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.

In climbing, rest has a branding problem. We call it recovery, but a lot of climbers experience it as a missed session. And yet, between overuse injuries, invisible fatigue, sacrificed sleep, and the guilt that creeps in when you skip the gym, the science keeps pointing back to a basic truth climbing culture still struggles to accept: getting better is not just about knowing how to try hard. It is also about knowing when to stop. (cc) Beta Boulders / Unsplash Every climbing gym has one sentence that should set off a biomechanical alarm: “I’m just going to do an easy session.” You were supposed to recover. You end up pulling on a crimp, a small, finger-intensive edge. You were supposed to keep it mellow. But your body does not know what a “mellow session” is. It only knows load. It only knows stress. That is the misunderstanding this article is trying to track: the fatigue you cannot always see, the “active recovery” that turns too quickly into a workout in disguise, and the strange guilt that rises the moment an evening passes without climbing shoes. The Phantom Load The problem with fatigue in climbing is that we want it to be obvious. We want it to burn, swell the forearms, make the jugs — the big, easy holds — feel humiliating, announce itself loudly enough that we can finally give ourselves permission to stop. When fatigue is clear, it almost feels comforting. You are not quitting. You are cooked. But the body does not always fade like a battery dropping from 20 percent to zero. It can lose precision before it loses strength. It can compensate before it complains. It can feel normal again while some systems are still absorbing the damage. In climbing, that quiet fatigue settles into the fingers, tendons, shoulders, and coordination. It shows up as a warm-up that takes weirdly long, a familiar move that suddenly feels wrong, a twinge you call “just a little warning sign” so you do not have to listen to it. Readiness to climb hard did not return until 60 hours Study published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living That is what a 2024 study by Arthur Fernandes Gáspari and colleagues, published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, helps make clear. The researchers followed nine members of the Brazilian climbing team after a national bouldering championship. They did not just ask the athletes whether they felt tired. They measured several markers before the competition, immediately after, and then 12, 24, 48, and 60 hours later: maximal grip strength, forearm swelling, delayed-onset muscle soreness, perceived fatigue, and readiness to climb hard again. The study separates what the body can still produce, what the athlete feels, and when the whole system is actually ready to go again. The results show that those signals do not all return to baseline at the same time. Grip strength and forearm pain were back to pre-competition levels after 24 hours. Perceived fatigue took closer to 48 hours. Readiness to climb hard did not return until 60 hours. The authors describe “different recovery profiles” depending on the marker and suggest that athletes may need “up to 60 hours” to fully recover after this kind of competition. After a national bouldering championship, subjective measures of recovery do not all follow the same pattern: some sensations return to their initial level within 24 or 48 hours, while the ability to climb at a high intensity does not return until 60 hours have passed. Figure 2. © Gáspari et al., 2024 / Frontiers in Sports and Active Living — CC BY 4.0. The study does not say you need three days off after every bouldering session. It does not say every bit of fatigue is a biomechanical disaster waiting to happen. It simply reminds us of something important: being able to squeeze a hold does not necessarily mean you are ready to add intensity again. And climbing is especially good at hiding load. A bouldering session can feel short, playful, even light, while still stacking maximal efforts, falls, violent pulls, poorly managed crimps, and dynamic moves that look nothing like rehab. A 2023 systematic review by Andrew Quarmby and colleagues, also published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, points in the same direction. After analyzing 34 studies on overuse injuries in adult climbers, the authors identified several factors linked to higher injury risk: “higher climbing intensity, bouldering, reduced grip or finger strength, use of the crimp grip, and previous injuries.” The same review notes that the data on training volume are “conflicting.” That shift matters. The right question is not only, “Am I climbing too much?” It is, “What does this session actually cost my body?” Your body does not care what mental category you put the session in. It does not know you planned to take it easy. It does not read your intention. It absorbs the intensity. The False Friend of Active Recovery At this point, it would be tempting to turn rest into the opposite command: do nothing, sit still, wait, feel guilty in a different direction. That would be too simple, and probably wrong. Recovery is not always passive. In some contexts, moving lightly between efforts can help you come back stronger for the next burn. Two studies published in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine help explain what active recovery actually means. In 2006, Nick Draper and colleagues compared active and passive recovery in 10 recreational climbers across five two-minute climbing efforts. The researchers found that blood lactate concentration and perceived exertion were lower with active recovery, while also noting that the strategy did not produce complete recovery. Lactate, to put it simply, is not the single villain behind exploding forearms. It is a useful but imperfect marker of how the body responds to hard effort and recovers afterward. Moving can help, but it does not reset the clock to zero. Active recovery maintains lower lactate concentrations than passive recovery between the five climbing efforts. Figure 3 adapted from Draper et al., 2006, Journal of Sports Science and Medicine. In 2015, Pedro L. Valenzuela and colleagues sharpened the question by comparing two kinds of active recovery: walking and easy climbing. Fourteen climbers performed three maximal two-minute efforts, separated by two minutes of recovery. In that protocol, easy climbing on a 5.6 route — 4c in the French system — cleared lactate better than walking and allowed climbers to cover more distance on the next effort. But the details matter. In these studies, active recovery is short, controlled, and low-intensity. It is not an improvised session under the banner of “just moving a little.” It is not three hours at the gym. It is not a detour to the board, a steep training wall, “just to see where things are at.” Climbing culture has a remarkable talent for turning every tool meant to protect us into another excuse to try hard. Strength work becomes one more session. Mobility becomes a performance. Volume becomes a contest over who climbed the most feet. The fingerboard becomes a confessional where everyone goes to check whether they still deserve their grade. Even active recovery can become another place for comparison, control, and productive guilt. 16.2 percent of participants were classified as ‘at risk’ of exercise addiction Study published in Medical Science Pulse This is where “load” becomes a more useful word than “session.” A session is just a social format. Load describes what actually happens to the body: intensity, repetition, grip type, fatigue, sleep, injury history, and sometimes the rest of life spilling over. The 2023 systematic review puts it plainly: prevention strategies should target “strength and conditioning, load management, and climbing technique.” That is not flashy. It is not especially Instagram-friendly. But it is probably where a lot of sustainable progress happens — less in the heroic accumulation of sessions than in the ability to understand what those sessions really cost. And this is where the subject moves beyond physiology. If climbers so easily turn active recovery into a workout in disguise, it is not only because they misunderstand recovery. It is also because not climbing takes away something more intimate than training. Withdrawal in Climbing Shoes Then comes the harder question: Why is stopping so difficult? Not just for athletic reasons. For identity reasons. Climbing is not only training. For many people, it is the rhythm of the week, a social place, a way to feel competent, a way to live in the body, and sometimes a more or less conscious method for keeping everything else at a distance. You do not go to the gym only to improve. You go to see familiar faces, to feel a kind of control, to measure an inner state against an external problem, to turn a shapeless day into something you can check off. In that context, rest takes away more than a session. It takes away a marker. A qualitative study by Robert M. Heirene and colleagues, published in 2016 in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, explored withdrawal states in eight climbers during periods of abstinence. The sample was small and entirely male, so it has to be treated carefully. But the study gives scientific shape to a feeling many climbers know well: not climbing can become more than simple athletic frustration. The authors found that higher-level climbers reported more frequent and more intense cravings to climb, along with more frequent and more intense negative feelings during time away from the sport. They concluded that climbing athletes “appear to experience withdrawal symptoms when abstinent from their sport.” Another study, published in 2022 in Medical Science Pulse, surveyed 272 climbers and mountaineers using an exercise addiction scale. The results showed that 16.2 percent of participants were classified as “at risk” of exercise addiction according to the tool used, with higher scores especially among competitors and boulderers. Again, this is not a diagnosis to slap on everyone who climbs four times a week. But it is a meaningful signal: for some climbers, the inability to stop is not simply extra motivation. Then there is another pillar we often underestimate: sleep. The CLIMB study, published in 2024 by Fredrik Identeg and colleagues in BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation, looked at advanced and elite Swedish climbers. Among the 183 climbers studied, 45.4 percent reported poor sleep quality, and about 48 percent reported at least moderate stress symptoms. The researchers did not find a statistically significant difference from the control group, so we cannot conclude that climbing damages sleep or mental health more than modern life in general. But the finding still matters. A large share of advanced climbers say they sleep poorly, even though sleep remains one of the major drivers of athletic recovery. We can spend hours debating a method, a hangboard protocol, a strength cycle, the curve of a shoe, a measurement tool, or a slightly slopey hold. But sleeping more, cutting a session short after a heavy week, accepting that you are not climbing because you have not recovered — somehow that feels almost too simple to take seriously. The point is not to love climbing less. Climbing asks for consistency, commitment, repetition, and sometimes even obsession. The problem begins when that love keeps you from reading what it is producing: fatigue, pain, recovery debt, damaged sleep, guilt over stopping, fear of losing your place in the story. Rest is not the opposite of climbing. It is where climbing becomes something the body can absorb. Training creates stress. Recovery allows adaptation. Without enough recovery, you are not building stronger progress. You are stacking debt. There is something almost cruel in that conclusion. Climbers spend so much time learning how to hold on: to holds, to tension, to fear, to other people’s eyes, to the project, to the schedule. But getting better sometimes asks for the exact opposite. Let go.

