After the Youth European Cup in Brussels, the Madrid World Cup could be next. The issue: the presence of Israel’s national team. In Spain, the protest is part of a broader movement of solidarity with Palestinians. Report from the ground. Members of the Climbers for Palestine Spain collective © Armelle Desmaison for Vertige Media To take advantage of the early-May sun, Almu and Álvar have set up a table and chairs on the terrace of the climbing gym. They know the place well, and they know the owners. The crag — the outdoor climbing area — is still where they would rather be, but they regularly train at this bouldering gym, a rope-free climbing facility built around short, powerful problems, tucked into an industrial zone about 30 miles from Madrid. Behind their sunglasses, it is easy to imagine the warmth in their eyes. But once the conversation turns to the subject at hand, their faces tighten. “We found out yesterday that they had registered for the competition,” Álvar finally says. The 30-something climber is referring to the registration of seven Israeli athletes — three women and four men — for the Climbing World Cup scheduled for May 28–31 in Alcobendas, just outside Madrid. Yet a petition signed by more than 120 Spanish organizations of all kinds had called for Israeli representatives to be excluded from international competitions, including the World Climbing Series Comunidad de Madrid. “We really hoped the international federation would act to prevent their presence. That hasn’t happened, so we’ll be there” Almu and Álvar, members of the Climbers for Palestine Spain collective The request was supposed to be reviewed last month at the General Assembly of the international federation, but for logistical reasons it was pushed back to the next Climbing Summit. The petition had been launched on April 10 by the Platform for the Sports Boycott of Israel and Climbers for Palestine Spain, the collective Almu and Álvar belong to. “We really hoped the international federation would act to prevent their presence,” the climber says with a sigh. “That hasn’t happened, so we’ll be there.” On Instagram, the collective is calling on “the public to get their free tickets and stay tuned for the actions that will be organized.” What exactly is planned? The activist will not say. But he offers one detail: “We are not a closed group acting off in our own corner. We will try to propose something collective and open to the public.” Spain Has More Than One Tour to Draw From Is the idea to recreate La Vuelta 2025? “That would be impossible,” Álvar says. “But we are in contact with the organizers of that boycott.” La Vuelta, also known as the Tour of Spain, is one of the most popular cycling races in the world. Its 2025 edition was disrupted throughout the route by pro-Palestinian protests opposing the participation of the Israel-Premier Tech team. In the end, thousands of citizens flooded the course, which was set to finish in downtown Madrid. They forced organizers to stop the race altogether with roughly 30 miles remaining, denying the riders their final sprint. Almu sees the success of that action as the result of “cycling’s popularity and the access.” As with the Tour de France, the stages stretch across miles of open roads that cannot be tightly controlled and that draw both hardcore cycling fans and casual spectators every year. A demonstration in support of Palestine in Madrid in October 2025 (cc) Barcex / Wikimedia Commons The episode made headlines around the world. Yet Spain is not known for a culture of protest in the same way France is. “La Vuelta is, to my knowledge, the first demonstration to have had national and international resonance,” says Raúl Sánchez García, a sociologist of sport and researcher at Rey Juan Carlos University. “Otherwise, at the local level, you do find activist actions, especially in soccer.” In certain parts of the peninsula, including Catalonia, Galicia, and the Basque Country, questions of identity are deeply politicized. “During the Copa del Rey, the Spanish soccer cup, you regularly hear the anthem being whistled at, or practices like that,” the researcher notes, before pointing out that the first disruptions of La Vuelta began during the stage that crossed Euskadi, the Basque Country. “In those regions, there is a very strong awareness of the oppression of peoples,” Almu and Álvar say. In their view, that helps explain the sympathy many in Spanish society feel for the Palestinian cause. “When athletes take a side, they can lose a lot with sponsors. That’s why they don’t stick their necks out” Raúl Sánchez, sports sociologist From Lamine Yamal to Pedro Almodóvar Few athletes with national or international profiles have spoken publicly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Top climbers have contacted us privately to buy Climbers for Palestine T-shirts, but none of them share or post anything on social media,” Álvar says. “In paraclimbing, there have been a few public positions,” Almu adds. On Instagram last spring, Guillermo Pelegrín invited people “to climb for Palestine” during a gathering organized in support of the cause. The para athlete, who regularly reaches World Cup podiums in the B2 category for athletes with moderate visual impairment, says he has to maintain a neutral posture during competitions. Most international sports federations and institutions enforce a principle of religious and political neutrality. “When athletes take a side, they can lose a lot with sponsors,” Raúl Sánchez says. “That’s why they don’t stick their necks out.” In