Lately, our philosopher-columnist has noticed a little contempt among climbers for “gym bros.” As more and more bodybuilders wander into climbing gyms to try the sport, it seemed like a good time to think through the welcome they get. A muscular little social drama, somewhere between screaming, Planet Fitness, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. (CC) Sehoon Ye / Unsplash Bodies and Yells Fair enough. Plenty of us make noises on the wall that sound closer to animal than human. At the same time, yelling in climbing is widely frowned upon. We yell a lot, but we condemn yelling because it breaks the rule of “fair play.” According to a line often, and perhaps falsely, attributed to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, fair play is “the way of playing the game used by those who know it is only a game and do not get caught up in the game.” Yelling does exactly the opposite. It forgets that climbing is only a “game,” to use the word of Lito Tejada-Flores, the American climber, filmmaker, and writer. It shows a disproportionate investment in an “useless” activity, to borrow the famous phrase from French alpinist and writer Lionel Terray’s Conquistadors of the Useless. And because it is useless, the activity is supposed to be practiced with a certain detachment—or at least with a convincing performance of detachment. “Because I know there are people who really yell on purpose to show it’s heavy. It’s about taking up space, marking their territory a little” A young climber The person who forgets that, the person who fails to remember that climbing must remain, at least outwardly, just a game, breaks a rule that pushes him outside the group. He is no longer one of us. He becomes the other. In this setting, yelling is always something the outsider does. “We” do not yell, because we know none of this is all that serious, and we do not let ourselves get carried away. Rental Shoes, Columbus, and Cannibals But if the yell does not come from us, if it always belongs to the other inside us, then where does it come from? A young climber recently explained it to me this way: “I think some people yell like people at a weight room. I think maybe they come from lifting. Because I know there are people who really yell on purpose to show it’s heavy. It’s about taking up space, marking their territory a little. That definitely exists. But I don’t personally know anyone who does it for that reason.” There it is again: the yell belongs to the outsider. To the others. To “the lifting people.” Here, they no longer even “yell.” They just open an animal mouth. They “yell to say” something instead of articulating speech like real humans. And they do it “like people at a weight room”: like those others who are not us. The ones who put on a show. The ones who fake it. Unlike us, the real climbers There is no proof of any of this. But it costs nothing to think it. That is exactly how prejudice works. As Claude Lévi-Strauss shows in Race and History, the tendency to suspect the next tribe over of the most shameful behaviors, to see them as closer to animals than to humans, to describe them as “savages” and “barbarians” or as “earth monkeys” and “louse eggs,” is what we call ethnocentrism. It is, he writes, “the most ancient” and most widely shared attitude in the world. Every society believes it is superior to the others and sees surrounding peoples as degraded versions of humanity. But Lévi-Strauss also points out that, while this reflex certainly did not spare Westerners, it was above all characteristic of the societies they encountered. So when Western societies believed themselves superior to so-called “primitive” peoples, they were merely “borrowing one of their typical attitudes.” On this point, we are no different from the peoples we contacted—and conscientiously exterminated. That is how Lévi-Strauss can set all human societies side by side: those that believe they are “civilized” and those supposedly “primitive,” all ironically united by a shared rejection of otherness. “But if he has a blast and spends his whole life enjoying himself in his blue rental shoes, that’s totally possible. And that’s a lot better than him going to Planet Fitness” A manager at a major rock climbing chain The story goes, for instance, that when Christopher Columbus landed on one of the islands in the Antilles and met Taíno people, he asked whether they were alone there. The local people replied that another people lived nearby, but that they should be feared because they were fierce, cruel, and ate human flesh: the Kalinagos, whose name, through slow distortions, eventually gave us the word “cannibal.” But nothing proves that the Kalinagos actually ate people. After all, they were described that way only through the testimony of their enemies, so we can reasonably doubt the truth of that reputation. We see the same thing in our own world with lifting and yelling. “Planet Fitness,” like “Kalinago,” starts to function almost like an ethnic label. It gets used to name the whole opposing tribe, the one we want to separate ourselves from, the one we accuse of deviance—yelling, eating people, same basic mechanism—the one we define ourselves against. “I picture Jean-Baptiste, not especially athletic, 27 years old, dragged by his friends into a climbing session after work,” one manager at a major climbing-gym chain told me. “Maybe he’ll never be a great climber. But if he has a blast and spends his whole life enjoying himself in his blue rental shoes, that’s totally possible. And that’s a lot better than him going to Planet Fitness.” Basic Instinct So why the rejection of “Planet Fitness”? There are probably noble reasons. A critique of consumerism. A critique of modern individualism. All of it in the name of the supposedly communal and humanist values of climbing. But already, we can see a clash of values that is typical of ethnocentrism: on one side, the pure ones, us; on the other, the corrupted ones, them. There is also the idea that newcomers treat our “art” like any other fitness activity. And that they lack the one thing every community sees as essential: culture. What we accuse them of is not having “climbing culture.” Not knowing anything. Then, by a small slide, we move from the absence of this specific climbing culture to the absence of culture altogether, exactly as Westerners accused other peoples of having no culture simply because they did not share ours. The yell expresses this perfectly. It makes visible an ignorance of the rules and of fair play, an excessive investment in an activity that is supposed to involve self-control and some distance from one’s own performance, as Olivier Aubel shows in L’escalade libre en France. But none of this is unusual. Identity is built this way. As anthropologist Gregory Bateson argued with the concept of “schismogenesis,” every human group builds itself in opposition to another. Through small distinctions, through the rejection of otherness, group bonds grow stronger, and each member identifies more deeply with the whole they are supposed to form together. From that angle, saying “climbing” is a “tribe” is not merely a metaphor. It is almost literal. Quasi-ethnographic. Deep down, climbers treat bodybuilders the way the Taíno people Columbus encountered treated the Kalinagos: with suspicion, prejudice, and slander, all classic signs of primitive ethnocentrism. We, too, are a small people bound together by our rejection of the other, the ones across the way, the ones who are not like us. We are simply “borrowing one of their typical attitudes.” We can regret this tendency, and it is probably good to stay aware of it so we can resist it when it appears. But we can also observe it with the distance and irony of an anthropologist. That helps us get down off our boulder a little and realize that, despite appearances, we are not so far from the few survivors still wandering the great Amazon forest—or from “the lifting people.” Though I do have to admit: I’m not far from thinking they keep some unspeakable culinary secret hidden in their tubs of protein powder. That said, I would love to know what they say about us when they are among themselves.

With the Skwama Lite, La Sportiva takes one of its cult models and turns it into something more approachable: more precise than a beginner shoe, less punishing than a pure performance weapon. It is a technical compromise for climbers who want to level up, start using their feet better, and still finish the session breathing normally. Skwama Lite of La Sportiva © Vertige Media Everyone knows the slightly masochistic ritual of breaking in new climbing shoes. Your foot goes in, but not willingly. Your toes make whatever space they can. The heel pulls. The downturn delivers its little sermon on suffering. And you tell yourself, once again, “They’ll stretch.” With the Skwama Lite, the pitch is different. Yes, it hugs the foot and clearly loads the front of the shoe. But above all, it lets you imagine an actual session: climbing, falling, trying again, working foot placements, without ripping your shoes off every two minutes with the fading dignity of a medieval monk. A Skwama, really? The name sets a trap. Skwama Lite. It is hard not to think about the original Skwama, the shoe that has become a staple in a lot of climbing bags, known for its springy softness, S-Heel, and almost cocky ease on modern climbs. By putting that badge on the Lite, La Sportiva immediately throws it into a slightly unfair comparison. Because the Lite is not a watered-down Skwama. It is not a Skwama that skipped leg day. It is a different tool for a different job. Less aggressive, less asymmetric, more human, it lands right in that very real gray zone of progression: the point where you have worn out your beginner shoes, but you are not ready to sacrifice your toes at the altar of pure performance. On paper, the brief is pretty clear: a vegan synthetic upper, moderate downturn, 4 mm FriXion Black rubber, a 1.1 mm full-length LaSpoFlex midsole, and the P3 system, which helps the shoe hold its shape and tension over time. Taken one by one, none of that is going to make anyone shout “genius” in the locker room. But together, it says exactly what this shoe is trying to do: give you precision without pretending you have mutant feet. The first fit backs that up. The forefoot feels wrapped, not crushed. The toe box is much more forgiving than the classic Skwama’s, though it is not wide by any means. Climbers with very high-volume feet should still try before they celebrate. And because the synthetic upper will not stretch like leather, sizing matters from the start: snug, precise, but livable. Going too small “for performance” would be the fastest way to ruin what this shoe is offering: progress without turning every session into a dispute with your toe joints. When your foot starts asking questions The Skwama Lite comes alive when your foot has to start thinking. Volumes, insecure smears, modern slabs: the feedback is clear, even a little instructional. You do not get the electric snap of an ultra-soft comp shoe, and you do not get the strict support of a shoe built only for edging, meaning standing on very small footholds. It sits in a readable middle ground: soft enough to smear on a volume, structured enough to stand on a small edge without folding in half. That is its main strength. It does not turn bad footwork into a miracle. There is no lie here, no cozy illusion where magic rubber covers up every sloppy move. When your foot slips, you can often tell why: you did not commit enough pressure, your hips lagged behind, the angle was wrong, the weight transfer was off. In those moments, the shoe works like a good technique coach. It does not forgive everything, but it explains a lot. That can sting. It is also useful. Skwama Lite of La Sportiva © Vertige Media On small edges, it holds up better than the “Lite” label might suggest. The 4 mm sole, combined with the full-length midsole, gives enough support to stand cleanly on vertical terrain or in a slight overhang. You do not get the talon-like bite of a Miura VS or the aggressive pull of a tightly sized Solution, but the shoe is serious. It lets you push, shift weight, and work. For a progression shoe, that matters far more than shining for three moves before turning into a torture device. Its natural habitat is the modern climbing gym. The Skwama Lite likes volumes, uncertain feet, open boulders, and problems where the foot is not just holding a foothold but helping balance the whole body. The FriXion Black rubber offers steady grip and makes sense for climbers stacking indoor sessions. It does not quite have the mental security of Vibram XS Grip2 on the slickest surfaces, that extra bit of trust that lets you commit without second-guessing. But this is not bargain-bin rubber. It simply makes you place your feet well. Bad news for the ego, excellent news for technique. The toe patch handles basic toe hooks well enough. Toe hooks, where you pull with the top of the shoe, feel solid on simple compressions, standard gym moves, and everyday scumming. But once the movement gets very physical and competition-style, with a lot of pulling through the front of the foot, you start to find the shoe’s limit. The Skwama Lite can do the move, but it does not pretend to be a mutant sock built to live on a 45-degree spray wall. The heel tells a similar story. By dropping the original Skwama’s S-Heel, La Sportiva gains comfort, simplicity, and probably a better fit for more feet. But it also gives up some absolute lockdown. On a heel hook, where you use the heel to pull or hold tension, it works fine for balance, positioning, or moderate compression. On a hard heel hook locked on a tiny feature in steep terrain, with your body pulling the other way, the Lite lacks authority. It does not necessarily pop off, but it does not give you that locked-in feeling that lets you forget the heel and think about the next move. And in that situation, being able to think about the next move instead of your heel already feels like a small luxury. The technical age Outside, the Skwama Lite still has real credibility on single-pitch sport routes, especially on technical vertical terrain or slight overhangs with smears, small feet, and placements you need to read carefully. Rock does not scare it. Its sensitivity even helps you understand footholds, adjust pressure, and avoid climbing only with finger strength, that old temptation whenever a foot looks even slightly questionable. Skwama Lite of La Sportiva © Vertige Media That said, it would not be our first choice for long multi-pitch days, cracks, or routes that demand a lot of sustained support. For that kind of terrain, a Katana, Miura, or TC Pro will offer more structure, more useful stiffness, and more overall coherence. The Skwama Lite can absolutely go to the crag. It just was not designed to spend its life at a belay while your partner sorts out the rope. That is where it finds its real place: in the very specific moment when you realize climbing better does not just mean pulling harder. When you start looking at your feet differently. When you learn that a tiny edge is not always too small; sometimes you just have not weighted it properly. That a volume is not a missing foothold, but an invitation to manage pressure. That a foot slip often says more about your position than about the shoe. For that phase, the Skwama Lite checks a lot of boxes without feeling like it was designed by committee. It is precise enough to help you improve, comfortable enough to keep on for a while, and sensitive enough to help you understand what is happening under your foot. It does not sell pain as proof of commitment. It also does not turn climbing into an easy walk. It offers something more useful: learn to place your feet before punishing them. Its limits are clear, and that clarity is part of what makes it easy to understand. Very advanced climbers may find it too tame. The heel lacks lockdown for demanding use. The rubber will not silence XS Grip2 purists. The more forgiving fit will not magically work for every foot. But criticizing it for those things would almost be criticizing it for being honest. The Skwama Lite is not a classic Skwama dressed up as an accessible shoe. It is a serious progression model, built for climbing often, training cleanly, and feeling a little more of what you are doing. It is not the shoe that will hand you two number grades just by touching your foot. No honest shoe does that. And any shoe that suggests otherwise should probably answer for its promises in front of a court of battered toes. But it can help you place your feet more accurately, load them more confidently, and keep your shoes on long enough to repeat, understand, and adjust. In a time when climbers still confuse technical performance with suffering, that is not so “lite” after all. The Skwama Lite is available through La Sportiva and specialty retailers in sizes 34 to 48, with half sizes across the full range. Suggested retail price: €130. Sponsored by La Sportiva.