The group Climbers for Palestine is organizing internationally to increase pressure on World Climbing over the presence of Israeli athletes on the official competition circuit. A cancellation in Brussels, protests in Madrid, letters to national federations: for several weeks, the confrontations have been piling up. The international federation, for its part, is waiting for a meeting scheduled this summer. An investigation into a file that keeps getting bigger. An Israeli climber during the World Cup qualifiers in Madrid © Alberto Astudillo García In climbing, athletes almost never do this. When Adi Bark tops one of the boulders in the qualification round of the Madrid World Cup, the Israeli climber turns toward the crowd and raises his index finger to his lips. “Shhh.” In sports, that gesture usually belongs to soccer players answering hostile fans or critical journalists after scoring a goal. Here, Bark is addressing a crowd of protesters chanting pro-Palestinian slogans each time athletes wearing the Israeli flag climb onto the wall. On Thursday, May 28, the temperature in Alcobendas, outside Madrid, is above 86 degrees. Still, roughly a hundred protesters have shown up, chanting “Free Palestine” at full volume and waving large Palestinian flags. The Conflict Moves Onto the Wall Climbers for Palestine Spain had made its intentions clear. For several weeks, the Spanish branch of the international movement had been announcing protests around the official competition circuit run by World Climbing, the international climbing federation. Whether through chants, boos, or whistles, the Spanish group’s action is part of a growing series of visible efforts by collectives denouncing the presence of Israeli athletes in official international climbing competitions. In mid-May, a private Belgian climbing gym known for its strong values decided to close its doors to an event it was supposed to host — the World Climbing Europe Youth Series Brussels 2026 — because athletes representing Israel were scheduled to compete. In a rare move in the history of the sport, World Climbing was forced to cancel the event. On the left, Adi Bark, and on the right, Yakovovitch Tomer, Israeli climbers in the middle of a competition in Madrid © Courtesy of Climbers for Palestine Spain The groups calling for a boycott of Israel on World Climbing’s official circuit do not intend to stop there. Pascal Etienne, a member of the French collective Grimpe Solidaire Internationale, or GSI, recently told Vertige Media: “From now on, World Climbing should expect mobilization at all of its competitions.” Organized internationally under the banner of Climbers for Palestine, several national groups have sent letters to their federations, demanding that they take a position on the presence of Israeli athletes in competitions. So far, no federation has answered the letters or responded to requests for meetings made by the collectives. “It took only four days after the invasion of Ukraine to exclude Russian athletes from all sports competitions. Nothing has been done by the IFSC to ban Israeli climbers from its competitions” Grimpe Solidaire Internationale, in a letter addressed to the FFME Vertige Media was able to review the letter sent by GSI directly to Sandra Berger, president of the French climbing federation, the FFME, on May 28, 2026. GSI, which is affiliated with the FSGT and has been involved for years in climbing development projects in Palestine, describes the conditions faced by Palestinian climbers: crags they bolted themselves later confiscated, access to climbing areas blocked by military checkpoints, and the import of climbing gear restricted. Members of the Palestinian Climbing Association have even been arrested and held under Israel’s policy of “administrative detention,” without charges, without trial, and without a defined release date. GSI also argues that the Israeli climbing federation, the ILCA, “is directly involved in various processes denying the rights of Palestinian climbers, thereby violating the rules of the international federation.” In November 2025, the Palestinian Climbing Association filed a formal request with World Climbing’s Executive Board calling for the immediate suspension of the ILCA. World Climbing responded by citing a lack of sufficient statutory grounds: according to the federation, the alleged violations were the responsibility of the Israeli state, not the climbing federation itself. GSI’s letter also leans on the Russian and Belarusian precedent, which has become the central reference point for the international movement: “It took only four days after the invasion of Ukraine to exclude Russian athletes from all sports competitions. Nothing has been done by the IFSC to ban Israeli climbers from its competitions.” The group asks the FFME representative to World Climbing to support the request for exclusion at the next general assembly and seeks a meeting beforehand to discuss the issue. The FFME Waits Sandra Berger did not respond directly to GSI. Contacted by Vertige Media, the FFME declined to comment, saying it “did not wish to speak before consulting with World Climbing, the CNOSF,” France’s national Olympic and sports committee, “and other sports bodies.” The FFME also denied a claim that had been circulating: that Israeli athletes had trained with members of the French national team. The federation confirmed to Vertige Media that “Israeli athletes trained in Paris in private gyms and at Karma Fontainebleau,” a federation-run gym, “where they may have crossed paths with French athletes, but nothing was organized and no official training camp was planned.” “The fact that Israeli athletes should stop competing is not on World Climbing’s agenda, nor, to our knowledge, on the agenda of any other international federation in the Olympic environment” World Climbing in a statement to Vertige Media France’s position is not unique. Internationally, the pattern is repeating itself: national federations are waiting for World Climbing to move first. In a statement sent to Vertige Media on June 5, the international federation defended its role as a neutral referee. It said it recognized the legitimacy of demonstrations, while pointing to their impact on “a majority of people who had no choice in these matters”: young athletes forced to cancel travel to Brussels, and spectators whose experience in Madrid was “tarnished.” On the Brussels cancellation, World Climbing said that “the private gym did not guarantee the opening of its facilities in the presence of Israeli athletes,” and that there is “no ad hoc rule for a competition.” On the substance, World Climbing’s position is one of status quo: “The fact that Israeli athletes should stop competing is not on World Climbing’s agenda, nor, to our knowledge, on the agenda of any other international federation in the Olympic environment.” The federation also rejects the accusation that it has refused dialogue, saying it has “exchanged several emails” with members of Climbers for Palestine Spain. “The fact that they did not like our answers does not mean we did not have dialogue.” Still, the statement leaves out one detail: the question of Israeli athletes’ participation was supposed to be put to a vote at a general assembly scheduled for April in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. That assembly was moved online on April 23, 2026, with no vote possible. Israeli officials responded quickly. In a statement to the pro-Israel outlet Israj, ILCA president Liad Agmon praised the Brussels cancellation as a decision that, in his view, prevented “anti-sport discrimination.” Yael Arad, president of the Israeli Olympic Committee, denounced what she described as an attempt to impose “blind hatred of Israel” on sport, saying Israeli athletes would continue carrying their flag “with pride” around the world. On Instagram, World Cup climber Ayala Kerem reacted to the Madrid events: “I believe competitive sport is a beautiful place where people from all over the world finally come together, equally, in fairness and respect. Trying to destroy that helps no one.” A Chain Reaction Contacted by Vertige Media, Climbers for Palestine Spain responded sharply to World Climbing’s statement the same day. “It’s not that we didn’t accept their answers. It’s that they didn’t give any.” Between September 2025 and May 2026, the group says it sent World Climbing a 14-page report documenting the ILCA’s own activities in occupied territory. According to the collective, that report received no substantive response. “There is simply no rule requiring international federations to wait for IOC recommendations” Climbers for Palestine Spain The grievances focus on verifiable elements. The ILCA promotes at least six climbing areas in the occupied West Bank and one in the annexed Syrian Golan, listing them on its website as “natural climbing sites in Israel.” The most documented case is Ein Yabrud: a crag first developed by international climbers, included in the 2019 guidebook Climbing Palestine, and closed to Palestinians before October 2023. The ILCA later published its own version of the area, carrying the logos of the IFSC — the former name of World Climbing — and the UIAA, the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation, while removing any mention of the original route developers. Climber Ayala Kerem is also sponsored by Shikun & Binui, a group added in 2025 to the United Nations database of companies involved in settlement-related activity. The ILCA also works with a pre-military academy