soccer, a few major figures have taken a position, including French star Karim Benzema, in a tweet published as early as October 2023. On May 11, young Spanish soccer star Lamine Yamal held up a Palestinian flag during FC Barcelona’s title celebration. Spain’s cultural world seems more willing to speak out on the country’s internal and external conflicts. “Since the beginning of democracy in 1975, I think a protest tradition has taken root in film and theater,” the sociologist says. The globally known filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar is a clear example. The director, whose films were seen as provocative after the end of Franco’s dictatorship, publicly called on his government in the summer of 2025 to cut all ties with the State of Israel. A few weeks later, Javier Bardem left a mark of his own. The actor appeared at the Emmy Awards wearing a keffiyeh — a Palestinian national symbol — around his neck and ended his speech with “Free Palestine.” More recently, Spain boycotted the Eurovision Song Contest alongside Iceland, Slovenia, Ireland, and the Netherlands.  Sí, Se Puede  The foreign policy pursued by Spain’s left-wing government marks a real break from other European Union member states: an arms embargo, a ban on ships carrying fuel for the Israeli military from entering Spanish ports, and an increase in humanitarian aid for Gaza. In May 2024, Spain officially recognized the State of Palestine, a step France would take more than a year later. Spain also joined the case brought by South Africa before the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in the Gaza Strip. More recently, Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez again stood apart by calling for an end to the EU-Israel Association Agreement. Almu and Álvar would like their government to go further, including by “formalizing the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador from the country.” The women's final at the 2025 Climbing World Cup in Madrid © Dimitris Tosidis for World Climbing Spanish society may have looked like a vanguard on this issue in Europe, but more and more actors in the climbing world are organizing internationally to increase their impact. Climbers for Palestine Spain is now part of that movement. “We are organizing with several collectives around the world,” Álvar explains. “Some are Climbers for Palestine branches, others are connected to the climbing scene, and others are gyms or mountain clubs.” Last week, a private gym, Le Camp de Base, announced that it would refuse to host an official World Climbing competition in Brussels because of the presence of Israeli athletes. In Alcobendas, a private gym network called Sputnik has already announced that it will refuse to host training for Israeli athletes. The goal is “to organize demonstrations, boycott actions, and informational events in the same places and on the same dates as climbing competitions,” the members of Climbers for Palestine Spain say. The World Cup may end up marking the next move in a much longer climb.

In her first film, Raphaëlle Damilano heads to the Himalaya with her father and her uncle, the French alpinist François Damilano. Vertige Media watched the film, then sat down with the director. Behind the expedition, what emerges on screen is a story about family, grief, and inheritance. © La Traversée Sagittaire On paper, La Traversée Sagittaire could look like a fairly classic mountain film: five weeks on expedition, a 20,000-foot peak, Nepal, altitude, camps, weather calling the shots, and crevasses reminding everyone that the margin for error does not care what you are going through. But very quickly, Raphaëlle Damilano’s camera turns away from that script. What she films is not a conquest of the high peaks, or even a straightforward alpine adventure. It is the invisible weight of a family name, in a lineage where the mountains were never just a vacation backdrop. The Damilano Family To understand the film, you first have to look at the rope team—the climbers tied together on the mountain. There is Jean-René, Raphaëlle’s father. There is François Damilano, her uncle, a major figure in French alpinism and ice climbing. And there is Raphaëlle herself: daughter, niece, Paris-based stage actor, about to climb her first Himalayan summit. “I had this feeling that I was really carrying grief in my backpack” Raphaëlle Damilano In the Damilano family, the high mountains did not arrive by accident. Raphaëlle describes a childhood shaped by Chamonix, family holidays, expedition stories, images brought home by her father and uncle, the French Alpine Club traces left by her grandparents, slide shows, and alpine figures moving through the family’s shared memory. “It’s really a family relationship,” she says. Later, she puts it more sharply: “I do think there’s a kind of cult around it.” She is not saying this as an attack on her family. She is naming the density of an inheritance. What you receive with love can also become a quiet demand. Then, at the very beginning of the trip, something happens that no one could have written into the story. On the first day of the expedition, after arriving in Dolpo, a region of the Nepalese Himalaya, Raphaëlle learns that her grandfather Raoul has died. Getting back to France in time for the funeral is impossible. The expedition continues, but it is no longer about the same thing. When we speak, she returns to that moment without trying to make it prettier than it was: “I had this feeling that I was really carrying grief in my backpack.” Then, later: “I