In climbing, we learn to hold on because holding on is visible. We spend less time learning how to fall, because falling still looks a little too much like admitting defeat. And yet, at the end of a rope or in the middle of a padded floor, a fall says plenty about risk, fear, other people’s eyes, and the rules of a sport’s culture. (CC) Nicolas Meunier / Unsplash In climbing, falling should be ordinary. In bouldering, most attempts end on a pad. In lead climbing, a clean fall can even mean you are finally climbing at the edge of what you know how to do. And still, falling carries a strange embarrassment. It makes noise. It stops the attempt. It draws eyes. Sometimes it makes you smile too fast, say “I’m good” before you have even checked, or turn fear into a funny story before anyone sees too much of it. That is one of modern climbing’s quiet contradictions: we fall all the time, but mostly we learn how not to. The Fall, and Everyone Watching In a bouldering gym, a fall disappears quickly. A body lands on the pad, someone walks through, the music takes over again, and the next try begins. On a rope, a fall lingers. The rope comes tight, the belayer catches it, the climber may swing back into the wall, then lower into that very specific silence that follows a fall nobody quite expected. In a sport built around the send—a clean ascent without falling or hanging—falling means the sequence broke. The attempt did not hold together. Climbing also makes failure unusually visible. For a few seconds, everyone knows who fell, where, and how. We do not always fall because we failed to hold on hard enough. Sometimes we hold on too hard because we never learned how to fall Just listen at the base of the wall. “Come on, commit.” “That was nothing.” “You had it.” “Take!” “I didn’t go for it.” “My foot slipped.” None of that is a big deal on its own. But these small reactions create an atmosphere, and eventually a culture. They show what gets admired, minimized, encouraged, turned into a joke, or kept private. A fall also exposes your place in the group. One climber who refuses to let go may be seen as tough. Another who comes down before the end may be seen as cautious, clear-headed, or “not committed enough,” depending on the place, the grade, and the vibe. The same fall does not mean the same thing in a packed gym, at the base of a crag, among friends, or in front of a camera. Technically, though, a fall is not just a mistake. On lead, until the rope is clipped into the next quickdraw, the last piece that is truly protecting you is still below. If the climber has pulled out slack to clip, the fall gets longer. Add in very concrete errors—back-clipping, Z-clipping, the rope behind the leg—or the physics of fall factor, and a fall becomes much more than “someone let go.” A fall is a system: dynamic rope, belayer, friction, wall angle, body position, slack, fatigue, surprise. Climbers are happy to learn how to read a route, place their feet, refine beta—the specific sequence or method for a climb—and squeeze out one more move. The possible end of the attempt is more often left to experience, imitation, or whatever reflex shows up in the moment. In a 2026 paper, “The Climber’s Grip,” Matthias Boeker and his colleagues equipped 19 climbers with sensors. The authors found that muscular fatigue was significantly correlated with increased fear during lead climbing. Fear sometimes shows on the face. More often, it settles in the forearms. It makes you stay on a hold too long, clip too late, breathe too high, decide too fast. Many climbers know the loop: the more fear rises, the harder you grip; the harder you grip, the faster you get tired; the faster you get tired, the more likely you are to fall; the more likely you are to fall, the more the fear seems justified. So we do not always fall because we failed to hold on hard enough. Sometimes we hold on too hard because we never learned how to fall. Climbing’s Love of Risk To understand why falling carries so much weight, you have to look at what climbing rewards. Success matters, of course. But how you succeed matters almost as much: staying calm, clipping at the right moment, not showing too much fear, keeping precision when the climbing gets exposed, brushing off the fall once you are back on the ground. Courage becomes a technical skill, but also a kind of style. The sociology of risk sports has a term for this. Sociologist Stephen Lyng popularized the idea of “edgework” to describe activities in which people deliberately move close to a boundary—physical, psychological, social—in order to test their ability to stay in control. Climbing fits that story well: a body near empty space, movement that still has to stay precise, fear that has to be managed without being denied. The trouble starts when that story turns fear into a character flaw. In a study on risk and recognition in climbing, sociologists Trygve Langseth and Øyvind Salvesen show that risk-taking is part of climbing’s value system and can generate credibility among peers. Climbers move through a world where certain kinds of risk are recognized, narrated, and ranked. A fall, then, also happens inside a language. In the gym, at the crag, in a group, or on social media, certain attitudes start to define what “counts”: not letting go too early, being willing to whip—a big lead fall—laughing off a foot slip, turning a scare into a good story. On the other side, some fears become harder to say out loud. “I don’t trust this belay.” “I don’t want to fall here.” “I don’t know what will happen if I let go.” Sometimes saying that takes more energy than squeezing the hold for a few more seconds. This is especially clear in the way climbers talk about the “mental game.” The phrase can be useful. It can also flatten everything else. If someone freezes, do they “have a mental block”? Or have they never practiced falling? Is the belayer reliable? Is the fall clean from that spot? Is there a ledge, ground-fall potential, a bad rope position, a major weight difference between climber and belayer? Psychological language can make an individual problem out of something that also involves training, trust, equipment, terrain, and shared culture. A pad absorbs some of the energy. It does not teach you to bend your knees, avoid catching yourself with straight arms, check the landing zone, downclimb instead of jump, or skip the last try when fatigue makes the fall worse Accident data reminds us of what heroic stories tend to forget: not all falls are the same. A prospective study conducted in Glasgow in 1992–1993 recorded 19 climbing injuries treated in emergency care; 18 were directly related to falls. Those numbers are old and local, but they point to something simple: the seriousness of a fall depends on where it happens, what the body hits, and how the rope comes tight. The point is not to split climbers into the cautious and the brave. An ordinary fall on a steep overhang can become a terrible idea two bolts lower, on a slab, above a ledge. What we call courage is sometimes a very concrete skill: knowing how to read the fall before it happens. Letting Go? Bouldering shows this paradox at scale. It has made falling ordinary. You can start climbing without a harness, without knowing how to tie a knot, without a partner, without much technical vocabulary. You walk in, put on shoes, follow a color, and fall. The gym democratized climbing by shifting part of the risk onto the infrastructure: pads, calibrated setting, posted rules. But a pad does not teach you how to land. In 2024, the DAV recorded 261 accidents involving serious injuries or rescue response in German and Austrian climbing gyms; 75 percent involved bouldering. In 84 percent of bouldering accidents, the injury came from falling onto the pad. In 2023, the same tracking system noted that bouldering injuries mostly affected the extremities: arms and legs. The DAV is not describing a sport that is unusually dangerous. It is pointing to a familiar paradox: in bouldering, injuries often happen at the exact moment when people assume the safety system will do the work. A pad absorbs some of the energy. It does not teach you to bend your knees, avoid catching yourself with straight arms, check the landing zone, downclimb instead of jump, or skip the last try when fatigue makes the fall worse. The same logic applies on a rope. A fall involves two people, sometimes more. Too much slack can make the fall dangerously long. Too little slack can create a hard catch, send the climber back into the wall, and make the impact harsher. Petzl makes this point in its guidance on dynamic belaying: giving a soft catch does not mean leaving a lot of slack, because that can increase the risk of hitting the ground. Learning to fall, then, has to be shared. It involves the climber, the belayer, the group that comments or stays quiet, and the gym that teaches people instead of simply posting rules. Behavioral psychology gives us a useful frame here. Graduated exposure means ranking fear-provoking situations from least to most stressful, then working through them progressively. A 2023 study of women climbers with fear of falling found that psychological training based on emotional regulation can reduce anxiety and improve performance. In climbing, that rarely starts with a huge, spectacular fall. It can be much quieter: jumping from a low boulder problem, learning not to land on straight arms, taking a small fall just above the bolt on a steep and well-protected route, working with a trusted belayer, saying exactly what is scary, and repeating the process until the body has another option besides locking up. The goal is not to eliminate fear. Fear can be right. It can point to a real danger, uncertainty, bad conditions, lack of trust, or a past experience. The work is to give that fear words and reference points. Is it the eyes of other people? A previous fall? An objectively dangerous spot? A shaky belay? Not knowing what will happen when the rope comes tight? In a sport obsessed with sending, falling will probably always feel like a public kind of failure. But it can become something other than a verdict. A learned movement. Shared information. A moment you know how to move through without immediately dressing it up as a joke, proof of courage, or a small private shame. Learning to fall does not mean giving up on climbing hard. It means understanding that climbing is not only about what you can hold on to. It is also about how, sometimes, you learn to let go.

