Israel Boycott: Le Camp de base Refuses to Host European Youth Climbing Event

Ten days before the World Climbing Europe Youth Series Brussels 2026, the Brussels climbing gym Le Camp de base says it will no longer make its venue available for the international youth competition. The breaking point: the failure to reach a compromise over Israeli athletes competing under a neutral flag.

© Courtesy of Base Camp

This is no longer an ultimatum. The door is shut. After several days of talks with World Climbing, the international governing body for climbing, along with Belgian officials and the Israeli federation, Le Camp de base has made its decision: the gym will not host the Brussels stop of the World Climbing Europe Youth Series, scheduled for May 30 and 31.

At the time of publication, the event was still listed on World Climbing’s official calendar.

But the private venue’s leadership confirmed to Vertige Media that it will no longer provide its walls, staff, or its new high-performance climbing space for the competition. Moving an international youth event on such short notice would most likely mean canceling it altogether.

One thing is certain: this is an exceptionally rare moment in the organization of international sport. And in competitive climbing, it is a first since the escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Compromise That Fell Apart

From the start, Le Camp de base’s position was clear: Israeli athletes could compete, but only under a neutral flag. The request was not about excluding individual athletes or targeting them as people. It was about refusing to host an official Israeli national representation in the current context, marked by the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the case brought before the International Court of Justice, and the occupation of Palestinian territories.

“Everyone needs to make commitments, and the responsibility cannot keep landing back on the organizers and the final venues that host these events”

Florian Delcoigne, co-founder of Le Camp de base

According to Florian Delcoigne, co-founder of Le camp de base, that request could not be carried out in time. “For them, granting neutral status to the Israeli athletes just wasn’t possible to put in place within 15 days,” he said.

That impasse raises an obvious question: why did World Climbing not anticipate this decision, when the issue has been building for months across the international climbing world?

A version of a compromise was discussed during negotiations between Le Camp de base, World Climbing, the Belgian climbing federation, and the Israeli climbing federation. One option would have allowed Israeli athletes, sent by their federation, to compete while removing visible signs of national representation: flags, livestream references, communications, bags, clothing, and protocol. Le Camp de base said it was ready to accept that imperfect solution.

Another, murkier option would have involved keeping certain symbols off display under the cover of “technical issues” or omissions. For the Brussels gym, that was exactly the trap to avoid: pretending, fudging the line, and sweeping the politics under the procedural rug.

In the end, the compromise collapsed. The Israeli federation did not accept the removal of national symbols. Its delegation was therefore expected to compete under the Israeli flag — an option Le Camp de base said it could no longer accept.

Values, Security, and Bodyguards

The Brussels decision did not come out of nowhere. Last year, during a previous European Cup hosted by Le Camp de base, the presence of bodyguards connected to the Israeli delegation had already created discomfort. According to Florian Delcoigne, they arrived the day before the event, without a framework agreed in advance, potentially armed, and without prior approval from local police. “That was not OK,” he said.

The gym raised the issue internally and with Belgian officials. Since then, Le Camp de base says it has tried to plan ahead. From the beginning of the year, the organization had again expressed its concerns: on one hand, the difficulty of calmly handling an exceptional security setup without a clear framework; on the other, a deeper disagreement with hosting an Israeli delegation under a national flag.

Meanwhile, World Climbing kept pushing the issue down the road. A general assembly was supposed to settle the matter, or at least move it forward, in the spring. But part of the discussion was ultimately postponed to an extraordinary general assembly scheduled for July. Too late for the Brussels event.

“This is where our responsibility lies: staying rooted in our values”

Florian Delcoigne, co-founder of Le Camp de base

That is the political core of the story. By delaying its decision, World Climbing is effectively passing the problem down to national federations, local organizers, gyms, and the crews on the ground — the people building walls, setting boulders, managing check-in, credentials, podiums, crowds, tensions, and sometimes threats of disruption. In climbing, boulders are short, ropeless problems; routesetters are the people who design them.

“We just want a decision to be made,” Delcoigne said. Then he added: “Everyone needs to make commitments, and the responsibility cannot keep landing back on the organizers and the final venues that host these events.”