think it changed everything.” From that point on, walking is no longer just movement toward a point on a map. It becomes a way of moving forward with what has just disappeared. A Mountain Film That Looks Away From the Summit That is where La Traversée Sagittaire clearly breaks from the usual grammar of the mountain film. The summit is there, of course, but it quickly stops being the center of the story. The film prefers the edges: hesitation, shaky footage, scenes staged after the fact, a recorded therapy session, family archives, letters left behind in Paris, a visit to her grandmother, small mistakes that end up saying more than clean, polished shots ever could. Raphaëlle Damilano makes no secret of the fact that the film was built backward. She left without a clear script, thinking at first that she would bring back images from an unlikely trip. Once back in France, she came down hard. “I didn’t want to make a mountain vacation film.” So she let the material sit for two years. “I think it’s a form of recognition for everything this family inheritance gave me” Raphaëlle Damilano The film truly came alive in the edit, with Delphine Dufriche, who had already worked on a film by François Damilano. The detail matters. Here again, the family returns through a side door. It is this editor who helps Raphaëlle understand that the subject is not Nepal, not performance, not even the expedition itself, but her own place inside the story. That late construction gives the film its unusual shape: part self-portrait, part altitude story, part family essay, part theatrical experiment. The astrologer almost plays the role of a Greek chorus. Raphaëlle owns that influence: “Because I come from theater, I’m very influenced by it. I’m moved by Greek tragedies.” Not the Finish, the Search The film could have slipped into oversharing, or into a family score-settling exercise. It does neither. Raphaëlle Damilano is not trying to kill the father, knock the uncle off his pedestal, or put her inheritance on trial. She simply moves the question onto her own ground: cinema, theater, looking. “I think it’s a form of recognition for everything this family inheritance gave me,” she tells us, before adding that there was also “something to unload.” That is the film in one line. La Traversée Sagittaire is not about how you become an alpinist in a family of alpinists. It is about what it means to inherit a passion that feels too large for you, and how you find a way to keep it from speaking in your place. In the end, the planned summit is not reached. Another peak, around 20,000 feet, becomes the high point instead. But by then, the film has already changed the measure of success. Raphaëlle Damilano has made less a story of conquest than a passage film: imperfect, funny, restrained, and guided by the sense that even the most beautiful inheritances sometimes need to be set down, at least a little. “It’s a kind of quest,” she says. “It isn’t resolved.” What remains now is to see where this crossing can go next. Raphaëlle Damilano does not hide the fact that the life of the film is partly out of her hands. A production company is now helping send it to festivals, with the hope that it can eventually be shown more widely. “I’d like it to be seen,” she says, while acknowledging that the film is an unusual object, hard to place in any simple box. In that sense, it keeps moving the way it was made: not in a perfectly straight line, but with enough direction to make you want to follow.

In the Cochamó Valley, in southern Chile, a small group of climbers and local residents spent 20 years fighting dams, roads, and hotel projects. In December 2025, they finalized the purchase of 325,000 acres of wild Patagonia for $63 million. This is the story of how it happened. © Austin Siadak It rains a lot in Cochamó. Rodrigo Condeza has known that since the first time he set foot in this valley in southern Chile more than 20 years ago. But the rain hardly matters next to what nature gave the place. Among a hundred other things: granite, forest, and 3,000-year-old alerces, South American conifers, that have never seen a parking lot. “I think that is the most beautiful place on earth,” he says over Zoom from his new home near a lake in the region of Los Lagos. He has been saying that for 20 years. At 52, he still says it with the tone of a man who has long since stopped apologizing for it. A River Runs Through It Cochamó Valley is often compared to Yosemite. It has the big walls, the meadows, the waterfalls, the river winding between pockets of dense forest. “I think it was Lonely Planet that, back in the ’90s, started talking about the ‘Yosemite of South America’,” Rodrigo says. He has always pushed back on the comparison, or at least on what people tend to do with it. “It’s having Yosemite 100 years ago. I will say that yeah, this is a really spectacular place like Yosemite, but what we want to do is a kind of the opposite.” For climbers, the valley is only reachable on foot, after 14 km of difficult walking, or on horseback with the help of arrieros, local horsemen who carry people and gear into the valley. Once there, the walls rise for hundreds of meters. The cracks are long, clean, and splitter — the kind of straight, continuous crack systems climbers dream about — cut into some of the cleanest granite on earth. The first climbers to put up routes there in the 1990s had to hack their way through the jungle before they could even touch the rock. Even today, topos — hand-drawn route maps and notes — still circulate folded inside glass