As the Olympic era pushes sports federations to pour more of their money and attention into elite performance, Sport Climbing Australia is trying to widen the frame. By creating an inclusive category at the highest level of its national competitions, the Australian federation wants to help its athletes chase the Games while also making room for climbers left out by the sport’s binary model. It is a delicate balance, still very much a work in progress. But Australia is choosing it. © ClimbingQTS Climbing’s arrival in the Olympics has shifted the sport’s center of gravity. In many federations, calendars, budgets, and priorities are being rebuilt around high performance. In Australia, though, the federation is testing a different answer: refusing to pit medal hopes against broader access to competition walls. Same Wall, Same Standard In many sports, gender categories arrive loaded with tension, suspicion, and hard lines. The conversation often starts at the top: international rules, eligibility criteria, Olympic policies, debates over fairness, and the protection of women’s categories. In Australia, Sport Climbing Australia has chosen a different entry point: the climbers who, until now, have not really had a place in the competitive pathway. “Our ambition is to have more Australians climbing more often, in whatever way makes them happy” Rebecca Hamilton, CEO of Sport Climbing Australia In a recent ABC News story, several young climbers described the gap between the welcome they found in LGBTQIA+ climbing spaces and the much harsher experience of competitions. Luce, a nonbinary climber, said they had felt forced to choose between being “a queer climber” and “a competition climber,” as if they could not be both. Phoebe, a trans woman, described being misgendered at competitions. That is the context in which ClimbingQTs, an LGBTQIA+ advocacy group within Australia’s climbing community, pushed Sport Climbing Australia to act. The organization, which brings climbers together every month in gyms across the country, had spent months calling for better recognition of trans, nonbinary, and queer climbers in competitive pathways. The Australian federation is now working on an inclusive category, open to climbers who do not want to, or cannot, enter the binary men’s and women’s categories. © ClimbingQTS Rebecca “Beck” Hamilton has led Sport Climbing Australia for the past year. She did not come out of climbing. In fact, she says she has only climbed once, and she sees that distance as an asset. “I do like to keep a bit of independence from it,” she says, “because that can be a real strength as a CEO..” Her job, she tells us, is not only to think about the athletes who might reach the Games. It is also to understand “the people who keep our sport going every day.” Sport Climbing Australia is trying to hold two goals at once: build international-level performance and create a broader, more accessible, more sustainable sport. “Our ambition is to have more Australians climbing more often, in whatever way makes them happy,” Hamilton says. For the federation, the challenge is to make sure the inclusive category does not become a side room, a symbolic add-on next to the “real” competition. Hamilton is clear on this point: the category has to be structured, easy to understand, and genuinely competitive. “I do think there still need to be rules,” she says. “Especially at an elite level, we had to define what category one looked like.” The model under discussion is built around levels: category one for athletes climbing at an elite standard, with lower levels potentially added later for regional, local, or gym-based competitions. At national championships, only category one would be offered. “In category one, you are essentially climbing at an elite level,” Hamilton says. “You are climbing on the same problems as our Olympians at our national championships.” That point matters. Boulder problems are the short, ropeless climbs used in bouldering competitions, and for Hamilton, using the same problems changes the nature of the project. The point is not to adjust the wall for a category seen as different. It is to open access to the same athletic standard. “The message I heard very clearly from talking with the team,” she says, “is that they actually don’t want anything to change on the wall at all. They want those elite competition opportunities.” Still, the question is practical. In a competition where boulder problems are usually split between men’s and women’s categories, which problems will athletes in the inclusive category climb? Hamilton does not pretend to have all the answers yet. “Will they climb on the male or the female boulder? … I’m actually not sure.” That choice, she says, will have to be built with the people most directly affected, as the federation gets a better understanding of participants’ profiles and levels. She even floats one possible solution: “Just draw it out of a hat,” she says. “Don’t make it a thing.” © ClimbingQTS That pragmatism runs through her thinking. The Australian federation has already launched an open category for disabled climbers who do not fit existing Paralympic classifications. At a recent National Cup, two athletes took part. “And two athletes is enough,” Hamilton says. “That’s two more athletes than we had before.” Not Choosing Between the Elite and the Grassroots Another distinctive part of the Australian model is how the country defines and funds the mission of its sports federations. “Most climbing federations today seem to have producing Olympians and Paralympians as their main mission,” Hamilton says. “We are no different in that respect. But in Australia, we have two very separate funding streams.” One side is dedicated to performance: Win Well. The other, Play Well, is focused on access to sport. “And that is where the inclusive category really makes sense,” she says. « La stratégie Play Well en Australie dit que chacun a une place dans le sport » Rebecca Hamilton, CEO of Sport Climbing Australia That structure allows Sport Climbing Australia to avoid setting elite climbing against the grassroots. The federation wants to support commercial climbing gyms, which play a central role in the growth of Australian climbing, while also working on coach education, adaptive climbing, equipment, safety, youth pathways, and masters categories. In that framework, the inclusive category is not meant to be a one-off gesture. It is one piece of a larger plan. “The Play Well strategy in Australia says everyone has a place in sport,” Hamilton says. “I love that idea. You may not be a competitor. You may come climbing once a week for the social connection. You may be an official, a volunteer, a coach. But everyone has a place in sport.” Local Bet, Global Rules There is one major limit: Sport Climbing Australia is not operating in a rule-free world. National competitions can also serve as selection events for Australian teams, which then compete on international, Olympic, and Paralympic circuits. In those pathways, the federation will have to apply international rules. « Nous voulons être un laboratoire » Rebecca Hamilton, CEO de Sport Climbing Australia Beck Hamilton le dit clairement : certaines compétitions permettront à des personnes trans de s’inscrire dans la catégorie correspondant à leur genre. Mais dès lors qu’un événement devient une porte d’entrée vers les équipes nationales et les Jeux, une ligne réglementaire s’impose. « Je ne fixe pas ces règles, je les applique », résume-t-elle. Hamilton says this plainly. Some competitions will allow trans people to enter the category that matches their gender. But once an event becomes a gateway to national teams and the Games, the international rulebook takes over. “I don’t make those rules,” she says. “I merely enforce them.” That is also why the inclusive category does not solve everything. For some trans women, it may leave the central question untouched: the ability to compete in the women’s category. ABC News cited one climber who welcomed the emergence of an inclusive category, but would still prefer to compete in a women’s event. Australia’s project, then, opens another route. It does not, by itself, reopen the door to the women’s Olympic pathway. The goal is not to replace the Olympic model with another one. It is to keep that model from taking up all the space. Alongside Olympic men’s and women’s categories, and alongside Paralympic categories based on classification, Sport Climbing Australia wants to add an inclusive pathway that is structured, competitive, and fully owned. Looking further ahead, Hamilton says Australia would like to host the World Championships before the Brisbane 2032 Olympics. In that scenario, she imagines the Olympic and Paralympic pathways having their World Championships first, followed by an inclusive World Championships “on the same walls.” She knows the experiment will be watched. “Absolutely, we want to be a laboratory,” she says. She has already heard from people in other Australian sports facing the same questions, but unsure how to approach them. For Hamilton, the method is simple: find the people affected, listen to them, build with them, then test. Sport Climbing Australia does not have all the answers yet. But its proposal comes down to a line Hamilton repeats like a guiding principle. “The walls don’t discriminate,” she says. “The walls are the walls. When you walk into a climbing gym and you go on the wall, it doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from, or anything in between.”

Desire Lines grew out of a simple conviction: mountain literature has been built around one narrow voice—white, male, and heroic—while pushing many other stories to the margins. Katie Ives, the former editor-in-chief of Alpinist, and Holly Chen, the collective’s art director, explain how a 2024 writing workshop sparked an editorial project that feels both ambitious and urgently needed: making room for marginalized voices in climbing and mountaineering at a time when their rights in the United States are under growing attack. © Juliet Kennedy Vertige Media: Mountaineering and climbing are still very male and very white spaces. How do you explain that, structurally and culturally? Katie Ives : It really depends on how you define mountaineering. If you look at the earlier meaning of the word—in both French and English, montagnard and mountaineer—it meant someone who dwelled in the mountains. Then the Victorians came along and redefined it in a much narrower way: specialized gear, alpine clubs, and hiring local guides who had been climbing those mountains for generations, while relegating them to a lower status as guides and porters. We are still trapped inside that very narrow definition. When you look at mountaineering in a broader, more global sense, you realize that countries in Africa, Asia, and South America have their own mountain-climbing traditions that long predate the first ascent of Mont Blanc. Even within European alpine climbing, women were far more involved from the beginning than the history books suggest. Clara Roche has done important scholarship in Britain, looking at guides’ journals and private letters and compiling first ascents—not first female ascents—and first winter ascents that women did. When winter mountaineering was developing in the Alps in the 1870s and 1880s, many of the people doing groundbreaking work were women. In Lizzie Le Blond’s case, she was writing the first English-language guidebooks to winter mountaineering. You have to read between the lines of history books to see that people pushed to the margins were always there. “Creating that broader, more diverse spread of voices and stories is going to take much longer. Probably as long as it took for the problem to be created in the first place” Holly Chen, Creative Director at Desire Lines Holly Chen : My perspective is more lived and first-person. I grew up in Taiwan and Hong Kong. There wasn’t a big mountaineering culture around me, not a big outdoor culture. So as a kid, I would go to the library, pull every adventure book off the shelves, and start reading. Walter Bonatti’s Mountain of My Life, Jon Krakauer—all the big hero narratives. I devoured every single book. And in my mid-teens, I suddenly thought: I can’t do this. I can’t mountaineer. I can’t rock climb. Everyone in these books is a man. I held on to that belief for most of my life. I moved to the U.S. when I was 18, started climbing in a gym, and still thought, “Oh, I’m just doing this for fun. I’m not a real climber.” It wasn’t until I started getting into mountain journalism, and reading some of the texts Katie talks about, that I understood this field was actually much deeper than it looked to me as a kid. Why aren’t these people more prominent? Because I spent ten years of my life believing I couldn’t do this. Vertige Media : Why has it taken so long to change? Holly Chen : A problem that took almost a century to create is not going to disappear in a couple of years. This is something we may be working toward for our entire lives. But the next person who lives in Hong Kong or Taiwan, or anywhere in the world, and picks up a book because they’re interested in mountaineering and climbing culture—they shouldn’t see only one dominant voice. Creating that broader, more diverse spread of voices and stories is going to take much longer. Probably as long as it took for the problem to be created in the first place. Katie Ives : When I was editor-in-chief of Alpinist, even as late as 2015, I still had trouble finding women to write for the magazine. I realized I had to break that cycle: women saw magazines, didn’t see themselves in them, and assumed they couldn’t write for them. So I started doing a lot of outreach directly to the community—seeking out women writers, nonbinary writers, writers of color, Indigenous writers—and inviting them in. After a while, you get momentum. People see themselves in the pages and think, “Oh, I can do this.” By the time I left Alpinist, about 50 to 60 percent of the writers we were publishing were women and nonbinary writers. I wasn’t trying to find them anymore. They were finding us. You have to create spaces where people feel welcome. Then people can take creative risks because they know they’re supported. Elizabeth Hawkins-Whitshed, also known as Lizzie Le Blond, Irish author, photographer, and mountaineer (cc) Wikimedia Commons Vertige Media : Other cultures have a very different relationship with mountains—neither conquest nor performance. What does that teach us? Holly Chen : Taiwan is a very outdoor country. I would have to double-check the exact number, but it has around 52 mountains over 10,000 feet running down the center of the island. People there are immersed in nature all the time. It becomes part of us, rather than some faraway peak you have to go conquer. It’s a parallel existence with nature, not dominance over it. Hong Kong, where I spent most of my teenage life, is different: concrete, glass, high-rises. But for Taiwanese people, nature is so integrated into the culture. There’s this recreational mindset of existing with nature, in nature. “How we approach mountains is a microcosm of how we approach nature in general: do we consider ourselves separate from it, or part of it?” Katie Ives, Editorial Director of Desire Lines Katie Ives : In many cultures around the world, mountains are seen as bridges between earth and the heavens—sacred spaces. Approaching them becomes more like a pilgrimage than a conquest. Sometimes reaching the summit is part of that. Sometimes it isn’t. There is also the sense of living with and living in the mountains, as