“Just Climb”: The Convenient Fiction of a Sport With No Problems

One very convenient line tends to blind people the moment climbing is asked to look at its darker corners. Behind “just climb” lies a fiction: the idea that a sport can somehow float outside the real world.

(cc) Mark McGregor / Unsplash

It comes back again and again, usually as soon as climbing is forced to stop admiring itself in the mirror: “We’re just here to climb, not to get political.”

On the surface, the line sounds reasonable. At first, it even sounds kind of appealing: the wish for a simple sport, a practice that works like a refuge, a boulder problem—the short, ropeless climb itself—as a break from everything else. It is a seductive idea. It is also very useful.

Because behind the call to “just climb” there is often something else: the desire to keep enjoying a sport without having to look at what, inside that sport, also produces exclusion, silence, domination, or violence.

No Climbing Is an Island

The desire is understandable. No one walks into a climbing gym to think about federation failures, sexual violence, conflicts of interest, market forces, power dynamics, or the image strategies of institutions and companies. People come looking for a line to figure out, a body to test, a community that feels reassuring, a kind of fatigue that makes more sense than everyday exhaustion. They come to climb, fall, laugh, and try again. They come for that almost childlike promise: here, at least, things are simple.

But things are never simple.

Climbing is not an island. It is not a moral safe zone protected by chalk, thick mats, and endless talk about “community.” It is a sport, which means it is also a social space. There are clubs, gyms, federations, coaches, national teams, minors, contracts, selections, funding streams, brands, investors, economic interests, careers that begin early, and dependencies that form quickly. There are places where people learn, places where people perform, places where people wait to be chosen.

And wherever there is authority, access, recognition, or money, there is also the possibility of abuse.

There is something strange about watching certain players in the climbing world talk endlessly about accessibility, inclusion, community, openness—and then get annoyed the moment a media outlet takes those words seriously.

Saying that is not “politicizing” climbing. It is simply refusing to describe it as a feel-good story for adults in climbing shoes.

In these discussions, the word “political” often works like a scarecrow. It appears as soon as a subject becomes uncomfortable enough that it can no longer be filed away as a harmless anecdote. Talking about sexual violence? Political. Questioning federation governance? Political. Asking about sportswashing? Political. Investigating working conditions in climbing gyms? Political. Showing that the accessibility promised by some market players sometimes stops at the door of social reality? Political again.

After a while, the word no longer describes an ideology. It describes everything people would rather not see.

It is a very effective way to move the problem somewhere else. We stop discussing the facts. We start discussing whether anyone has the right to talk about them.

That is exactly where “just climb” becomes a convenient fiction. Not because climbing for pleasure is somehow suspect—thankfully, climbing is still that too—but because the phrase turns the comfort of the bystander into a general principle.

You can “just climb” when the gym still feels like a refuge. When the club remains welcoming. When the coach stays in their lane. When the institution responds. When your body has not been exposed, threatened, dismissed, or made vulnerable by the very people who were supposed to support you.

For those who are harmed, climbing is no longer a break from the world. Sometimes it becomes the place where the problem lives.

“Climbing would be better off if [we] jumped off a bridge.”

Excerpt from a conversation with one of the managers of a network of climbing gyms

When the Varnish Cracks

That is what our investigation last December made clear through the testimony of a climber from the French national team, who denounced a sexual assault and the way the FFME handled her case.

It is also what recent cases have shown, in radically different contexts, in Indonesia, where eight athletes reported sexual harassment and physical violence involving their head coach, and in the United States, where a USA Climbing staff member was arrested in a case involving child sexual abuse material.

The facts are not the same. The legal procedures are not the same either. But they all damage the same illusion: the idea that climbing can assume it is naturally healthy simply because it tells itself it is free.

There is something strange about watching certain players in the climbing world talk endlessly about accessibility, inclusion, community, openness—and then get annoyed the moment a media outlet takes those words seriously.

As long as accessibility remains a brand promise, a line in a manifesto, a hiring argument, or a pretty value posted on Instagram, everything is fine. But the moment someone asks who can actually enter, stay, speak, report, be believed, and be protected, the conversation suddenly becomes too heavy, too negative, too political.

Sometimes the varnish cracks wide open.

A manager from one of the major climbing gym chains in Paris once told us that “climbing would be better off if [we] jumped off a bridge.” The line matters less for its violence than for what it reveals: in an industry that loves to talk about kindness, some people only tolerate critical speech when it asks nothing of them.

But making climbing accessible to everyone is not just about opening more gyms, simplifying memberships, or producing soft-lit images of happy beginners. It also means making sure no one has to stay silent in order to remain part of the group.

That is where the word “protect” stops being administrative language.

To protect people is not to wait for the courts to say everything before taking reports seriously. It is not to confuse legal caution with moral paralysis. It is not to set the presumption of innocence against the immediate safety of the people involved.

To protect people is to build a space where performance does not come before vulnerability, where an institution’s reputation is not worth more than an athlete’s account, and where keeping the system running does not become the quiet argument for leaving everything untouched.

Looking these subjects in the face is not politicizing our sport. It is making sure the sport remains usable for everyone.

Not just for those who can afford not to see anything. Not just for evening climbers, comfortable witnesses, and companies that love climbing’s values as long as those values stay vague enough to demand nothing. Not just for people who want the sport to be a refuge for them, while accepting that it stops being one for others.

For everyone.

Maybe that is what some people call “political”: the moment we take seriously the words they had been using as decoration. Accessibility. Community. Trust. Freedom.

And if climbing wants to keep telling that story about itself, then it has to accept that, from time to time, someone is going to check whether the story still holds up.