on the Gaza border whose stated goal is to prepare young Israelis to join elite combat units. In response to these points, the collective has listed several questions it wants to send to World Climbing so the federation can take a position. Above all, the group wants to challenge the argument that the violations are the responsibility of the state, not the federation. During the 2026 Climbing World Cup event in Madrid © Alberto Astudillo García It again cites the Russian and Belarusian precedent, and its aftermath. In March 2022, the Russian and Belarusian federations were suspended in four days. In February 2026, just weeks before the events in Brussels and Madrid, World Climbing lifted that suspension. “There is simply no rule requiring international federations to wait for IOC recommendations,” the collective writes, noting that World Athletics acted independently in the Russian case. “National sports federations are not above international law,” the group concludes. “Suspend the Israeli federation from competitions as long as it continues to promote sports activities in the occupied territories” Marzio Nardi, a leading figure in Italian climbing The issue is now spreading to Italy. The World Climbing Youth Championships are scheduled in Arco from July 18 to 25, 2026. Climbers for Palestine Italy has announced a mobilization, supported in part by Italian climbing figure Marzio Nardi, who has publicly asked the federation to “suspend the Israeli federation from competitions as long as it continues to promote sports activities in the occupied territories.” The Italian climbing federation, FASI, is watching the situation closely. Its vice president, Ernesto Scarperi, told the Italian daily Il T that he wants “to know whether there will be demonstrations and whether they risk creating public-order problems.” Before Arco, another stop is approaching. From July 10 to 12, all of World Climbing’s elected officials will be in Chamonix for one of the most prestigious competitions on the circuit. Protests may well take place there, too. One thing is clear: this sensitive case has left the federation stuck in a deep hesitation. The collectives have made it known that every stop on the circuit will now be watched. World Climbing is finding itself in an increasingly uncomfortable position. The procedural answers it gives in response to the demands are not ending the debate. They are trapping the institution inside it. National federations, starting with the FFME, are waiting for the international federation to decide before taking a position of their own. For now, World Climbing can only tell Vertige Media that an extraordinary general assembly is scheduled for July 23 to address the issue. By then, the file may have grown even thicker. Members of Climbers for Palestine say they intend to keep increasing pressure on the international climbing federation. And it will probably take a lot more than one finger to the lips to quiet this debate.

In climbing’s grand story of upward struggle, the glory always goes to the biceps and the big, flashy moves. But the real line between a smooth send—a clean climb from bottom to top—and a sudden fall is usually under your shoe, on the tiny footholds climbers ignore right up until panic sets in. © Vertige Media I live in the shadow of Instagram-friendly jugs, those big, easy-to-grab holds; dramatic volumes; and moves designed to feed your social media accounts. From my permanent blind spot, I watch the great misunderstanding of climbing play out over and over again: most of you think you’re not strong enough. Really, you just lack basic technical decency. I am not spectacular. Nobody gasps when they see me. Nobody walks across the gym to study me with the solemn devotion you reserve for purple slopers or shiny new pinches. Nobody debates my texture, my line, or my aesthetic value. I am not a handhold. I am not the final jug. I am not that giant orange lip around which three adults in tank tops suddenly form a research committee. I am a foothold. In other words, I am the thing you refuse to consider until the exact moment your self-respect depends entirely on my existence. No matter where I sit on the wall—down low, barely above the mat, or three yards up on a slab, a less-steep wall where balance matters more than muscle—I live below your useful field of vision, below your pride, down where rubber and swearing meet. You step into a boulder problem like you’re entering a private negotiation with reality. Your eyes go up. Your fingers are already picturing the victory. Your forearms are rehearsing their own tragedy. You see everything that lets you tell climbing as a story of courage and upper-body strength: that intense little face you make to hide the fact that you still refuse to bend your knees. You notice me later. Usually too late. When your foot starts searching empty air with the panic of a kitten on a sunroof. When your hips decide to join a different gravitational system. That is the split second when you realize this problem was not designed to be solved with pull-ups and a gym membership alone. That is also when desperation takes over. Panicked, some of you try to grab me with your hands. You should see a climber in distress trying to pinch my two centimeters of plastic with their fingertips, clawing at resin and hoping for a miracle. I was not made for your hands. Then, inevitably, you fall. You look down. And you blame me. Not directly, of course. You say, “That foot sucks.” Or, “It’s slippery.” Or the timeless classic: “It’s morpho”—climber shorthand for “this only works for certain body types,” and also the elegant refuge of people discovering that their bodies are not quite the biomechanical fantasy they had imagined. You call it slipping. I call it putting the full weight of your denial on two centimeters of plastic. You should see the way you step on me. My daily life can be divided into a few major schools of bad faith. In the symbolic economy of the climbing gym, I am the working class of your success First, there are the movers. They bring their foot down like they’re trying to get a double-door refrigerator onto an escalator. No angle. No softness. The shoe lands, physics does its best, and when it slips, they blame gravity, the route setting, or the temperature in the gym. Then come the tappers. They test the surface. Tap. Tap. Tap. Like they’re trying to wake up an old coffee machine. They feel me, but they refuse to weight me, because trusting a foothold requires an act of technical faith they simply cannot manage. They would rather hang from their arms, stiff as coat hangers, and conclude that “the problem is kind of weird.” No, the problem is not weird. You tried to negotiate with gravity without bringing a valid argument. And finally, there are the theorists, who have a very verbal approach to failure. Stainless steel water bottle, loose pants, hours spent analyzing from the mats. They say things like, “Honestly, if you take the undercling in a shoulder position, it opens up the hips.” They say a lot of things, basically, except the only one that matters: “Maybe I should place my foot properly.” In the symbolic economy of the climbing gym, I am the working class of your success. Wherever I am on the wall, I support, I absorb, and then I disappear from the story. When you send, you talk about the deadpoint, the dyno, the crimp you held. You never say, “And then I entrusted my entire future to a tiny screw-on bump in the middle of the wall.” Your tragedy is that you dream of having steel fingers when what you really need is faith in your toes. Remove me, and your smooth little world becomes a full-body torture session The upper body gets good press. It flexes. It makes veins. It photographs well. Feet, meanwhile, live trapped in shoes that are too small and remind the human species that before it became obsessed with climbing upward, it was made of mammals that had to learn how to shift their weight. That is a harder sell. Nobody launches an influencer career on the quality of an outside edge. But the good climbers know. They walk up, read the feet, and understand that the hand move is often just the result of everything below it. They do not step on me like they are crushing an inconvenient thought. They weight me. Weighting a foothold is not just pressing down. It means arranging the body so weight turns into friction. It is a technical conversation between rubber, hip position, and the decision to stop pulling like a wild boar. A good foot placement has a kind of politeness toward the wall. That is why I know how good you really are. Not the level in your social media bio, or the one you announce with carefully measured modesty somewhere in the “5.11” range—that wonderfully vague administrative region where so many bruised ambitions live. Your real level comes down to the split second when your climbing shoe meets me. Precision. Silence. Or noise. I am not jealous of handholds. They get the spotlight. They get brushed. You assign them personalities: “That sloper is nasty,” “that pinch is powerful.” I am just “the foothold.” A piece of furniture. But remove me from a section and everyone starts crying. Remove me, and your smooth little world becomes a full-body torture session. I am small, narrow, rarely comfortable. But I am a promise. All I am saying is this: look down, lower the pride in your ankle, and place your foot. Not like some administrative formality before the “real” move. Place it like your whole world depends on it. Because, statistically, it does.