Holly described, rather than coming from the outside to dominate. Ashima Shiraishi wrote something in a recent anthology on women mountaineers that I found really powerful. She asked: “How can climbing circle back to being an activity rooted in ritual and meaning? What other traditions and cultures that have gone unwritten and unnoticed may emerge into the climbing culture?” That is exactly the question we are asking. How we approach mountains is a microcosm of how we approach nature in general: do we consider ourselves separate from it, or part of it? Vertige Media : What was the founding moment of Desire Lines? Holly Chen : It was in 2024, at the Women Up Climbing Festival in Los Angeles. I had known Katie for a while, and that’s where I met Rosie Bates. After the festival ended, the three of us—Katie, Rosie, and I—sat down to teach a writing clinic. It was just a small yoga room, a couple of tables pushed together, a little projector. And the energy in the room was so different. The energy of that entire weekend was: everyone feels safe being who they are. No one is performing for anyone else. The questions, the excitement that came out of it—when it was over, we looked at one another and said, “How do we keep this going?” That conviction kept growing, until we invited Natalie Berry and Juliet Kennedy to join the team. Vertige Media : Which literary and cultural references inspired the editorial direction of Desire Lines? Katie Ives : Around 2016, I started noticing real growth in writers coming into mountain literature from the margins—women, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming writers, writers of color, Indigenous writers. They were bringing radically different, cutting-edge, experimental ways of looking at mountains, and they were shattering old paradigms. There have been a number of powerful books. Faye Latham’s erasure poetry took Frank Smythe’s British Mountaineers and used whiteout and stitches to remake it into something new: this idea of bursting through the seams of Western colonial mountain literature and finding buried voices by reinterpreting the past. And then there is Headstrap, by Nandini Purandare and Deepa Balsavar, about the Sherpas of Darjeeling. It’s told in a nonlinear style, almost as a series of interwoven conversations. That inspired me a lot in terms of narrative form. We don’t have to follow a traditional arc that looks like a mountain: an inciting incident, rising conflict, summit, resolution. Life—and history—is much more full of gaps and missing spaces. Holly Chen : Something struck me when I first started writing about climbing. I had just led my first climb outside—lead climbing means clipping the rope as you go—and I was very excited. I started writing about the experience, but I would flip open those classic mountaineering books and try to imitate the language because I wanted to be part of that world. The tropes were all there: the storm closing in, pushing through, conquering the objective. So I wrote about this little 5.7 crag I had just led for the first time as if I were conquering some big mountain. I wrote like that for a long time. Until one day I looked at it and thought: that is not how I feel about rock climbing. I don’t feel like I’m conquering anything. Why am I writing this way? “We have to keep producing these stories faster than they are being silenced” Katie Ives, Editorial Director of Desire Lines Vertige Media : In the U.S., federal policies are directly attacking the rights of trans people and minorities, including in national parks. Has this changed the sense of urgency around Desire Lines? Katie Ives : Absolutely. Doing this work was always important, but now it feels like we’re racing against time. You look at the ways the U.S. government has been rapidly deleting and removing stories about the contributions of women, LGBTQIA+ people, people of color, and Indigenous people. We have to keep producing these stories faster than they are being silenced. We have to keep helping people continue to have a voice faster than they are silenced. And by “we,” I don’t mean specifically us. There is only so much our small group can do. But everyone in America should be doing what they can to push back. Vertige Media : You say Desire Lines isn’t a media outlet—it’s a movement. Where do you draw the line between journalism and advocacy? Katie Ives : When I first got into writing, the idea was that you weren’t supposed to write about ideas or politics. I came across a piece by a British editor, Dave Cook, who talked about how climbing writing had the same problem: it was keeping out discussions of race, gender, and politics. By doing that, he argued, it was becoming an incredibly narrow, escapist genre that was, as he put it, running on empty. Mountain literature needs to open its doors to these wider conversations if it wants to be relevant to our changing world. And there can be a false idea of neutrality—this notion that we have to give equal weight to both sides. When one side is saying that trans people shouldn’t exist, are you going to give equal weight to that? Women are people. Climbers of color are people. Trans people are people. Those should be basic human ideas, and nonpartisan. And yet, strangely, in our current world, they have been branded as somehow partisan. That is incomprehensible to me. On the left, Katie Ives; on the right, Holly Chen © Courtesy of Desire Lines Vertige Media : What are the most urgent stories to tell right now? And the most difficult ones? Katie Ives : My preference, generally, is that if we include a story about a marginalized culture, the writer should be from that culture. That removes a lot of the difficulty of outsiders misinterpreting things. What feels both urgent and difficult to publish is work on sexism and sexual harassment in the climbing community. Those topics make people very uncomfortable, and it can be hard for writers to get published because some editors see them as too political or too divisive. But that is exactly where you need to be bold. “These stories need a place to be told. I really hope we can be that place—where people feel safe” Holly Chen, Creative Director at Desire Lines Holly Chen : I feel very similarly. I host a routesetting podcast—routesetting is the craft of designing climbs in a gym—and sometimes, weeks after an episode comes out, someone reaches out to me anonymously to say that the person I just hosted has some dark backstory, or has left a trail of hurt people behind. And I feel absolutely frozen. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if it is even my place to help these people. And I have potentially platformed someone’s abuser online. These stories need a place to be told. I really hope we can be that place—where people feel safe. Vertige Media : In five years, what do you hope Desire Lines will have changed? Holly Chen : On a small scale, if I can provide a safe space for just one person to be themselves, that would sustain me. On a larger scale, I hope people in the climbing and mountaineering community will feel a little more confident being themselves, and more willing to speak up about these issues rather than staying silent out of fear of repercussions or losing work, like what happened to Shannon Joslin. Katie Ives : Every story that gets told is something saved from the void. I believe very strongly that every human being has infinite realms of wonder, possibility, and worth within them. Every fragment of that preserved in a publication is something saved from the abyss. That has always been a huge motivation for me. And beyond representation, I think about what Julie Rak wrote about cholita climbers in South America. For them, it wasn’t just about being able to climb. It was about being able to climb as themselves, wearing their traditional dress, and redefining what climbing means. That is the transformation: not just more representation, but revolutionizing the genre itself. Read more: the official website of the Desire Lines collective and media project

In Fontainebleau, even the things people leave behind have something to say. Especially when they smell like pine resin, sleep in the sand, and watch a whole generation of climbers come outside looking for what the gym can no longer quite promise. These are the thoughts of a pof bag left at the base of a boulder. (cc) Wolf Lieff / Unsplash I no longer know exactly how long I’ve been squatting in this patch of sand. Three weeks? Ten years? A full generation of Solutions and Dragos? In Fontainebleau, time doesn’t pass. It settles in. Into the grain of the sandstone, the repainted circuits, the old crash pads, and the springtime promises of gym regulars swearing that this year, finally, they’re going to “climb outside more.” I’m a pof bag. Or I was. These days, I’m mostly a small textile corpse. A sticky relic from a time when friction smelled like pine resin, not a chemistry lab. Every now and then, someone nudges me with a shoe. Someone takes a picture of me with an ironic emoji. Someone asks, “What is this old-school thing?” And somewhere, in a Bleau parking lot, a purist in canvas pants quietly cries inside his Renault Kangoo. Back then, people pulled me out with respect. They slipped a hand inside, tapped their palm, and launched toward the crimp with the modest confidence of people who did not need an algorithm to validate their attempt. I’m not saying things were better before. I’m just saying they were less white. I can already hear the comments. People will say I’m acting like a bitter old bag. That I’m confusing culture with mothballs. That Fontainebleau belongs to no one, and especially not to a little resin pouch abandoned back when people still said “Bleausard” without irony. You would not be entirely wrong. A forest guarded by three old guys in threadbare shorts who can recite the full first-ascent history of Bas-Cuvier without taking a breath is not exactly a democratic ideal. And the old-timers were not all quiet saints of good style. I’ve seen plenty of self-appointed gatekeepers hold forth on the purity of the rock while leaving behind a cigarette butt, three scraps of tape, and a 20-minute ethics lecture for a beginner whose only crime was putting a pad on a patch of heather. Age does not make you exemplary. It just gives you more memories to justify your own contradictions. Still, the problem is not change. It’s the speed of it. You came in large numbers: motivated, sincere, full of that wild energy people have when they discover the forest for the first time. It is beautiful to watch waves of climbers leave the fluorescent lights behind and come looking for something else among the pines and sandstone lines. A culture that is not shared becomes a private collection. And private collections always end up gathering dust. But going outside is not just a change of scenery. It is not a bouldering gym with a transparent roof. Sometimes you show up in Bleau as if you’ve arrived at a new sector inside a concept-store gym. You scroll. You find the line. You check the grade on the app. You watch the beta video — beta meaning the sequence, the how-to. You drop the pads. You film the go. You tick it. You leave. In the meantime, the boulder has turned white, the landing has been chewed up, three chalk ticks have survived your enthusiasm, and someone has delivered the classic line: “Don’t worry, the rain will wash it off.” The lazy gospel of invisible impact. From my low little lookout in the dirt, I’ve learned to identify the powder tribes. First, there are the plasterers. They don’t chalk a hold. They remodel it. A sloper resists them — a sloping hold, the kind you have to press and trust — and they coat it until they’ve created a cast of their own helplessness. They call it “optimizing conditions.” I call it turning a thousand-year-old sandstone masterpiece into a whiteboard for a crisis meeting. Next to them are the tick-mark people. Their relationship with rock is purely geometric. A hold does not exist unless it has been underlined in white highlighter. A foothold only counts if it’s marked like a fire-escape route. They don’t read the boulder. They annotate it. It’s touching, really, this way of coming into nature only to recreate the ergonomics of PowerPoint. Outside begins at the exact moment you start asking what you are leaving behind And then there are the cosmetic brushers, a very common species. They own a magnificent boar-bristle brush, clipped to their pack with an unnecessarily technical alpine carabiner. They pull it out, give the rock two vague little polite swipes, like dusting off a jacket before a job interview, then walk away convinced they have performed a major ecological act. Spoiler: owning a brush does not make you a guardian of the forest. No more than owning a Netflix subscription makes you a French New Wave director. I’m exaggerating, obviously. That’s the perk of being an old fossil: I get to be unfair without having to manage the Instagram comments. Thankfully, there are others. The ones who arrive gently. Who look where they place their feet and their pads. Who really brush, before and after their turn. The ones who understand that a boulder is not a product to consume, but a material thing to care for. They know that the beauty of Fontainebleau lies as much in what you send as in what you choose not to leave behind. You can spot those people quickly. They are not necessarily quieter, because restraint has never stopped anyone from having a strong opinion about heel-hook beta. But their presence weighs less. They do not act as if the forest has been privatized for their training session. They know the rock was there before their project, and that it will outlast them. Do not treat the rock like a gym wall that forgot to be reset Pof versus chalk, in the end, is not the point. The real fault line is somewhere else. It separates those who think climbing outside means getting something out of a place from those who understand that you also have to learn how to leave it. Outside begins at the exact moment you start asking what you are leaving behind. Not just the visible trash, the tape, the cans. The habits, too. The noise. The consumer confidence. The comfortable idea that a natural space is basically a free public service with trees around it. I know. I sound like a cranky old scold. And yet I love watching you climb. Even the rushed ones. Even the plasterers. Even the theorists of “Honestly, this style just doesn’t suit me” after four catastrophic burns. Because sometimes, the magic still happens. A beginner finally understands that you do not pull with your arms so much as push with your feet. A mutant pauses for two seconds from performing and looks at the light through the birches. A child invents a sequence that is absurd and beautiful. Someone lovingly brushes for the next person without turning it into a story. The sandstone gets its mystery back. And I think, maybe not everything is lost. Cultures do not die when new people arrive. They die when no one takes the time to pass on the tiny habits that hold them up. So keep your crash pads, your apps, your ultra-technical shoes, and your beta videos. Come. Climb. Fall. Discover. Keep this forest alive. It was never meant to be the private lounge of three nostalgic men. But please, learn how to leave. Brush. Erase. Look. Do not treat the rock like a gym wall that forgot to be reset. As for me, someone may eventually pick me up. Or I may disappear under the leaves for good, which is another way of vanishing. That’s fine. I’m only a pof bag. But when you head home, at least try to leave the rock less marked up than your ego.