jars left at the base of climbs for the next party. The place has its rituals. It also has its guardians. “For Rodrigo Condeza, loving a place is not enough to protect it. You have to be ready to fight” Rodrigo Condeza, leader of the campaign to preserve Cochamó In 2003, Rodrigo Condeza left Puerto Montt, a large port city in southern Chile about 60 miles from Cochamó, and settled in the valley for a year with his wife. A trained mountain guide, he started a company offering trekking, sea kayaking, and horseback trips. He bought 10 acres deep in the valley, even farther in than La Junta, the heart of the climbing area. A stream crossed his land. Naturally, he applied for the water rights. They were denied. And the answer caught him off guard. “They told me the stream had already been planned,” Rodrigo says. Meaning: it belonged to someone else. When the new landowner started digging, he got a shock. Following the water and how it was supposed to be used, he discovered a massive project: seven hydroelectric plants built in a chain, miles of high-voltage power lines to supply copper mines, all connected to industrial energy networks less than 60 miles away. “When you go to Cochamó, it feels really remote, because it’s a remote place. No road, no anything. We are 100 kilometers from Puerto Montt, which is a big city, and from there you can connect with power lines to the mining, to the big cities, to the capital, to all these industries. The industry of forestry is pretty close also to where we are. So that’s why it has been so much pressure into this wild territory, because we’re really close.” After that discovery, Rodrigo could not pretend he had not seen it. “When something is not fair, a different energy is inside of me. So then I can recognize that. Myself, this quiet guy that likes to talk a lot and friendly, he becomes a fighter. And it’s irrational. It’s irrational. So I will do everything that needs to be done.” The Cochamó Valley © Rodrigo Manns Paradise for Sale Rodrigo Condeza soon met Daniel Seeliger, an American climber who had been living in the valley since 2004 with his wife, Silvina, and who had opened the first campground in La Junta. Together, with neighbors, local tourism operators, and landowners, they founded an NGO, the first of four that would emerge over the years. The fight began to take shape. Locals held roughly 50 meetings with elected officials, associations, and regional tourism offices. Every presentation ended with the same final slide: an image of Cochamó Valley dried out, with a sign planted at a crossroads. “Which path do we choose? Tourism or hydropower? Yosemite or Hetch Hetchy?” Hetch Hetchy, a valley inside Yosemite, was flooded to supply San Francisco with water and became a symbol of wild places sacrificed in the name of development. When the legal routes ran out, Rodrigo and his allies went as far as buying six mining concessions at $1,200 each to physically block potential dam sites. “An incomparable piece of environmental art to be treasured just as a Picasso or Monet painting would be” The description of Cochamó in the Christie's auction catalog After three years of fighting, in 2009, Chile’s president at the time, Michelle Bachelet, declared the Cochamó watershed the country’s first hydrological reserve. The hydroelectric project was dead. “When I knew the decree was real, I cried.” The victory was real. It was also temporary. Since 2007, an investor named Roberto Hagemann had been quietly buying pieces of the valley, parcel by parcel. He had made his fortune in mining and real estate. He saw in the land a rare opportunity: assembling, in one contiguous property, a patchwork of parcels scattered among more than 200 families, a deal so complex that no one else had wanted to attempt it. Hagemann spent 15 years of his life on it. Once the property was consolidated, his plan was to build roads into the valley, hotels by the lake, and gondolas for an international clientele willing to pay top dollar to see Patagonia from a café terrace. © Valentina Thenoux and Austin Sadiak Rodrigo and his partners opposed each new attempt. Puelo Patagonia, another NGO the guide founded with friends in 2013, eventually defeated Hagemann before Chile’s Supreme Court in 2017. Blocked at every turn, unable to secure the necessary permits, Hagemann changed tactics. And the pivot was wild. In 2018, he hired Christie’s, the famous auction house, to sell the property for $150 million. In Christie’s catalog, the property sat between a seaside villa and an English manor. Cochamó Valley was described as “An incomparable piece of environmental art to be treasured just as a Picasso or Monet painting would be.” No buyer came forward, but the listing traveled around the world. It landed in conservationists’ inboxes, in conversations among climbers who knew the valley, and in the newsletters of philanthropic foundations. In 2022, after securing the final titles for the entire property, Hagemann found himself in a strange position. He legally owned 325,000 acres. But he could not develop them, and he could not find a buyer at the price he wanted. Rodrigo saw an opening. The idea was simple, and almost absurd: what if they bought it themselves? Hippies, The New York Times, and a Catfight Contacting Hagemann after 10 years of conflict was a risky bet. A lawyer arranged the first meeting. By Rodrigo Condeza’s own account, the first two meetings were “a cat fight.” Then, slowly, something shifted. Hagemann was stuck. He owned a place he could neither develop nor sell for the price he