing in India is developing much faster as an urban social lifestyle than as a pure competition sport. It is becoming a cultural marker, an alternative to the traditional gym, a place to meet people and build community. That is not a bad thing. Elite sport needs a wide base of recreational climbers to help fund itself. But India now faces a short-term choice: does it want to build a recreational climbing community, an elite competitive pipeline, or both? For both to move forward at the same time, the country needs stronger institutional bridges between private gyms, clubs, the federation, and the Ministry of Sports.
Institutional recognition remains the core issue. At the moment, climbing is still seeking official integration into India’s national sports governance framework. That step is essential if the sport is going to unlock stable, long-term public funding.
For Deepu Mallesh, the future of his Olympic dream depends on that administrative shift. “I do believe it’s possible,” he says. “But to keep that dream alive, the coming year is crucial I need consistent international exposure, structured training, and financial backing. Without that, it becomes very difficult to compete against athletes who have full support systems behind them.” Those are the conditions that could make the road to Los Angeles 2028 real.
“For me, this journey has never just been about competing,” Mallesh adds. “It’s about proving that athletes from India can reach the highest level if given the right support.” More than anything, he says, he wants to show the next generation that an Indian climber can stand among the best in the world — provided they are given the same tools as everyone else.