On June 20, workers at Movement San Francisco launched a national campaign asking customers to pledge to freeze their memberships. Management has spent thousands of dollars on anti-union legal fees. Ten unionized gyms are still waiting for their first contract. At the largest climbing gym chain in North America, the standoff is entering a new phase. Movement Gym employees in San Francisco on June 20, 2026 © Courtesy of Climbing Workers United On Saturday, June 20, 2026, at 2 p.m., about 20 people gathered outside Movement San Francisco, a few miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. Some held signs. Others handed flyers to members walking through the door. They were not asking them to turn around. They were asking them to scan a form and sign one promise: if the workers give the signal, they will freeze their memberships. By the next day, workers say more than 300 members had already pledged to do it. The practice picket — a trial run meant to test support before a larger action — officially launched a new national campaign led by Climbing Workers United. At the same time, Movement workers in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the Baltimore suburbs were handing out the same flyers outside their own gyms. This is not the first chapter in the fight. In January, Vertige Media reported on how Movement workers were organizing at a pace the climbing industry had never seen, while earning an average of $15 an hour in cities like San Francisco and New York, where a living wage — enough to cover basic costs — is above $25 an hour. Aaron Vanek, a full-time organizer with Climbing Workers United, told us then that Movement was the key domino: “Once we bring down this big domino, it will mean we can close negotiations anywhere in the country.” This summer, that bet is playing out in public — and workers have decided to turn up the pressure. Ten wins, zero contracts Since late 2024, workers at 10 Movement Gyms have voted to join Climbing Workers United, a union affiliated with Workers United. In San Francisco, the December vote was unanimous. “Our vote to unionize was unanimous back in December and there is strong solidarity among our team,” Merit Hagenkort, Front Desk Lead at Movement San Francisco, told Vertige Media. And yet, despite 10 election wins, none of those gyms has secured a collective bargaining agreement. That is the problem. In the American labor system, a union election does not change much on the ground until a contract is signed — and that is often where employers slow the process down. Movement workers’ demands are straightforward: raise wages that are too low, address what unions call pay compression — when new hires are paid nearly as much as experienced staff, effectively wiping out seniority — fix chronic understaffing, create more full-time jobs, provide holiday pay for routesetters, the workers who design indoor climbs, and address safety concerns tied to air quality. Workers point to “a lack of investment in our facilities.” “The implicit message to hesitant workers: joining a union will cost you” Merit Hagenkort, employee at Movement Gym San Francisco With bargaining stalled, Movement recently sent a message that workers at unionized gyms decoded quickly. The week before the San Francisco picket, the company announced new paid holidays — but only for non-union locations. Hagenkort called it “a move that feels designed to undermine our organizing.” Movement workers say the move fits a familiar anti-union playbook, known in the U.S. as union-busting. The implicit message to hesitant workers: “joining a union will cost you.” Unfair labor practice charges have also been filed against Movement with federal authorities. If successful, those charges can legally force an employer back to the bargaining table in good faith. Very expensive lawyers According to Aaron Vanek, Movement has hired Jackson Lewis, a law firm known for representing employers in union fights, and is paying steep fees in some cases. “Imagine how that money could be used to improve the gyms or pay their employees,” he told Vertige Media. “The fact that they are responding in such a way shows that they are afraid of the power of their workers. We are confident we will win a contract that will change conditions for Movement employees. It is a question of when, not if” Aaron Vanek, a member of Climbing Workers United For Movement workers, this is not just a bad line item. Their employer is backed by private equity — investment in companies that are not publicly traded. Spending that kind of money, they argue, is a business decision: stopping unionization across a 30-gym chain means protecting margins built in part on low wages and maximum workforce flexibility. Vertige Media asked Movement for comment on these points. The company did not respond. Vanek is not backing down. “The fact that they are responding in such a way shows that they are afraid of the power of their workers. We are confident we will win a contract that will change conditions for Movement employees. It is a question of when, not if.” The federation is asked to pick a side The union push is not limited to gym entrances. In May, Workers United International President Lynne Fox sent a letter to USA Climbing, the national governing body for competition climbing in the United States, asking it to stop holding competitions, qualifiers, or championships at facilities that do not respect workers’ rights. In practice, that would rule out Movement Gyms and Touchstone Climbing, California’s largest climbing gym chain, where several Bay Area and Los Angeles locations are also in conflict with Workers United. The argument is direct: climbing has been an Olympic sport since Tokyo 2020, and “When USA Climbing partners with facilities where management has committed labor law violations or where serious labor disputes remain unresolved, it risks placing the sport out of alignment with international standards and exposing athletes, events and the sport itself to reputational harm.” “When USA Climbing partners with facilities where management has committed labor law violations or where serious labor disputes remain unresolved, it risks placing the sport out of alignment with international standards and exposing athletes, events and the sport itself to reputational harm” Lynne Fox, International President of Workers United The letter followed new unfair labor practice charges filed against Movement with the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that oversees labor relations in the U.S. Workers’ attorneys describe “surface bargaining” — going through the motions of negotiation with no real intent to reach a deal — at several gyms: Wrigleyville and Lincoln Park in Chicago; Callowhill in Philadelphia; Gowanus, LIC, and Harlem in New York; and Crystal City in Virginia. “At my gym, Movement has been bargaining in bad faith with us for as long as we've been unionized. We're ready to do whatever it takes to win a contract,” said Aliya Hunter, a front desk worker at Movement Harlem. The customer has leverage Facing a wall from management, Climbing Workers United is scaling up. If management will not bargain with its employees, maybe it will listen to its customers. The campaign launched on June 20 asks members and visitors to sign a freeze pledge — a promise to temporarily freeze their memberships. This is not yet an active boycott. It is a collective pre-commitment from a critical mass of customers who, when the union chooses the moment, would suspend their payments at the same time. Workers are holding financial pressure in reserve, ready to use it if they have to. “We're grateful for the solidarity and support we've seen from members and guests during our practice picket and at the gyms every day, and it only strengthens our resolve,” Hagenkort said. © Courtesy of Climbing Workers United Already, nearly 500 Movement Gyms workers have organized with Climbing Workers United. Across the climbing industry, more than 1,200 workers at 31 gyms have joined Workers United. Movement remains the most symbolic case, the most closely watched — and probably the most important for the entire North American climbing industry. It is a test for a sector that has grown from roughly 350 gyms to nearly 900 in the United States in the past decade, while working conditions have not kept pace. “Given how fast this industry is growing, there is no reason this shouldn't be a viable career,” Hagenkort said. Meaning: full-time work, decent pay, benefits, and a future. The June 20 picket in San Francisco was the first visible piece of a larger structure now taking shape: a membership-freeze campaign, pressure on USA Climbing, a growing number of cases before the National Labor Relations Board — and on the other side, the deafening silence of the largest climbing gym chain in the United States. No contract has been signed at Movement. But no unionized gym has backed down, either.

Let’s start with a simple compass: at Vertige Media, we will never separate the move from the moment. Martin Stranik - 2025 Chamonix World Cup © David Pillet Climbing is not a portable voting booth, or a clean little escape hatch from the noise of the world. It is the opposite. It is a doorway. A lookout. From private gyms to besieged cliffs, from worn-out bodies to brand logic, we want to document what this century is doing to climbing, and what climbing throws back in the century’s face. We believe lived passions tell us more than disembodied editorials ever will. A climbing wall can say more about the state of our social fractures than a cable-news panel packed with experts paid to perform decline. A plastic hold, a monthly gym membership that keeps getting more expensive, freelance route setters—the people who design the climbs—running on dreams, a locked Paralympic selection system: that is our raw material. This is not a cute lifestyle item at the end of the paper. It is the main story. Vertige Media was born from one conviction: climbing is not a harmless niche pastime. And for anyone who thinks it is too small to matter, beware the blind spots. That is exactly where the social order likes to hide its worst violence: in the folds of everyday life. We can already hear the eternal gatekeepers choking on their chalk: why contaminate the pure movement with politics, gender, class struggle, ecology, or postcolonialism? Let’s flip the question. How can anyone talk seriously about climbing today while pretending the rest of the world is not in the room? To cover the boom in urban climbing gyms without looking at gentrification and the exclusions it creates is not neutrality. It is blindness. To write about the rush on outdoor crags—climbing cliffs, basically—without naming conflicts over access and the stripping of shared resources is complicity. To talk about performance without examining ableism in para climbing or the financial precarity of elite athletes is a lie. And the mountains? They are not exempt from grand national myths or from the aggressive commercialization of our desire to get somewhere “wild.” The world does not stop at the landing pads, the mats below the wall. It is already on the wall. We are simply refusing to look away. This is not a lecture. It is a method. We care about the world because we find it in something physical: a face, a frustration, a lived experience. Cognitive science and social psychology have shown it clearly enough: lasting attention comes from concrete friction with reality, not from moral instruction. We care when a subject collides with our own private map. Knowing is no longer enough. People need to feel it That is where climbing becomes a powerful journalistic tool. Not a trick for sneaking sociology into distracted climbers’ diets. We are not asking people to abandon their passions in order to look at society. We are showing them that society is already waiting for them inside those passions. That is our answer to the numbness of contemporary democracy. We are drowning in a flood of frightening information that almost nobody still has the energy to metabolize. Crises, wars, climate collapse, class domination: everything has been documented to the point of disgust, and then paralysis. Knowing is no longer enough. People need to feel it. When psychological distance turns collective tragedies into faraway abstractions, journalism cannot just keep shouting along with everyone else. It has to find side trails. Ours run through grades—the rating systems climbers use to measure difficulty—that split a community in two; everyday sexism; a cliff closed because biodiversity is hanging by a thread; the route setter paid next to nothing; the broke champion; the outdoor brand selling a fantasy of anti-establishment freedom while locking down its financial messaging. We believe in the power of story. Not the pretty story used as packaging, but story as a tool for disruption and understanding. Narrative transportation is not a cocktail-party concept. A strong story moves the line, shakes loose old assumptions, and gives facts a body. It gives political flesh to what had been a cold statistic. Sport loves to wrap itself in the convenient myth of childish neutrality: pure, innocent, protected from human ugliness That is why we prefer the micro to the macro, the body to the concept. A Ukrainian climber who lost a limb does not represent war in the abstract. He shows what war does to a life, directly, physically, brutally. An athlete shut out of a Paralympic future is not a footnote on ableism. She shows us the machinery working in real time. A climbing-gym chain does not “sum up” urban capitalism. It offers a small working model of it. This is not about forcing politics onto climbing. It is about refusing to keep stripping politics out of it out of cowardice. Sport loves to wrap itself in the convenient myth of childish neutrality: pure, innocent, protected from human ugliness. That is a fraud. From Pierre Bourdieu to Loïc Wacquant, sociology has been cutting that myth open for decades: movement is social. No one climbs in a vacuum. We climb with our money, our free time, our class legitimacy, our family history, our gender. Sport sorts, ranks, and separates as much as it brings people together. Sometimes it frees people. Often it excludes them, while leaving our consciences plenty of room to stay comfortable. Climbing should not be ashamed of its contradictions. A culture that wants to grow up has to break with ready-made thinking. You can love climbing and still refuse to buy its own mythology. It will only become more alive, more critical, and more free. That is Vertige Media’s obsession: taking climbing too seriously to leave it to the merchants alone. Make room for reporting, analysis, irreverence, and humor, too. Because climbing is an industry, a geography of bodies, a knot of ecological tensions and economic power struggles. Who climbs? Who pays? Who cleans the crag? Who makes the decisions behind the scenes? Who gets erased by the big heroic story of performance? This text is our ridgeline. We will write about climbing fully, passionately, and without turning it into a shadow play for people chasing disconnected thrills. We will look at the holds, of course. But we will never forget the hands worn down on them, the bodies that fall, the monopolies being built, and the resistance taking shape. Climbing is not where we go to disappear. It is where we hit the world head-on.