expected. Puelo Patagonia needed the land protected by a seller willing to negotiate, rather than see it fall into the hands of a stranger. “Deep down in our souls, we both knew we needed each other,” Rodrigo says. Hagemann’s son, a climber who knew the walls of Cochamó well, reportedly also encouraged his father to sell to the conservationists. “The New York Times made this article and said, you know, a bunch of hippies bought the Chilean Yosemite. And it was kind of true. We are workers, professionals, but we had no business doing this” Rodrigo Condeza, leader of the campaign to preserve Cochamó The NGO offered $50 million. Hagemann wanted $100 million. They negotiated for a year. The final agreement landed at $63 million. There is something uncomfortable about the idea that the only way to remove a wild place from the logic of the market is to pay full price for it, using the very tools that threatened to exploit it. Rodrigo knows that. “The New York Times made this article and said, you know, a bunch of hippies bought the Chilean Yosemite. And it was kind of true. We are workers, professionals, but we had no business doing this.” What they did have was nerve. Because when the “hippies” signed, they did not have the money. What followed was part word of mouth, part relentless work. The Freyja Foundation, the Wyss Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, and Patagonia joined the coalition, named Conserva Pucheguín. “It’s like, you know, the wolf — when you make a call, more wolves will come. I think it’s something like that. We made a call and after one and a half year we had the money.” The transaction closed in December 2025. The property is now in the hands of NGOs. Le film que Patagonia a consacré à l'histoire de la préservation de Cochamó After traveling the world to close the funding gap, Rodrigo Condeza is not planning to rest. He has another plan: place 80 percent of the protected territory under national park status, with the remaining 20 percent managed by the local community. Because even after a historic victory, he is not fooling himself. Chile spends $2 per hectare on its national parks, compared with $30 in Costa Rica and $50 in the United States. And the rise of the radical right in Chilean politics — José Antonio Kast, a far-right figure, won Chile’s presidential election in December 2025 — is a reminder that conservation victories are never permanently carved in stone. For Rodrigo, legal protection alone cannot carry the whole burden. “It’s not enough to have a land under a national park, under the government. It’s not enough. It’s something that we are learning in this moment of the history of humans.” For Rodrigo Condeza, loving a place is not enough to protect it. You have to be ready to fight. He started climbing again in Cochamó two years ago. His children, now 13 and 15, pulled him back onto the rock. Since returning to climbing, he says he understands again, “in his body,” what the valley does to the people who arrive there, and why some of them never leave quite the same. Now that the place belongs to the people of the valley, the guide can let himself hold on to one dream: that a hundred years from now, future generations will still see rain falling on a lush wild valley, not on parking lots.

Higher, faster, stronger. Caught in a growth model, climbing has pulled us into a race that can leave us exhausted and alone. What if we slowed down? What if downclimbing meant putting limits back into a world that keeps pushing us to move past them? The answers are not light ones. (cc) NEOM / Unsplash This article is the fourth episode of Heavy Mental, our series unpacking key psychological concepts in climbing under the weight of performance. It is written by Léo Dechamboux, a mental coach and co-author, with Fred Vionnet, of the reference book Le Mental du grimpeur. If you have followed the cracks Heavy Mental has been working its way into, you know this series sits at the intersection of several paths, all aimed at talking about climbing performance differently. From self-confidence to resilience to the psychological grind of competition, the previous pieces have tried to go deep on subjects that are often only lightly discussed. For this fourth episode, it felt important to slow down. Or, more precisely, to look at the need to slow down, to doubt, and to rethink climbing’s practices, stories, and players. In short, to talk about the need for a kind of cognitive ecology, and for degrowth. In one word: downclimbing. Because what could be more urgent than slowing down when social media, competition circuits, sponsorship pressure, and the constant reset cycle in commercial gyms all push us into a frantic logic? You have to progress fast, optimize every detail, push your limits, climb harder routes, package the whole thing for public consumption, and get rewarded for it. It even changes our relationships. First in obvious ways: we now have our mental coach, our trainer, our “community.” Then in more subtle ways: being surrounded by the right people becomes another tool for better performance. All of this comes at a cost: mental fatigue, less joy, isolation. We produce climbing more than we live it. The Myth of the Endless Route To understand where this comes from, we have to go back to the 19th century, when so-called “modern” sport emerged around a simple logic: frame it, measure it, compare it, improve it. From there, sports entered the broader model of growth, a model that would also shape how we organize society and live as individuals. French sport