A 37-year-old man died overnight Tuesday after falling roughly 23 feet at the RedRock Climbing Center in Soleuvre, Luxembourg. According to RTL Infos, he was climbing alone on an auto-belay, a device that lets climbers go up without a human belayer and then lowers them back down under controlled tension. © RedRock Climbing Center The accident happened on Tuesday, June 2, shortly after 8 p.m., inside a gym that describes itself as the largest and most modern climbing facility in the Grand Duchy. The climber fell about 23 feet while using an automatic belay system. Emergency responders treated him at the scene, then transported him to the hospital in life-threatening condition. He died from his injuries shortly after midnight. The prosecutor’s office has ordered an autopsy, forensic police went to the gym, and the device used at the time of the accident was seized as part of the investigation. For now, the exact circumstances of the fall remain unknown. What the Investigation Still Needs to Determine According to information reported by RTL Infos, the climber was using an auto-belay, sometimes called an automatic belay system in climbing gyms. The device allows someone to climb without a belay partner: a webbing lanyard attached to the harness follows the climber upward, then controls the descent. Its role in the accident is therefore central to the investigation, but that does not, by itself, explain what happened. Reached by RTL Infos, Gilbert Schneider, a representative of RedRock Climbing Center, said the system was compliant, that the facility is inspected annually, and that the required documents had been provided to authorities. The fact that police seized the device does not mean a mechanical failure has been established. At this stage, it means investigators need to examine every technical detail in an accident where every detail matters. RedRock Climbing Center says it has roughly 21,500 square feet of climbing walls, a main hall nearly 49 feet high, and four rail-mounted auto-belays. It is a setup that matches many modern gyms, where independent roped climbing now sits alongside bouldering, group classes, and more traditional sessions with a human belayer. Investigators will now have to determine whether the fall was linked to user error, failure to clip in, equipment failure, the layout of the line, a medical event, or another factor. In this kind of accident, caution is not just a legal nicety. It is what keeps a tragedy from being turned too quickly into a convenient explanation. Auto-Belays Are Already a Known Safety Focus The fatal accident in Soleuvre comes as auto-belays are already a major prevention topic in the climbing world. These devices have helped fuel the rapid growth of climbing gyms by allowing people to climb alone, without relying on a partner. They have made roped climbing more flexible, more accessible, and sometimes more spontaneous. But that independence also changes the safety chain: the partner check disappears, and more of the responsibility shifts to the climber, the gym’s instructions, the design of the space, and the systems meant to make mistakes less likely. The FFME’s accident report did not describe an out-of-control situation: about 125,000 members, 473 reported incidents, a rate of roughly 0.38%, and no deaths recorded during the 2024 season. But it did stress one point: safety does not come only from having a compliant device. It depends on learned, repeated, verified habits, and on procedures clear enough to be passed on consistently. On auto-belays, the FFME identified one rare but serious risk in particular: forgetting to clip in. The federation’s response was to distinguish between supervised and unsupervised use, formalize protocols at the base of the walls, strengthen double-checks in certain contexts, and encourage physical safeguards — visible signage, protective tarps, detection systems when available — that make it harder to start climbing without being attached. The point was not to present the auto-belay as dangerous in itself, but to remind gyms that a well-designed environment sometimes has to compensate for the weaknesses that routine can create. That issue had already become very concrete in France after the fatal accident at Climb Up Lyon Confluence on November 2, 2024. A 72-year-old experienced climber fell roughly 65 feet after, according to the initial information released at the time, he forgot to attach himself to the auto-belay. In an article published a few days later, Vertige Media noted that these accidents cannot be reduced to a simple opposition between individual mistake and equipment failure. They also raise questions about how gyms communicate instructions, separate climbing lines, mark risk areas, and maintain a culture of checking in spaces where climbing has become more routine. Today, the Soleuvre accident does not allow for any direct comparison with the Lyon case. The causes are not known, and there is no public basis for favoring one hypothesis over another. But it does bring a familiar issue back into focus: indoor climbing has become widely accessible, driven by modern equipment and more independent use, while safety still cannot be reduced to a box checked during a technical inspection. The investigation will have to determine what happened Tuesday night at RedRock Climbing Center. Until then, the case remains open, the seized device must be examined, and the exact circumstances of the fall still need to be established. For gyms and climbers alike, the tragedy is a reminder that auto-belays are not ordinary pieces of equipment. They make it possible to climb alone, but they still require a safety chain.

Have you ever argued over whether a route is 5.10a or 5.10b — 6a or 6a+ in the French system? The problem, as with so many things, is capitalism. Once you try to quantify reality, the pleasure of climbing starts getting crushed under the weight of performance. So let’s try breaking a few rules. Grade chart for new routes at Climbing District St Lazare in Paris © Vertige Media When a boulder problem or route gets established, or when someone repeats it, climbers sometimes slip into strange little rituals. Armed with an almost occult vocabulary, they try to agree on how hard the thing actually is. One person says, “That’s 6a.” Another insists it’s more like 6a+. Then someone else, trying to keep the peace, says, “No need to fight. Let’s call it 6a/+.” To most normal people, these debates look absurd. Inside climbing, they are everywhere. Over time, the community has made its difficulty system more and more complex. First came numbers, from 3 to 9. Then letters: a, b, c. Then plus signs. Then slashes. All in the name of precision. So we went from three levels inside a grade — 6a, 6b, 6c — to twelve: 6a, 6a/+, 6a+, 6a+/b, 6b, 6b/+, 6b+, 6b+/c, 6c, 6c/+, 6c+, 6c+/7a. And yet this hunt for ever-finer precision seems doomed from the start, as Lucien Martinez, former editor-in-chief of Grimper and an elite climber himself, has shown. Which raises the real question: where does this obsession come from? What makes us assume that “more precise” automatically means “better”? A quick detour through the history of measurement helps answer that. Measuring the Problem In Essay on Approximate Knowledge, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard recalls that between 1668 and 1776, before the meter was introduced, length in France was measured against a standard “sealed into the outer wall of the Grand Châtelet, exposed to every kind of weather.” This standard, known as the toise, was made of wood. It swelled in humidity, shrank in heat, gained and lost a few tenths of a millimeter. Worn down by repeated checks against merchants’ measuring rods, it also got slightly shorter over time. “The demand for ever-greater precision is not neutral. It comes from specific needs: the needs of capitalist economies working alongside the modern state” By today’s standards, it was not especially precise. And yet the Toise of the Châtelet was used both in commerce and in serious scientific measurement. It even served as the model for instruments taken on expeditions to Peru and Lapland, despite the fact that everyone knew its flaws. As the astronomer Lalande noted, “the difference between two toises can reach about one-tenth of a millimeter.” Bachelard’s conclusion is striking: even the most careful scientists and experimenters of the time were satisfied with a rough determination, including in the highest levels of scientific research. In other words, we did not abandon older measuring tools for more precise ones because science demanded it. The scientists of Newton’s and Lavoisier’s era managed perfectly well despite their instruments’ imprecision. So what drove the rise of the metric system? The dates matter. The toise remained the reference standard until 1776, when it began to be seen as insufficiently precise. That is when the long adventure of the meter began, an effort that would culminate more than a century later, in 1889. So: 1776 to 1889. What happened during that century? Quite simply, the rise and triumph of capitalism and the modern state. More precise measurement systems were developed for that alliance: capital and the state. But what, exactly, did they need them for? The Made-to-Measure State The anthropologist James C. Scott explains it in Seeing Like a State: “Ultimately,” he writes, three factors made the “metric revolution” possible. First, the growth of market exchange pushed toward standardized measures. Second, popular sentiment and Enlightenment philosophy supported the idea of one standard across France. Finally, the Revolution, followed by the strengthening of the state under Napoleon, imposed the metric system in France and across the Empire. “Market