In 2026, 530 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills are moving through the United States, and trans people have become the top target of a hostile federal administration. In France, one in two LGBT+ people has experienced discrimination in a sports setting, and one in seven has quit a sport because of it. Climbing is not immune. During Pride Month, the question of allyship — actively standing with people who face discrimination — is running through the climbing community on both sides of the Atlantic. A gathering in Salt Lake City, United States (cc) Mike Newbry / Unsplash Written with the help of Jay Bruneau-Bongard. A trans flag, unfurled in the open air on El Capitan. That is what Shannon “SJ” Joslin, a ranger and biologist who had worked in Yosemite National Park for four and a half years, chose to do on their own time alongside Pattie Gonia, the drag queen and environmental activist known across the American outdoor community and beyond. A few days later, a criminal investigation was opened against them. On August 12, 2025, SJ was fired overnight. A new rule had just appeared in the park regulations, backdated to the day of the action. “When I was fired, it felt like losing the love of my life. I had never felt that kind of grief. I lay on the floor for two days,” SJ told Vertige Media. The firing was not an isolated incident. Since Donald Trump’s reelection, 530 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills have been moving through the United States, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union. Of those, 55 have already been passed, targeting trans rights in 16 states. The MAGA movement has made trans people — who, according to SJ, make up roughly 1 to 2 percent of the U.S. population — one of its main targets. The Myth of the Free Space One in two. That is the share of LGBTQIA+ people in France who say they have personally been targeted by homophobic or transphobic behavior in a sports setting, according to a 2022 Ipsos survey for the Fédération Sportive LGBT+, supported by the French Ministry of Sports. The same survey found that 46 percent of people in France had witnessed that kind of behavior, a number that rises to 73 percent among LGBTQIA+ people themselves. One in seven LGBTQIA+ people has quit a sport because of these experiences. Mountain and climbing culture has its own features that can make these dynamics worse. A culture built around risk. Groups that often look and sound alike. A strain of macho behavior that still runs through some corners of the outdoor world. All of it can make discrimination harder to name and harder to fight. Climbing likes to sell itself as a free space, open to everyone, without hierarchy. That story deserves a closer look. What SJ’s story reveals, beyond the firing itself, is how the climbing community responded when something unacceptable happened: mostly, with silence. After the flag action, SJ became an outcast. No more access to volunteer assignments. Friends turned away, afraid of blowback. A few local climbers defended them. The bigger names mostly did not. The reason says a lot: for too many people, Yosemite is too valuable as a backdrop for landing sponsorship deals to risk taking a public stand. Shannon “SJ” Joslin at Camp 4 in Yosemite National Park in the United States © Ryan Moon That silence is not neutral. It says something about what the climbing community protects, and what it leaves behind. Refusing to take a position in the face of discrimination allows that discrimination to keep working. One thing becomes clear from stories like this: the fight for LGBTQIA+ rights is, first and foremost, led by the people directly affected. But in every era, that fight has also been strengthened by people who chose to stand with those most exposed. See, Amplify, Act Being an ally starts with seeing what is happening. LGBTQIA+ hatred does not always arrive as a direct attack. More often, it lives in the details: a joke tossed out at the end of a climbing day, the repeated use of the wrong name or pronoun for a trans person, the comfortable silence after an out-of-line comment, the total absence of LGBTQIA+ representation in magazines, club programs, and brand catalogs. “The best way to grow representation is exposure. People don’t know what’s possible until they see someone who looks like them doing it” Marian May Perez, co-founder of Rise Outside, in Climbing magazine Seeing also means taking the time to learn. According to a guide published in November 2025 by the Born This Way Foundation, the organization co-founded by Lady Gaga and her mother, Cynthia Germanotta, more than one in three LGBTQIA+ young people experienced online harassment because of their identity in the previous year, and 60 percent reported chronic loneliness. Only one in three had access to spaces they saw as truly supportive. These numbers describe real people — people in our gyms, at our crags, in our clubs. Learning to recognize the mechanisms that push them out is a condition for acting usefully, not just acting around the problem. In recent years, the international climbing community has produced stories that shift the frame. Lor Sabourin, a trans climber, is the subject of They/Them, a documentary portrait that presents their climbing and their identity without setting one against the other. Campbell Harrison, an openly gay Australian competition climber, has spoken publicly in a world where that kind of visibility remains exceptionally rare. Jordan Cannon, an American professional climber, organizes Arc’teryx Queer Ascent, an annual gathering for LGBTQIA+ climbers. Marian May Perez, co-founder of Rise Outside in New York, put it this way in Climbing: “The best way to grow representation is exposure. People don’t know what’s possible until they see someone who looks like them doing it.” Those voices exist. Sharing those stories, recommending them — at the gym, at the crag, on social media — helps normalize forms of representation that mainstream climbing media still too often makes invisible. The impact is documented: according to the Born This Way Foundation, LGBTQIA+ young people who have access to genuinely supportive spaces report depression at roughly half the rate of those who do not — 28 percent compared with 53 percent. In France, these kinds of stories are almost entirely absent from climbing media. That absence is not an accident. It is the result of editorial choices and institutional silences that have made certain experiences invisible for far too long. The third lever may be the most effective, because it is within reach for everyone: act where you are. A climbing gym can state clearly that it is a safe space — a supportive place where marginalized people can feel secure without hiding who they are. A club can adopt explicit rules against discrimination and train staff and volunteers to enforce them. But a sign on the wall is not enough. What matters is concrete action: naming a staff contact people can go to if something happens in the gym, offering gender-neutral changing rooms to customers and club members, and making sure people know what will happen when a problem is reported. The more genuinely safe a space is, the more likely a climber is to speak up when an anti-LGBTQIA+ comment is made in front of them. The Fight Goes On Allyship is not built on grand statements. It is built through repeated, concrete choices in everyday spaces. Economic support for the organizations doing the work is part of that, too. In the United States, groups such as Flash Foxy, Queer Crush, and All Rise Outdoors — founded by climber Ashima Shiraishi — organize gatherings, mentoring programs, and inclusive climbing spaces. “Our gear sponsors allow us to offer sliding-scale programs — without them, we would have to charge three times as much,” Lou Bank of Flash Foxy told Climbing. France has few national equivalents. Grimpe et Glisse, an LGBT+ association and member of the FFCAM, the French federation of alpine and mountain clubs, offers outdoor activities and is one of the rare initiatives working at the intersection of outdoor sports and LGBTQIA+ identities. It remains fragile, held up by volunteers. The Fédération française de la montagne et de l’escalade, France’s national climbing federation, does not currently have a publicly stated policy on LGBTQIA+ inclusion. Most clubs have no effective protocol for preventing or handling discrimination. Still, models exist. Project Pride, founded in 2022 in Squamish, British Columbia, by kinesiologist Michelle LeBlanc, offers bouldering sessions for 2SLGBTQIA+ people — a Canadian acronym that includes Two-Spirit people — along with mentoring and partnerships with local gyms. Four years after its creation, the project has expanded to Calgary and Canmore, in the Canadian Rockies. Its model — nonprofit organizing, gear partnerships, sliding-scale pricing — can be adapted elsewhere. SJ Joslin, for their part, found the strength to get back up. They decided to sue the U.S. federal government to defend the right of public employees to exercise freedoms protected by the First Amendment, and more broadly, to strengthen trans rights. On June 13, a federal judge dismissed SJ’s case. They are now awaiting a final decision from the Office of Special Counsel in August. “Climbing happens on public lands that we all manage together. When the people who protect those lands are silenced, fired, or pushed out because of who they are, it affects everyone,” SJ told Vertige Media. The crag is not outside the world. It is shaped by the same power dynamics, the same silences, and the same possibilities for resistance. Being an ally in the climbing community is not about checking a political box. It is about deciding, whenever the moment comes, where you stand.

June 26, 2024. Bonn, Germany. From the headquarters of the International Paralympic Committee, the news breaks. And it is huge. Para climbing is joining the program for the Los Angeles 2028 Paralympic Games. For the climbing world, it feels like an earthquake. For the discipline, it is a massive stage. For the athletes, it is the peak of a career, an American dream suddenly made real. But another reality sets in almost immediately: not everyone is going to California. Some athletes will hit the jackpot in a selection process that feels uncomfortably close to a lottery. The others, whose disability classifications were not chosen, will watch the event from France. Thierry Delarue at the World Cup in Laval in October 2025 © Jan Virt/IFSC Behind the church in Saint-Géry, in the Lot region of southwest France, a trail appears almost out of nowhere. A few yards of dirt, a few low branches, and then the cliff rises into view. Among the Sunday climbers, Nicolas Moineau moves forward without hesitation. He wears opaque glasses. He is blind. Cane in hand, following his guide dog Upsy, the 48-year-old physical therapist slips between rocks and roots with ease, as if he were reading the landscape through his fingertips. “This is my backyard,” he says. Every wrinkle in the rock seems familiar to him. Moineau was para climbing world champion in 2012 and runner-up in 2014 and 2016 in the B1 visually impaired category — B stands for Blind. His résumé commands respect. But at the base of the cliff, rope over his shoulder and a shy smile on his face, he blends into the scene almost like any local climber. Once he ties in, the champion appears. His movement is precise, smooth, almost instinctive. From below, his friends guide him by voice, occasionally pointing out a key hold — “left hand, a little lower” — but most of the time he just climbs. He knows the route by heart. On the cliffs of the Lot © Matthieu Delour Moineau climbs today for the pleasure of it. But he also has a very clear goal in mind: the 2028 Paralympic Games in Los Angeles. The announcement nearly two years ago that para climbing would join the Paralympic program upended a decision he had made in 2018: to hang up his climbing shoes. “At that point, I realized our competitors had improved, while we — the French team — had really stagnated because we didn’t have the resources to progress,” he explains. That frustration came with a deeper need: to find a kind of freedom again. For seven years, he stepped away from the circuit and turned to outdoor climbing. That break pushed him toward bigger and bigger goals, all the way to sending 8a — about 5.13b in the Yosemite Decimal System — a level already demanding for a sighted climber. California dreamin' He put on a competition bib again in 2025. “I needed a challenge,” he says. “What interests me about the Games, beyond the visibility, is mostly having the means to push performance.” More coaching, training camps, strength work, psychological support: “We moved into a different league.” The results came quickly: two podiums at the world championships, two French national titles. Seen as a real medal contender, Moineau still refuses to get ahead of himself. “I’m going to be really serious about it and go all in,” he says. “I don’t go to competitions as a tourist.” Thousands of miles from the cliffs of the Lot, the stage is already set. Long Beach, south of Los Angeles, will host the para climbing events a few weeks after the Olympic climbing competition. A temporary wall will rise in front of the Pacific Ocean, with a blue horizon stretching out behind it where sea and sky blur together. It is an almost Hollywood setting, designed for performance and spectacle. Eighty athletes will be selected: 40 women and 40 men from around the world competing for the sport’s first Paralympic medals. It will also be the first time a sport enters the Paralympic program with gender parity from the start. For a discipline long kept in the background, and now pushed onto the world stage after its recognition by the International Paralympic Committee in 2017, it is a major milestone. Para climbing is young, spectacular, and already connected