In a forthcoming statement obtained by Vertige Media, the board of Le Camp de base writes: “As a climbing gym, the owner of the venue, and an employer, it is our responsibility to determine whether an event can take place in peaceful, safe, and viable conditions.”

Le Camp de base knows the decision will come at a cost. The competition was supposed to serve as the launch event for Camp avancé, its new high-performance space. For six months, the team had been pushing to finish the work in time. Money has been spent. Employees, routesetters, volunteers, and partners had been mobilized.

Legal and financial consequences are also possible. “There are cancellation fees that World Climbing could claim from us directly, or at least the Belgian federation could,” Delcoigne said. He also noted that Le Camp de base is not directly tied to the international federation as the organizer, but to the Belgian federation through the venue agreement.

Inside the gym, the decision was not made lightly. Le Camp de base is an engaged climbing space, but it is not a perfectly unified political bloc. Some staff members, routesetters, and volunteers share the position in principle while also recognizing the professional risks of such a move, especially in a high-performance climbing world where international opportunities matter.

Management chose to take responsibility. “This is where our responsibility lies: staying rooted in our values,” Delcoigne said. He added that several staff members did not want to work under those conditions anyway.

In its statement, the leadership also stresses that “the disagreement concerns governance, national representation, and the lack of a credible framework. It does not concern athletes as individuals and must not lead to any form of discrimination.”

More Pressure Ahead

What is happening in Brussels now extends far beyond Belgium. For months, pro-Palestinian climbers have been organizing internationally, often informally, through groups such as Climbers for Palestine. They share information, pressure federations, amplify calls for a sports and cultural boycott of Israel, organize solidarity events, and raise funds.

Some of those actions are publicly documented, including by Climbers for Palestine Spain and by American journalist Andrew Bisharat on Evening Sends. According to Pascal Etienne, a member of Grimpe Solidaire Internationale, that global organizing has accelerated around the request brought by the Palestinian federation to World Climbing.

“From now on, World Climbing should expect mobilization at all of its competitions”

Pascal Etienne, member of Grimpe Solidaire Internationale

“There are pro-Palestinian climber groups in many countries around the world,” he said. An informal coordination now reportedly brings together volunteers from about 20 countries, with the goal of putting more direct pressure on federations and competitions on the international circuit.

Le Camp de base’s decision does not appear to have been organized with that international network. Etienne himself makes that point clearly: the Brussels gym already had its own activist history, its own internal discussions, and its own red lines.

The international collectives have instead rallied around a decision that suddenly embodies what they have been denouncing for months: World Climbing’s inability to make a call on a situation other sports bodies have already had to confront, sometimes by imposing neutral status, sometimes by suspending delegations, but always by acknowledging that international sport does not exist outside the world.

The next flashpoints may come elsewhere. Wherever World Climbing takes its calendar, pro-Palestinian collectives now intend to make that pressure visible. “From now on, World Climbing should expect mobilization at all of its competitions,” Etienne warned. Awareness actions, demonstrations, public pressure campaigns: the forms of action remain open, and in some cases deliberately unannounced.

For World Climbing, the Brussels case is a warning. The former IFSC is being caught up by the very thing its new name now carries: the world. Le Camp de base is not claiming the right to decide on behalf of World Climbing or to become the final referee of global sport. It is asking, more simply and more bluntly, that governing bodies take back the responsibilities they are now allowing to slide all the way down to the venues on the ground.

An international sporting event being canceled because of Israeli athletes’ participation is rare when the move comes from within the organizing structure itself. It is not, however, without precedent more broadly. More often, that pressure has come from civil society, as in 2025, when more than 100,000 pro-Palestinian protesters disrupted a stage of the Vuelta, Spain’s major cycling tour, near Madrid.

For now, almost no federation has taken a clear position on excluding Israeli competitors or requiring them to compete under neutral status, despite growing pressure. And by continuing to postpone political decisions in the name of sporting neutrality, those same federations may end up creating exactly what they hoped to avoid: local crises, broken trust, venues closing their doors, and a community slowly realizing that “apolitical” is sometimes just the polite word for doing nothing.