exchange” and “the strengthening of the state”: that is what the invention of the meter, and the search for more precise systems of measurement, were especially for. The historian Fabrice Argounès makes a similar point in Méridiens, mesurer, partager, dominer le monde, his history of meridians. He writes that “the history of meridians and longitudes from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century is also the history of expanding colonial empires.” European empires needed to map their sea routes more precisely in order to control their colonies. Scholarly work, at that moment, was primarily meant to serve economic and commercial needs, especially maritime ones. “We inherit, often without noticing it, a capitalist and modernist idea: that a more precise measure is objectively better and more desirable” Beyond those needs, capitalism also rests on the mechanization of work. Machines became more complex, and they tolerated less and less margin for error. Every gear had to be manufactured precisely enough to fit exactly where it belonged. “In modern industry, the interchangeability of parts must be total. It happens within a margin of precision on the order of the micron,” Bachelard notes. Errors like that can stop production. They can keep goods from going out and money from coming in. So they become unacceptable. More precise measurement systems had to be developed because they were one of the conditions for accumulating capital. Beyond the Meter The demand for ever-greater precision is not neutral. It comes from specific needs: the needs of capitalist economies working alongside the modern state. And that is one way to read the “progress” of climbing grades: the multiplication of plus signs and slashes we started with. To inherit this search for ever-increasing precision is also to inherit a certain ideology, one that modern measurement systems both express and carry forward. We inherit, often without noticing it, a capitalist and modernist idea: that a more precise measure is objectively better and more desirable. Our desire to grade routes and boulders more and more precisely is simply the arrival inside climbing of an idea that already shapes the rest of our lives. We are not asking for more precise grades, adding plus signs and slashes, and keeping more fussy little accounts because of some pure, selfless love of climbing. We think a more precise grade is better because we live in a world that treats increasing precision as a synonym for progress and modernity. You can accept that idea. You can share it. But it did not come from nowhere, and it is not self-evident. People living in societies unlike ours, without a state and without a capitalist economy, would probably not place the same value on ever-more-precise measurement. They would want differently what we want — to climb — assuming the strange idea of climbing for fun ever occurred to them at all. That does not mean we should stop grading climbs. Grades can be useful in all kinds of ways. But we can still question this almost pathological need to quantify reality and reduce it to numbers. First, as Lucien Martinez pointed out, because we will not gain anything from it. Second, because that need is not really ours. It belongs to an economic and administrative system built to monitor and increase the productivity of territories, labor, and trade. When we “work” a route or a boulder problem — when we project it, meaning we keep trying it over time until we finally send — we are thankfully not working in the same sense as someone sitting at a desk or stuck on an assembly line. That concern should not be ours. Letting go of it might even be good for our mental health. The grading systems we already have are enough. In their original form, they do something far more valuable than the numerical bookkeeping we keep asking of them.

Lebanon has a small climbing community of roughly 300 people. It is growing, but it has also had to adapt to crisis, war, and a chronic lack of resources. A report from the crag. In Beit Mery, a climbing spot north of Beirut © Sandro Basili for Vertige Media Beit Mery, about nine miles north of Beirut. Among steep, striking limestone cliffs sits one of Lebanon’s precious climbing areas, with roughly 30 routes. On a late-May morning, a handful of young men gather on the paved road that winds through the cliffs. Pickaxes, pruning shears, large trash bags, ropes, and carabiners slung over their shoulders, they head down a steep little trail barely visible from the road. “We’re going to split into three groups,” says Jad Khoury, the climber who organized the maintenance day. “The first group will clear the trail up to the olive tree. The second will work from the olive tree to the platform where the first climbing routes start, and rebuild the stone steps there. The third group will handle the last section, where we need to build the bridge.” Developed over the past decade, Beit Mery is still being explored every week by route developers and bolters, the climbers who establish new lines and place fixed protection. Over the years, they have built trust with landowners, local officials, and nearby communities. In 10 years, they have opened about 30 routes here, from roughly 5.9 to 5.13a. A Bridge Toward Paradise The group gets to work clearing the trail of invasive plants, but also of the trash that has piled up here over the years. In a hollow in the mountain lies an old dump: tires, slabs of cement, buckets, clothing, the frame of a pink stroller. “We’re going to clean what we can, then build a bridge to connect the two sides,” Jad says, visibly excited. “There’s an Ailanthus altissima here” — the so-called “tree of heaven,” an invasive species that prevents other plants from growing — “so we’re going to cut it down and use the wood to build the bridge.” The bridge will link the existing crag to another sector spotted on the far side of the cliff, where the group hopes to open new routes. © Sandro Basili for Vertige Media In Lebanon, these climbers have made environmental care a priority. “It’s important for climbers to take care of the environment and leave no trace behind,” says Ramy Abu Khalil, who is also an agricultural engineer. “It’s like we’re part of the place, part of the cliff.” The thirty-something trims branches from a thorny shrub, then crouches down to show the group a wild orchid. At other areas, including the very popular Tannourine crag in the north of the country, climbers maintain trails to limit erosion. “Climbing isn’t just about sending five routes a day,” Jad Khoury says. A send is a clean ascent, without falling or hanging on the rope. Khoury is the founder of Sit Start and Rock Climbing Lebanon. “It’s also about helping preserve these places. Even if we didn’t cause the damage, we do the restoration work. Our goal is for everyone to benefit from it, not just climbers.” “We want other people to discover how this sport changed our lives. It helps you get past fear, stress, and forget the war a little. We want people to be able to experience that too” Lea, a Lebanese climber Two massive trash bags fill up with debris collected from the site. Once they are full, the climbers haul them up by rappel. Léa Medawar, one of only two women there that day, belays her friends during the operation, managing the rope to keep them safe. For the thirty-something, who has been climbing for six years, the community is built around a shared passion, but above all around shared values. “We want other people to discover how this sport changed our lives,” Léa says. “It helps you get past fear, stress, and forget the war a little. We want people to be able to experience that too.” The two heavy bags are hauled up along a route called “Hummus for Breakfast,” then carried back to the road. Lower down, the rest of the group is still building the bridge and cleaning the sector so they can explore the possibility of opening new routes. Jad Khoury saws hard into a branch of the tree of heaven. “In a crisis,” he says, “climbing is a safety net.” Léa Medawar, a Lebanese climber © Sandro Basili for Vertige Media © Sandro Basili for Vertige Media After So Many Years “No matter what happens in Lebanon, there will always be someone climbing, someone bolting routes, someone camping by the river and climbing on the cliff every day,” says Tino Deeck, a climber who has been making a documentary about the sport for the past two years. “Especially during a war. Especially during a crisis. Especially after an explosion. Especially in a time of instability.” For more than a decade, Lebanon has been hit by one crisis after another: economic and social collapse since 2019, the double explosion at the port of Beirut in 2020, then the war between Hezbollah and Israel since October 2023. The latest offensive, which began on March 2, has already killed more than 3,000 people and injured 10,000. More than one million residents have been displaced. Despite a truce officially in effect since April 17, the Israeli army continues to kill residents, bomb Lebanon, raze entire villages in the “buffer zone” south of the Litani River — an Israeli military control area inside Lebanese territory covering more than 230 square miles, denounced by Lebanon and many international actors as a violation of the country’s sovereignty — and push into the country. In recent days, the army has called for the evacuation of the entire area south of the Zahrani River, north of the Litani, far beyond that “buffer zone,” raising fears of a long-term occupation like the one that lasted from 1980 to 2000. “There’s a disconnect between climbing to escape reality and being in a country at war” Tino, a Lebanese climber On phones, notifications keep scrolling by, listing strikes and bombings in the south of the