to a sport with a strong Olympic presence. It also fits a broader ambition: to attract new audiences and modernize the image of parasport. “Our presence at the Games is an incredible opportunity,” says Hélène Le Rouge, manager at the French Mountain and Climbing Federation’s national parasport division. “It is a powerful tool to bring in new participants, structure clubs, and develop the sport nationwide.” Behind the event, the sport is already scaling up: more visibility, more recognition, and broader prospects for athletes. In climbing gyms, a “Paralympic effect” is starting to show. The number of licensed athletes is rising. Training programs for coaching disabled climbers are multiplying. More clubs are opening so-called inclusive sections: 23 clubs in 2022, compared with 150 in March 2026. Funding for para climbing is moving in the same direction, with increased support from France’s National Sports Agency. The change also shows up in athletes’ daily lives: more training camps, stronger medical support, more international competitions. “Today, they train almost every month, compared with just a few camps a year before,” Le Rouge says. But as the sport gains visibility, one rule reshuffles the deck: at the Games, not every category gets invited. In Los Angeles, being among the best will not be enough. Athletes will also have to be in the right classification. For those whose disabilities do not fall into the eight selected events, the road ends there. No appeal. It is a brutal reality: performance alone no longer guarantees a place. And access to the Games can start to look like a lottery. At the Foot of the Wall Inside the Penhars sports hall in Quimper, Brittany, the air is thick with chalk and anticipation. On Saturday, March 14, 2026, the small world of French para climbing has gathered for the national championships. Fifty-four athletes are preparing to compete in a gym more crowded than ever. At the back of the hall stands a large gray wall split into six routes. Purple, blue, white: each line has its own color. All morning, athletes get familiar with their routes. The announcer works the crowd and shakes the hall’s speakers. At 1 p.m., the competition finally begins. Athletes have six minutes to reach the top hold and claim the top, the official finish of the route. Solenne Piret cruises through qualification. In the final, the face of the discipline fights hard and takes the French national title. She even gets a standing ovation during the medal ceremony. The five-time world champion has delivered. No surprise there. It is also a strong statement ahead of the Games, where everyone hopes to earn a ticket. Their life together revolves around climbing. They met at the French championships in 2023. Since then, the two para athletes have installed a climbing wall at home and shared the same dream: the Olympic rings. Pottier, who has climbed since childhood, had a stroke at 18 and is classified RP1. Routhiau, who has dwarfism, competes in RP3. He is eligible. She is not. The contrast is striking with one of her compatriots competing at the same championships. At 52, Bastien Thomas is mourning his Olympic dream despite finishing second on the podium in Quimper. Originally from the slopes of the Garlaban massif near Aubagne, Thomas is a serious athlete. He regularly does Metafit and cross-training. “It’s the training of American G.I.s,” he says proudly. His disability, severe hemiparesis, causes muscle weakness on one side of his body. It also makes speaking difficult at times. On June 3, 2025, one year after the announcement that para climbing would enter the Paralympic Games, Thomas learned he would be staying home. The 2019 RP1 world champion — RP covers limited strength, stability, or range of motion — has since been moved down the classification ladder: reclassified as RP2, then RP3. RP3 was not selected for Los Angeles. So that is it. No L.A. Like him, many athletes have felt the same disappointment and the same sense of injustice. For them, the Games are already over. Away from the wall, far from the noise of the competition, Aloïs Pottier finds Marine Routhiau, his partner. Their life together revolves around climbing. They met at the French championships in 2023. Since then, the two para athletes have installed a climbing wall at home and shared the same dream: the Olympic rings. Pottier, who has climbed since childhood, had a stroke at 18 and is classified RP1. Routhiau, who has dwarfism, competes in RP3. He is eligible. She is not. Routhiau will only be able to cheer him on in Long Beach. “We knew there would only be eight medals. That’s how it goes when a sport is added,” she says, with a trace of bitterness. They are a couple bound by climbing and its values, united in the daily reality of disability, but split by criteria that have nothing to do with performance. “We figured RP1 would be selected,” Routhiau explains. “Their disability is easier to recognize. Mine is a little more catch-all.” For Pottier, everything will come down to 2027. He will need to shine at the world championships in Brno, in the Czech Republic, to secure his ticket to the Games. “Fairness isn’t for everyone,” he says. “Para sport is full of unfairness, all the time.” Bastien Thomas, French Para-Climbing Runner-Up The announcer keeps the show moving. The crowd chants the champions’ names. The mood is joyful because today, para climbing is being celebrated. Never mind that for many athletes, the American dream is slipping through their fingers. Classification protocols have become more complex over time. Even with a multi-step process overseen by World Climbing, the international climbing federation, they reveal a degree of subjectivity that can be frustrating. A para athlete must first be eligible for one of the nine disability categories recognized by World Climbing. They must undergo a medical examination: physical assessment, imaging if needed, and eye tests for athletes seeking classification in the Blind category. The doctor provides a diagnosis documenting the impairment, but the doctor does not decide the classification. The problem is that disability cannot be reduced to nine boxes. There are as many realities as there are disabled athletes. Some conditions, such as chronic pain, can create a disadvantage without pain itself being taken into account in the classification system. Once the para climber is medically recognized as eligible, they must submit their medical file to trained classifiers, often doctors, physical therapists, coaches, or former athletes, all with expertise in the sport. These classifiers review the medical tests and put the athlete through a dynamic assessment on a climbing wall. The goal is to confirm or challenge the doctor’s diagnosis. Finally, there is competition observation, where classifiers assess how the disability, whatever it may be, affects athletic performance. Only after that final observation is the para climber classified. Another fault line remains, quieter but just as real: how disability is seen. Or, more precisely, what the Games want to show. What the public sees, and what it understands. “When you can see that someone is disabled, it has impact. It’s spectacular,” says Aurélien Cirotte. Ewen Clodic, the French AU3 champion in Quimper, rejects that logic. “More visible or less visible, it’s still a disability,” he says. Bastien Thomas sounds resigned. “Fairness isn’t for everyone,” he says. “Para sport is full of unfairness, all the time.” It is a view shared by Hugues Lhopital, an associate researcher and lecturer in sports science at Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University. In an article for Vertige Media, he explained that to classify is inevitably to rank — and therefore to exclude. That injustice is sharpened by the Paralympic Games, which try to fit disabilities into boxes in part to make the spectacle easier for the general public to understand. Despite the unfairness this creates, everyone seems to agree on one point: unfair competitions are still better than no competitions at all. And even if the sense of injustice hangs over the room, no one wants to spoil the celebration. Routhiau refuses to give up. “What we hope is that the Paralympic committee sees the potential in our sport, and that the federation then pushes for more categories at the next Games,” she says. The next step is clear: keep going, and work for the next generation. That next generation is already stepping onto the wall. Smiling, blond ponytail pulled back, Elsa Boutel Ménard arrives at the base of the route. Her guide, Victor Matile, is never far away. “Right hand at twelve o’clock. Bring your left foot up level with your right knee. Push through your leg.” The instructions come fast. Clear, sharp, precise. Through a microphone, they reach the young visually impaired climber. Guided by her coach’s voice and lifted by her parents’ cheers, the climber from Nantes reaches the top. She wins by a wide margin. Almost routine. At just 18, the high school student is already a star. Crowned French champion again this year in Quimper, she also has an impressive international record: one bronze medal, three silvers, and one gold across World Cup rounds from the United States to Austria, from Laval to Seoul. Her life is organized around climbing. A packed schedule. A family fully mobilized. This is elite sport. Olympic-level sport. And yet, when the categories were chosen, the decision went the other way. Elsa Boutel Ménard sees too well. “I have a prosthetic left eye and 0.5 out of 10 vision in my right eye,” she says. Her visual acuity puts her in B3. “I’m not far from moving into B2. It depends on what the doctor says in a few months,” she adds. Boutel Ménard has only the slimmest chance of setting foot in California. For now, the Games remain out of reach. Still, she keeps training in the gym, keeps improving, keeps working relentlessly. To keep moving forward, she looks to the leaders in the Blind category: Nicolas Moineau, and Guillaume Degenève, who finished second at the French championships in Quimper. She hopes for better in 2032. But plastic — climbers’ shorthand for indoor climbing on artificial holds — is not the end goal. Rock can still be seen as one of climbing’s foundations: an open space for adaptation and expression, indifferent to categories and disability. In other words, a return to what matters. Letting Go Maybe what matters is here, above Lake Annecy, where Bruno Longuet and Siloë Tetaz are climbing freely. Lake views. Full sun. Nothing to envy in the postcard setting promised to the chosen few in Los Angeles. Far from the crowd in Quimper, far from Olympic stress and the arbitrary feel of classifications, this is a calmer kind of climbing. Far from the chill of doctors’ offices, the atmosphere is warm. Climbers greet one another. Sitting on a rock beside the routes they have just climbed, Longuet and Tetaz take some distance. For Longuet, it is time to move on after the disappointment of missing the Olympic dream. The answer is to return to the basics: the cliff. “I don’t think I’ll keep that dream in my head,” he says. “Other things drive me: my para climbing group, and mountaineering too.” Tetaz shares that love of open spaces. “I’m always outside wandering around, walking in the mountains, getting some air by the lake, reading a book there in the evening,” she says. Bruno Longuet above Lake Annecy © Matthieu Delour It is the first time the two champions have climbed together outdoors. The guiding principle is simple: pleasure. Move beyond the boxes. Enjoy the rock. Perform in their own way, at their own pace, in a setting that more than does the job. Longuet and Tetaz agree: the cliff is the essence of climbing. A feeling of connection with nature. Few rules, if any. And the chance to let their bodies express themselves without limit. “You have to adapt to the cliff, find different holds,” Tetaz says. “Outside, you have options.” At the base of the cliffs in Saint-Géry, Moineau is also enjoying his “backyard.” Here, the world champion is an ordinary man. A living legend in his discipline, he almost goes unnoticed. Everything is simpler here, slower. All afternoon, Moineau climbs at his own pace. He chooses the routes he likes. “If I want to rest five or ten minutes between each hold, I can,” he says. The rest of the time, he talks with friends, takes off his climbing shoes and slips into flip-flops, pets Upsy. For Moineau, whose category has been selected for Los Angeles, “the Games are almost secondary.” The cliff comes first. “What motivates me is the love of climbing. I like improving and pushing myself. That’s it,” he says. The words match his climbing: direct, without detours. He does not like noise, crowded spots, or roads roaring below the cliff. “When we climb, we focus on simple things.” Nicolas Moineau © Matthieu Delour When retinitis pigmentosa appeared during his teenage years, it slowly ate away at his sight until it erased it, taking many of his future plans with it. Still, he held on: to rocks, to texture, to sensation. Outdoor sport quickly became “an escape,” a way to regain autonomy, to climb with anyone willing to guide and belay him. The Games remain his priority, but Moineau is already looking past them. “It won’t change my life,” he says. “After Los Angeles, I’ll keep climbing on rock.” Away from the spotlight, the cliff does not care about selections or classifications. No boxes, no quotas. The Paralympic Games are a crowning achievement, both for the discipline and for the climbers selected. But those who lose out in the lottery will still find the mountains open. One thing remains certain: each of them, in their own way, is finding a route to the top. This reported piece was written and produced by Enzo Calderon, Edgar Causse, Matthieu Delour, Sacha Gaudin, Juliette Hirrien, Théo Lamarque, Emma Likaj, Victor Nogues-Szalkowski, Maxence Pourpoint, and Ana Puisset-Ruccella.

Nearly two weeks after a 37-year-old climber died following a fall at the RedRock Climbing Center in Soleuvre, the exact circumstances of the accident have not been publicly established. In that context, Luxembourg’s climbing federation says it is working with the Ministry of Sports on a system to collect and analyze incident reports — an important step in a country that still has no consolidated national data on climbing accidents. (cc) Adam Bezer / Unsplash On June 2, shortly after 8 p.m., a 37-year-old climber fell about 23 feet at the RedRock Climbing Center in Soleuvre, in southwestern Luxembourg. He was seriously injured and taken to the hospital, where he died during the night. Prosecutors ordered an autopsy, and the police technical unit went to the gym to determine what happened. According to RTL, the man was using an automatic belay system, commonly known as an auto belay — a device that takes in slack and lowers the climber without a human belayer. RTL reported that the device was seized by police and that “the exact causes of the accident remain undetermined for now.” Missing Data Speaking to the Luxemburger Times, Anaïs Bourin, an official with Luxembourg’s climbing, sport hiking, and mountaineering federation — FLERA — said there are currently no national statistics available on climbing accidents in Luxembourg. The federation is now working, with support from the Ministry of Sports, to create a system for collecting and analyzing incidents and accidents. FLERA presents the future system as a way to better understand risky situations, track how they evolve, and strengthen prevention. The federation already has a safety commission and has published two best-practices guides online: one for climbers, the other for operators of artificial climbing structures. In an interview with RTL Today, FLERA president Jacques Welter said the federation analyzes accidents in detail. He cited, among other cases, an accident that took place in October 2025 in Berdorf, which was reviewed to determine whether structural changes were needed. He also said a best-practices document had been prepared and distributed to climbers and gyms, with posters planned for climbing areas. The lack of consolidated data weighs on an already sensitive debate in Luxembourg. RTL Today recently interviewed Gilles Gardula, who was seriously injured several months earlier in an accident in Esch-Lallange. Gardula is calling for a stricter framework, modeled on traffic rules, with training and skills validation. The same article also reported concerns from some local clubs, which worry that too much regulation could make climbing harder to access. Gates at the Base of Routes Neighboring France has recently documented similar accidents. In its September 2025 prevention and safety bulletin, the FFME — France’s climbing and mountaineering federation — published a specific warning about auto belays. The federation said it had recorded three ground-fall accidents linked to climbers forgetting to clip into an auto belay, all with serious consequences: two during supervised speed-climbing sessions, and one during unsupervised lead or roped climbing practice. The FFME also warned that “the increasing number of auto belays in climbing gyms and how easy they are to access” should not make climbers forget the basic safety principles of roped climbing. In its updated 2025 safety rules, the FFME draws a distinction between independent climbing and supervised climbing. For independent climbers, it recommends asking another person to check the setup before starting up the wall. In supervised settings, that third-party check is mandatory. The document also restates the basic checks: harness correctly positioned and tightened, attachment point consistent with the manufacturer’s instructions, connector locked, and no obstacle in the fall or lowering path. Other federations have also addressed these devices. In Norway, the national climbing federation published specific recommendations in 2024 after several incidents involving climbers who started up without clipping in. In a lessons-learned report published by the UIAA, the Norwegian federation recommended, among other measures, physical gates at the base of routes, systems designed to reduce incorrect clipping, and separate areas for auto-belay climbing. In the United States, the Climbing Wall Association also recommends specific oversight for auto-belay use. In its position paper, the CWA says gyms should, at minimum, provide dedicated orientation, evaluate users, document those orientations and evaluations, and install appropriate barriers or gates at the base of routes. None of these examples establishes what happened in Soleuvre. But they do show that, elsewhere, auto belays have already generated specific incident reviews and safety recommendations. For Luxembourg, where FLERA says it wants to create a system for collecting and analyzing incidents, the challenge now will be to document not only accidents, but also near misses — so prevention can be based on stronger evidence rather than scattered reports.

In climbing, advice is never just advice. It can save an attempt, start a conversation, build a connection, or ruin, in about three seconds, the fragile pleasure of figuring something out on your own. A small sociology of beta—the sequence or move that unlocks a climb—and of the tiny gift that often says a lot about the person offering it. (cc) Beta Boulders / Unsplash There is a moment at the base of a boulder problem when everyone has seen it. The foot is too low. The heel hook never happens. The climber falls once, twice, three times. Around the mat, people trade looks, then pretend to look somewhere else. Should you say something? Should you stay quiet? A surprising amount of gym life lives inside that hesitation. The Loaded Gift In English-speaking climbing culture, we call it beta: the method, the sequence, the way through. It would be easy to think that giving beta simply means helping. And sometimes it does. Someone has figured something out and passes it along. That exchange is one of the best things about climbing: the quick, collective intelligence that appears between people who were strangers ten minutes earlier. But in sociology, a gift is never as innocent as it looks. In his famous essay The Gift, Marcel Mauss writes that exchanges often take the form of gifts that are “in theory voluntary,” but “in reality obligatory and reciprocated.” That is what makes beta so interesting. It costs nothing, but it creates a bond. When someone gives beta, they seem to be offering three words. “Left foot higher.” “Push harder.” “Cross right hand.” But those three words carry something else with them: attention, expertise, status on the mat. The person giving advice wants to help, of course. But they also want some form of recognition. And the person receiving it is not entirely free, either. They have to say thanks. Sometimes they have to try, out of politeness, a sequence suggested by someone who is 6-foot-1 and recommending a move that makes no sense for an average-sized body. They have to acknowledge that the other person saw something. They have to give something back: a smile, a “nice catch,” a small symbolic nod. Beta may be climbing’s smallest Maussian gift. It costs nothing, but it puts everyone in relation to everyone else. The person giving it wants to be useful, but also, just a little, to be recognized. The person receiving it wants to improve, but not necessarily to be publicly reminded of what they had not yet understood. Saving Face The problem, then, does not begin when someone gives beta. It begins when the beta arrives uninvited. When it flies into someone else’s attempt like a drone over a quiet crag. When it turns a private moment of problem-solving into an unsolicited technical consultation. Give the solution too early, and you sometimes steal the exact moment when the body was about to figure it out on its own English-speaking climbers have a term for this: beta spraying. The image works. At that point, it is no longer information offered; it is competence sprayed into the air. In the gym-etiquette guides scattered across the internet, the rule is simple: ask first whether the person wants beta. Talking about a boulder problem does not automatically mean telling other people how to climb it. Climbing is not just execution. It is interpretation. To climb is not only to get to the top. It is to read, test, get it wrong, and try again. The body thinks through the feet, through the hips, through the hand that keeps returning to the same hold as if, on the eleventh try, the hold might finally give up its secret. Give the solution too early, and you sometimes steal the exact moment when the body was about to figure it out on its own. This is where Erving Goffman’s work becomes useful. In “On Face-Work,” he defines “face” as “the positive social value a person effectively claims for themselves.” Put more simply, it is the version of ourselves we try to hold together in front of other people. In the gym, then, we are not only climbing, falling, or sending—the climbing term for completing a route or problem. We are also trying not to collapse socially along with the attempt. Unsolicited advice touches that face. In many settings, that would not be such a big deal. But climbing makes failure visible. When you fall, you fall in front of other people. You come down with your project still stuck to your fingertips, your ego in whatever shape it happens to be in, and the little dignity you are trying to fold back up before the next go. To step in at that moment is to enter a scene that is already fragile. The boulder has to remain common ground without becoming collective property Of course, context matters. Among friends, in a training group, or on a route everyone is working together, beta can move around without ceremony. But among strangers, especially in the semi-public space of the gym, unsolicited advice can quickly become an act of ranking. It separates the person who knows from the person still searching. Beta is no longer just help. It becomes a position. I Help, Therefore I Am Bouldering makes all of this even more sensitive. Outside, around a route project, beta can become a shared work: someone finds the rest, someone spots a hidden hold, someone else invents an absurd foot sequence that somehow works. In bouldering, especially indoors, everything is more compressed. The problem is short, visible, shared. Attempts come one after another. Everyone is watching, even when they pretend to be checking their phone. A boulder problem is a tiny social stage. Everyone sees the failure, the stubbornness, the success, and sometimes the exact second when a climber finally understands what they were supposed to do twenty minutes ago. On one hand, bouldering creates a rare kind of sociability. The subject is right there, bolted to the wall. “Have you tried it?” “Do you start left hand or right hand?” “I think it goes with a cross.” You are not talking about yourself. You are talking about the problem. Sometimes that is much easier. But that sociability depends on a very fine balance. The boulder has to remain common ground without becoming collective property. Seeing does not automatically give you permission to intervene. Understanding does not require you to explain. Being right does not always mean you should speak. In “The New Forms of Sociability in Climbing,” published in the collective volume Sport, Social Relations and Collective Action, the French sociologist Jean Corneloup argues that, to study social bonds in a sport, we have to look at the relationships built “between individuals, an object of practice, and symbols.” His essay describes climbing’s shift away from more pyramid-shaped structures—mountains, clubs, alpine culture—toward forms of connection that are more horizontal, networked, and varied. At the scale of a gym boulder, that idea becomes very concrete: a wall, bodies, looks, rarely stated codes, and one tiny question that quietly governs a lot of what happens there: who gets to tell whom how to climb? We talk a lot about technique in climbing: finger strength, core tension, mobility, coordination, route reading. We talk less about another central skill: tact That is why giving beta can also be a way of existing. In a gym where ability is visible, being able to read a problem gives you a place. You may not be the strongest climber, but you can see clearly. You may not send, but you can understand. You may fall low and still talk high. Beta becomes a small form of symbolic capital. Ridiculous, maybe, sometimes limited to three square yards of padding and a yellow coordination problem set the day before. But it exists. Reading problems quickly, having “the” solution no one else has found yet: all of that lets a climber convert knowledge into recognition. I know, therefore I can help. I help, therefore I am. That is not inherently bad. Communities depend on shared knowledge and mutual recognition. But sometimes advice helps, and sometimes it mostly shows that the person could have helped. Everyone has met the climber who gives beta like they are handing out a business card. They are not really advising. They are announcing themselves. The opposite exists, too: beta offered with admirable tact. “Want a hint?” at exactly the right moment. “I have an idea, after your go, if you want it.” “Want me to tell you, or do you want to keep working it out?” In those phrases, everything changes. The person is not forcing the door open. They are pointing to it and letting the other climber decide whether to walk through. Sending is not the only pleasure in climbing. There is also the search. The slow rise of understanding. The small moment when you finally find the right body position and the move that looked impossible suddenly feels almost obvious. Asking first does not turn climbing into paperwork. It simply recognizes that help is only help if the other person can receive it that way. Advice can be technically right and socially wrong. It can get someone up the problem and still spoil the fun. So this is not a case against people who give beta. Climbing would be infinitely poorer if everyone kept their discoveries to themselves. The sport lives through informal transmission: imitation, observation, conversations on the mat. That is when beta becomes beautiful—not when it imposes a solution, but when it opens a possibility. Not when it says, “Do it like me,” but when it suggests there may be another way. We talk a lot about technique in climbing: finger strength, core tension, mobility, coordination, route reading. We talk less about another central skill: tact. The ability to understand what is at stake for someone else before stepping into their effort. “Do you want beta?” is not a throwaway line. It is a way of recognizing that the person in front of you is not just a body struggling on a wall. They are inside a small story: their attempt, their level, their relationship to failure, their desire to understand it alone, their ego in whatever condition the last fall left it. The sentence costs nothing. But it changes everything. The beauty of climbing lies partly in its strange ability to turn a wall into a conversation. But a conversation only works if the other person still has room to answer. So yes, give beta. Give it generously, joyfully, awkwardly sometimes. But learn to offer it like a real gift: with enough attention to know whether the other person wants it, and enough humility to accept it when they do not.