country. In Beit Mery, though, the roar of Israeli bombs and tanks feels far away. For a moment, birdsong covers the buzz of drones. Still, reality often catches up with those who look to climbing for an escape. Sitting in the shade of a carob tree, Tino Deeck remembers a day out at Tannourine. That day, the filmmaker had tried to put some distance between himself and the noise of the war. He was warming up at the base of a route when a group of children came over. “We started talking to them about climbing because they didn’t know the sport, so we showed them,” says Deeck, who knows he is lucky to be able to step away. The children tried climbing. The group shared drinks and chocolate bars. But the conversation quickly turned heavier. “They told us they were from the south, that they had been forcibly displaced,” he says. “One of them told us his mother had gone back south to check on their house, and he didn’t know whether she would come back that night.” The big man’s hands shake as he grips his camera. After a pause, he adds, “There’s a disconnect between climbing to escape reality and being in a country at war.” On the left, Ramy Abu Khalil, an agricultural engineer. And on the right, Jad Al Khoury, who organized the cleanup day in Beit Mery © Sandro Basili for Vertige Media Since the 1980s, when foreign soldiers opened the country’s first routes, climbing in Lebanon has reflected a country shaped by colonization, occupation, crisis, and conflict. Climber Space is part of that story: a clothing brand and outdoor-trip organizer born in the middle of the pandemic and economic collapse. In 2020, the founders could no longer find climbing shoes because of pandemic restrictions. “We started repairing our own shoes and offering several climbing products for the Lebanese market, so people could buy locally and promote our culture,” says Jad Issa, who co-founded Climber Space with his two brothers, Georges and Elias. The three brothers taught themselves the craft and, within a few years, earned Vibram and Scarpa certifications. In 2022, they created Spacefest, a climbing festival held every summer in Tannourine. “The idea is to bring together the whole climbing community, people who love outdoor activities, and people who want to discover the sport,” Jad Issa says. “But it’s also about introducing our country and our culture to climbers who come from abroad.” Jad Issa teaching a class at Climber Space © Sandro Basili for Vertige Media “I’m Not Exactly Going to Quit Now” Back in Beit Mery, the afternoon moves on. The sun now plays hide-and-seek with the mountain. Charlie Sifri ties into his harness and steps to the base of the wall. Hands dusted with chalk, climbing shoes on his feet, he starts up the pale gray rock. His fingers search for holds, feeling around. His first try fails. He lowers, resets. “I’m not exactly going to quit now,” he says, laughing. After several more minutes of effort, he reaches the top. A climber for seven years, Charlie Sifri also worked on developing the sport for the Swiss organization ClimbAID. Through several programs, the organization aimed to create safe spaces for dialogue between different communities in the Bekaa Valley, in eastern Lebanon, while also offering psychological support through climbing. “ClimbAID introduced climbing in the Bekaa among marginalized communities,” says Sifri, the former project manager. “They managed to take a first generation of women, Lebanese and Syrian women from the Bekaa, climbing in Tannourine and other places. They also helped bring those young climbers from the Bekaa into the wider climbing community.” Hassan Shehade, originally from Aleppo, Syria, was one of them. Now an experienced climber, he passes the sport on to younger people. “For me, climbing is not just a sport. It’s a way of life,” he says from the Bekaa, where he still lives. “I feel like I’m part of the climbing community because this sport creates strong relationships between people, based on trust, support, and encouragement.” He is still working to develop climbing in Lebanon, but also in Syria, where he has been returning regularly since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in 2024. His next goal: “to open a climbing route in the Syrian mountains that represents the Lebanese and Syrian community.” At Beit Mery, the final hammer blows finally ring out across the cliff. Foreheads are beaded with sweat. Faces break into smiles. The tree of heaven is gone. It is now possible to move from one side of the cliff to the other with ease. For Tino, the bridge reflects the spirit of climbers in the Land of the Cedars. “We’ve learned to do things ourselves and set our own rules, instead of letting someone from outside come in and impose theirs,” he says. “Because we know our land. We know how it works.” The bridge Jad, Léa, Ramy, and the others have just built still sways a little. But with maintenance, persistence, and determination, it should carry hikers and climbers for years. Above all, it connects two sides of the same cliff.

As La Sportiva approaches its 100th anniversary, the brand is changing its logo, its tagline, and its commercial ambitions. In an outdoor market that keeps expanding, the old Italian family company is attempting a delicate move: modernizing its story without turning its roots into just another sales pitch. Giulia, Lorenzo and Francesco Delladio © La Sportiva The invitation did not exactly spark instant excitement. An international sales meeting, in theory, is mostly a sales affair: future collections, distribution strategy, and slide decks in front of retailers. La Sportiva, though, promised a historic announcement. In a mountain market that has become a growth machine, the usual storylines almost write themselves. Arc’teryx, Salomon, On—technical brands now prove their credibility not only on steep terrain, but also in annual reports and city storefronts. So it would not have been hard to imagine La Sportiva, one of the great family-run houses of the Dolomites, announcing a sale, opening its capital, or accelerating with outside investment. Onstage, Lorenzo Delladio chose a different story. No acquisition. No outside investor. Instead, the company’s leader announced that he was transferring part of his shares to his children, Giulia and Francesco Delladio, members of the fourth generation, and expanding the historic headquarters in Ziano di Fiemme, a small town in northeastern Italy, by 2028. Alongside that came a new logo, a new tagline, and a redesigned retail concept. La Sportiva is modernizing its brand tools at the same moment it is doubling down on its family and industrial roots. The Mountains Have Become a Market A few years ago, saying “mountain” might have been enough to place a brand. Today, the mountains are everywhere: on jackets worn far from any ridge, on trail shoes that may never see a trail, in global campaigns where peaks sell performance and status in equal measure. Technical outdoor has not just gotten bigger. It has found a new audience. The numbers tell that story clearly. In 2025, Anta, the Chinese owner of Arc’teryx and Salomon, reported 27% growth, reaching $6.6 billion in revenue. Arc’teryx grew by more than 30%, while Salomon jumped 35%, passing $2 billion in sales. That same year, On passed 3 billion Swiss francs in net sales, with annual growth of 30%. On May 12, 2026, Reuters reported that the Swiss brand had raised its margin forecast, helped in part by its sneakers, its Zendaya collaboration, and the Cloudtilt becoming Foot Locker Europe’s best-selling shoe in March. That is the world in which La Sportiva is unveiling its new logo. Not inside some untouched Alpine bubble, but in a market where technical signals travel much faster than the practices that created them. An alpinism jacket can become a fashion piece. A mountain shoe can end up in a city outfit. An outdoor store can be designed like an experience gallery. Arc’teryx, described by The Wall Street Journal as a brand capable of turning $1,000 jackets into status symbols, captures that shift: technical performance now comes with social prestige. La Sportiva is trying to keep its distance from that dilution while still using the same tools of global visibility. During the conference, Vittorio Barrasso, one of the company’s executives, directly named the competitors now crowding the field: The North Face, Salomon, Arc’teryx, On, Scarpa. In all that noise, La Sportiva is putting forward a phrase: “Nothing But Mountain.” “It is not an abstract mountain or one chosen at random. It is a real mountain, one we know very well” Francesco Delladio, the fourth generation of the Delladio family But that stance also exposes the contradiction of the moment. To say it is not just another interchangeable outdoor brand, La Sportiva now has to use all the tools of a global outdoor brand: a simplified logo, an international slogan, a communications platform, experiential retail, unified language. In other words, the brand is not rejecting the rules of global marketing. It is trying to speak that language without losing its place. Staying Rooted with Global Tools At the center of the new logo, La Sportiva keeps its mountain. Not a stock-photo mountain, not an abstract ridgeline designed to sit neatly on packaging, but Cimon della Pala, a peak in Trentino already embedded in the brand’s historic identity. During the presentation, Francesco Delladio made the point clearly: “It is not an abstract mountain or one chosen at random. It is a real mountain, one we know very well.” “Until today, I was the sole owner of the shares” Lorenzo Delladio, President of La Sportiva That might sound like a small storytelling detail. It says a lot about the moment. After years of being recycled by outdoor marketing, “the mountain” can start to lose its address. It becomes portable scenery, a promise of clean air, a silhouette that can be placed just as easily on a trail shoe, a technical jacket, or a digital campaign. Giulia, Lorenzo and Francesco Delladio © La Sportiva La Sportiva is trying to do the opposite: put a specific place back inside the symbol. Not “the mountains” in general, but this mountain, with its name, its valley, and its history. Founded in 1928 by Narciso Delladio, La Sportiva is still based in Ziano di Fiemme while distributing its products in more than 70 countries. That is the balancing act behind the redesign: make the logo more efficient without stripping away its accent. In the designers’ language, the approach is called “subtraction with intention.” In plain terms: remove what gets in the way, keep what matters. Lighten the mountain. Clarify the silhouette. Make the mark easier to read on a sole, a jacket, a screen, a storefront. That is where the contradiction becomes interesting. A real mountain, once simplified, travels better. It can move across packaging, windows, digital campaigns, stores, and sales tools. That is exactly what the press release lays out: a global communications platform, rolling out from Fall/Winter 2026 across campaigns, retail, digital, and packaging. La Sportiva wants to avoid the market’s abstraction. But it still has to learn the market’s grammar. The difference, then, will be measured less in words than in actions. Lorenzo Delladio announced that he had transferred part of his shares to Giulia and Francesco. “Until today, I was the sole owner of the shares,” he said onstage. At the same time, the company is extending an industrial strategy that was already underway in 2023, when it acquired a majority stake in Meet Italia, an Italian manufacturer specializing in mountain footwear. Put simply, La Sportiva is still putting capital, buildings, production, and part of its succession into the valley. Retail is where that tension comes into focus. The brand presented a new store concept in Arco, a symbolic town in European climbing. The press release describes a space redesigned to strengthen a sense of community. Onstage, Andrea Ranalletti, Trade Marketing Manager, put it more directly: “If a customer leaves the store having only bought something, we have only done half the job.” The store, then, is no longer just there to sell. It has to make people feel the brand, put substance back around the product, and reconnect the object with gestures and places. In Arco, La Sportiva talks about testing areas, repair, and stories of how things are made. The store becomes a kind of controlled base camp: not the mountain itself, obviously, but an organized, staged, tangible enough version of it, meant to make the customer feel they are buying more than just a product. The map of flagship stores the brand has drawn is not accidental either. Ziano di Fiemme for the industrial base. Arco for climbing culture. Annecy for the French commercial network. The map connects places that matter in European outdoor culture while giving the brand footholds in a market where rootedness itself has become a strategic asset. As it nears 100, La Sportiva is trying to hold two opposing movements together: staying rooted while speaking the language of the global market. Family succession, headquarters expansion, a strengthened Italian supply chain, the “Nothing But Mountain” tagline, experiential stores—all of it belongs to the same project. What comes next will show whether Cimon della Pala remains a mountain with an address, or becomes just another mark that works.

The Black Diamond Solution 2.0 Hoody is back with an insulation name that sounds like a Wi-Fi password: PrimaLoft Gold Insulation with Cross Core. Behind that little bit of spec-sheet poetry is a fairly simple promise: keep the spirit of the jacket, but boost its warmth with aerogel. So is this a real upgrade, or just a tech badge slapped onto a jacket we already know? Black Diamond Solution 2.0 Hoody Cross Core We already tested the Black Diamond Solution 2.0 Hoody. And let’s be honest: writing the same review again with three new synonyms, two fresh adjectives, and a photo shot from a different angle would not be especially useful. The jacket had already found its lane: a lightweight synthetic layer, wind-resistant, water-repellent, useful in moderate cold and messy shoulder-season conditions, but not meant to replace a belay parka — the big warm jacket you throw on while standing around — or a true hardshell when the weather stops playing nice. So the question is not whether the Solution 2.0 Hoody is a good jacket. We already know it makes sense for what it is. The real question is more specific: what has Black Diamond actually improved with this Cross Core version? And more importantly, does it change anything for people choosing between the old version, the new one, or another synthetic jacket in the same category? A Fiber by Any Other Name Let’s start with the full name: PrimaLoft Gold Insulation with Cross Core. You almost have to take a breath halfway through. In plain English, it means Black Diamond is sticking with a high-end synthetic insulation, but adding Cross Core technology, which puts aerogel particles into the fibers. Aerogel, simply put, is an extremely lightweight material made mostly of air. It is used in aerospace applications and is often described as a thermal barrier against both cold and heat. Put that way, it almost sounds like an approach jacket just earned its astronaut license. In reality, it is less spectacular than that, but still interesting. The idea is to get more usable warmth without turning the jacket into a bulky puffy. So no, Cross Core is not magic. It is not a heated liner smuggled out of the International Space Station. It is an attempt to improve thermal efficiency: more warmth, without much extra weight or bulk. Same Jacket, Different Engine The broader idea of the jacket does not appear to have changed. The Solution 2.0 Hoody is still a packable layer, the kind of jacket you pull out when the wind picks up, when the break runs a little too long, or when the temperature drops just enough to make a plain hoodie feel like a bad decision. The previous version used 60 g/m² PrimaLoft Gold Eco and had a stated weight of around 360 grams in a men’s medium. The new spec sheet from Black Diamond does not highlight some dramatic weight cut. Instead, it emphasizes warmth-to-weight ratio and packability. That distinction matters: this jacket does not seem designed to be lighter. It seems designed to be warmer for what it weighs. In other words, the real contest is not on the scale. It is in a much more practical question: at roughly the same weight, do you get a little more warmth, a little more margin, a little more comfort in the moments when the old version could feel just short of enough? NASA at the Belay The outdoor industry loves this kind of story. A material from aerospace, a technical name in English, two registered trademarks, one extra logo, and suddenly a lightweight hiking jacket starts giving lunar module. It is funny, but it would also be too easy to dismiss the whole thing as marketing. Because the idea does make sense. In a lightweight synthetic jacket, the problem is not just staying warm. It is staying warm enough without becoming bulky, clammy, or too specialized. Good synthetic insulation needs to remain useful when the air is damp, compress reasonably well, dry faster than traditional down, and still make sense in imperfect real-world use. In short, it has to do the quiet, unglamorous work we ask of the clothing we actually use. Cross Core promises less of a revolution than a small extra buffer. And in a piece like this, a few well-placed degrees can matter. Not because they turn a freezing belay into a sauna. Because they may delay the moment when you start wishing you had packed something warmer. Not Lighter. Smarter. This is probably the key point to be clear about: if you are looking for a jacket that is dramatically lighter than the old one, this is probably not where you will find it. The promise is elsewhere: same category, same use case, but insulation that is supposed to work a little better. That is less exciting than a lower weight number. It may also be more useful. A jacket like this does not need to be ultralight at all costs. It needs to be light enough that you actually bring it, warm enough that it actually helps, and simple enough that you do not need a PhD in layering strategy before every day outside. On that front, the Cross Core version scores a point. It does not pretend to move into a new category. It simply tries to be a little better in the same one. The Verdict The Black Diamond Solution 2.0 Hoody Cross Core looks like a good update, not a new jacket. And that is already something. If you already own the previous version and it works for you, there is probably no rational reason to rush out and replace it. It still makes sense: lightweight, synthetic, protective, useful in moderate damp conditions, with a clear purpose and clear limits. But if you are thinking about buying a Solution 2.0 Hoody soon, the Cross Core version looks like the more interesting option. Who Is It For? For anyone who wants a lightweight synthetic jacket that is easy to pack, useful at a chilly crag, on the approach, while traveling, as a just-in-case layer, or on days when the weather can’t decide between “fine” and “starting to bite,” the pitch holds up. For anyone looking for a true belay jacket, a serious cold-weather piece, or waterproof protection, this still is not that. Cross Core or not, the Solution 2.0 Hoody remains a compromise jacket. The Black Diamond Solution 2.0 Hoody Cross Core will be available starting in September 2026.

You have to go back almost a decade to find the last French win in a Lead World Cup. While France’s bouldering team has been tearing up the international circuit, what explains the drop-off in lead, the roped discipline where climbers try to get as high as possible on a route? A few people who know the game offer some answers. French climber Sam Avezou in Seoul in September 2025 © Nakajima/Timmerman for World Climbing Edinburgh, September 23, 2017. In the final of that Lead World Cup stop, Julia Chanourdie and Romain Desgranges pull onto their respective routes almost at the same time. The field is stacked with names that still carry weight today: Stefano Ghisolfi, Sean Bailey, Janja Garnbret, Jakob Schubert. And yet it is Desgranges who catches the commentator’s eye. At one point, he is even called “the Roger Federer of climbing.” Stuck It turns out the nickname was not a bad call. Chanourdie falls fairly early on her route, but Desgranges moves through his like a clean backhand down the line. He is the first climber to top. It is his third gold medal of the season, and that win helps him finish first overall in the 2017 Lead World Cup standings. Romain Desgranges’s breakthrough remains one of France’s last victories at a Lead World Cup stop. Almost ten years later, he has traded the competition bib for the coach’s shirt at the French Mountaineering and Climbing Federation, the FFME. In other words, Desgranges now coaches France’s lead team. That is the role in which Vertige Media reached out to him to talk about where France stands in the discipline. On the phone, the former champion immediately draws a comparison with bouldering. Over the past decade, competition climbing has changed sharply. Lead was once the prestige event. Now it seems to sit slightly behind bouldering, which has pulled in a large part of the ecosystem around the sport. You can see it in the results of the French bouldering team, but also in the depth of French climbers regularly crowding international podiums. “There are engines in bouldering, like Oriane [Bertone] and Mejdi [Schalck], who pull everyone else up with them,” Desgranges says. “Who wants to watch an Instagram Reel of an entire lead route, with a climber resting on holds for a third of the video?” Guillaume Levernier, club coach in Massy For Lucien Martinez, a high-level French climber and former editor-in-chief of Grimper magazine, the point is now obvious. “The French only look behind in lead because they’re performing at such a high level in bouldering,” he tells Vertige Media. Since 2021, those “engines” have been moving fast. Mejdi Schalck has taken more than ten World Cup podiums. Oriane Bertone has taken around fifteen. And they are not the only ones winning. Naïlé Maignan took gold in 2025. More recently, Zélia Avezou won the first stop of the 2026 World Cup season in Keqiao, China. Arthur Rebollo, the 2025 U21 European bouldering champion, points to the same thing: depth. In his view, France is one of the best-stocked countries in the world when it comes to bouldering talent. Looking back on competitions in France, he says the pressure was enormous because the field was so strong. “Compared with the French team selection events, the European Championships felt like a party in my head,” he says, smiling. Guillaume Levernier sees it another way. A coach at the Massy climbing club outside Paris, and an experienced climber himself, he reads the shift through a generational lens. He points to social media, which tends to push newer climbers toward a more consumer-friendly, more spectacular version of the sport. “Who wants to watch an Instagram Reel of an entire lead route, with a climber resting on holds for a third of the video?” he asks. Another sign of the times, he says, is instant gratification. Levernier explains that he often starts a bouldering session on a problem that seems impossible, then eventually sticks the top-out after thirty tries. That is much harder to reproduce on a route. Working a crux—the hardest section of a climb—requires more setup, and linking the whole route after a fall usually means taking a serious rest before the next attempt. On the left, Romain Desgranges, and on the right, Guillaume Levernier © Courtesy of the FFME and Guillaume Levernier Lead Is Complicated In 1985, the first climbing competitions were held directly on real rock, at the end of a rope. At the beginning, the height itself made the spectacle compelling. Lead remained the flagship discipline for two decades, until bouldering, and to a lesser extent speed, began cutting into its dominance. It is hard to put an exact date on the shift. But Romain Desgranges also sees an explanation in the public and private infrastructure that can produce elite climbers. New climbing gyms are overwhelmingly bouldering-focused. “It’s much more accessible,” the coach says. “A bouldering wall is easier to build than a 16-meter wall. It costs less, it’s easier to run. In lead, there are more constraints. A route is not five holds, it’s fifty. You don’t need a ladder, you need a lift. Everything is heavier to set up.” “The movement range in bouldering gives the discipline its own appeal, and you find much less of that in lead” Arthur Rebollo, 2025 U21 European Bouldering Champion. Looking back at the development of climbing over the past two decades, Lucien Martinez is convinced that the boom in commercial gyms freed bouldering from its old limits. In his view, private gyms chose lower walls to make climbing more accessible, “so everyone could find something in it, so a beginner could have fun in their first session and not get too frustrated.” Counterintuitively, that accessibility helped produce a more technical style of climbing. “The difficulty of a climb shifted toward the smart use of technical skills rather than purely physical ones,” Martinez says. “Coordination moves, technical slabs, and so on. More or less what we call modern climbing.” The result? France excels in that style. French slabs, in a sense, have become a training ground recognized around the world. The level of some elite French climbers in that specific style only reinforces the point. Commercial gyms changed the way people think about climbing and helped create a new generation of climbers. Add in the large number of French routesetters, and some people see France as having played a pioneering role on the international circuit. Still, it can look as if that ability to ride the evolution of the sport has come at the expense of French lead climbing. As a young athlete, Arthur Rebollo says bouldering simply offers more ways to perform. “The movement range in bouldering gives the discipline its own appeal, and you find much less of that in lead,” he says. “Slabs, dynos, coordination moves — they’re almost nonexistent on a route.” That also means there are more ways to stand out. Because climbing styles are more varied, more climbers can specialize. Depending on the way a competition is set, that gives more athletes a real shot. “Lead World Cup walls are too short. It’s so intense, so violent, and not that long. The climbers with the most raw power will always be the ones who express themselves best on those routes” Lucien Martinez, author and former editor-in-chief of Grimper. Rocher canon On February 11, a 17-year-old French climber completed Bombé Bleu in Buoux. Erwan Legrand had just made the first ascent of one of the last legendary projects in world climbing, graded 5.15b, or 9b in the French system, after some of the sport’s biggest names had tried and failed on it. Before him, Seb Bouin became the second climber in the world to climb 5.15d, or 9c. Jules Marchaland, meanwhile, keeps showing he can get close to the hardest rock climbs on the planet. In short: the French are thriving outside. So why are they not standing on the top step of the podium in competition? “It has nothing to do with it,” Martinez says flatly. “The reality is that international competitions are not, or are no longer, suited to outdoor sport climbers — those endurance climbers who know how to rest on bad holds.” In his view, “there simply isn’t a competition made for them.” He continues: “Lead World Cup walls are too short. It’s so intense, so violent, and not that long. The climbers with the most raw power will always be the ones who express themselves best on those routes.” The media coverage of climbing, and the need to produce more spectacle, are not incidental. World Climbing, the international federation, has had to adjust formats accordingly, favoring faster, more dynamic sequences, adding time limits, reducing rests, and pushing the sport toward a different rhythm. “The physically strongest climbers are the ones dominating the lead circuit,” Arthur Rebollo confirms. “A few less physical profiles can still find a way through, but you can count them on one hand.” Last year in Bali, a young French athlete with a slight build managed to climb onto the second step of the podium at a Lead World Cup. Max Bertone, Oriane’s brother, won a welcome medal for French lead climbing. Before the international season began, Romain Desgranges told us that performance was “a sign of what’s coming next.” On May 9, at the most recent Lead World Cup stop in Wujiang, China, two French climbers — Sam Avezou and Victor Guillermin — made the final.