sociologist Christian Pociello showed that this growth model extends far beyond economics and reaches into human ability itself. Put another way, our physical capacities began to be seen through the lens of performance. Through a combination of religious, philosophical, economic, and technological conditions, Western societies turned those capacities into limits to be surpassed. Functional physiological norms became records. The priority was no longer to understand the altitude at which the human body can function properly. It became watching “superhumans” trained to survive higher than those who came before them. The level always has to rise. Higher, faster, stronger. This is not treated as an occasional event. It becomes the norm. A V17 boulder problem — the hardest grade in bouldering, known in Europe as Font 9A — was an anomaly in 2016, when Nalle Hukkataival announced the first ascent of Burden of Dreams. Today, that level has hardened into a benchmark that almost feels normal. Since then, the climbing world has been waiting for one thing: a new hero to push the limit again. But that progression is neither infinite nor self-sustaining. Athletic performance is the product of a system. French economists Jean-François Bourg and Jean-Jacques Gouguet explain it clearly in their work: endless growth is impossible because planetary resources are limited. That means we need to think about sport in a world of degrowth. Pociello is pointing to the same tension when he describes the conflict between growth and limits in sport. Sport regulates, frames, imposes rules, ranks people. At the same time, it can also produce excess, self-overcoming, and the drive to push beyond the norm without limits. We see it in the optimization and intensification of training methods, in specialization, in the control of bodies and mental resources. The same central idea of capitalism is playing out here: endless growth in a finite world. Between Resistance and Co-option Under the cover of the supposed ability to push past athletic limits, climbers dream of summits to reach. The practice follows, propped up by stories in which hardship and failure exist mainly to serve a victorious ending. And yet climbing has always held a particular place. Like board sports, it developed at the margins of institutions, often against their logic. Climbing, surfing, and skating were embraced as playgrounds rooted in a direct relationship with the environment. Before they became stages for performance, they were spaces of exploration and commitment. The point was less to measure than to experience. That emphasis on experience — described by Alain Loret, an academic specializing in the future of sport, and embodied by figures such as Dean Potter — helped form a critique of modern sport. In its early form, climbing tested a thesis of resistance. But like most of these activities, climbing did not withstand market logic for long. Alternative cultures were absorbed, then given economic value. The outdoor industry, tourism, media coverage, and competition circuits reshaped them. Some crags are now overcrowded. Ascents are framed as feats. Climbers become image carriers. What once expressed a singular relationship to the world has been translated into product, content, and spectacle. This does not happen without tension. Board sports and climbing still swing between two poles. On one side, they still carry real possibilities for resistance: autonomy, creativity, reclaiming time, cooperation. Climbing can still be that place. The discipline can define its own norms and challenge the established order. On the other side, these practices are deeply shaped by co-option. Measurable performance, standardized routes and walls — from the Kilter Board to the Titan wall — and the mass circulation of images all pull climbing into a growth economy. The Right Flow Given all of this, one question remains: what would sport look like in a degrowth society? The first answers point to a major shift. Practice would no longer be organized around growth, but around restraint, experience, and the collective. That would mean rethinking mobility, competition, and the role of sport itself. In climbing, it would require structural, theoretical, and psychological change. Because downclimbing cannot only be systemic. It also happens in the way we perceive, interpret, and live our experiences. It starts with a change in perspective: doubt, fatigue, and fear, usually seen as obstacles, can also be understood as signals of our resources and our limits. Taking them seriously means stepping out of guilt and optimization, and building a different relationship to practice. That means accepting the need to slow down and recognizing that learning is uneven. In this frame, flow plays a key role. Far from an ideal of performance or control, flow is the fine balance between the demands of a move and the resources we have available. It is built on attention to the gesture, less judgment, and presence in movement. It is invisible in a world where performance can be measured, shared, and rewarded. The right kind of flow can therefore remain quiet, intimate, and unspectacular. Confusing it with absolute performance turns the moment into another productivity demand. Mental downclimbing also means stepping out of the solitude produced by competitive logic. As we have seen in earlier episodes, confidence is not just individual. It is relational and situational. Revaluing collective practice through cooperative formats based on learning, sharing, exchange, and mutual support can shift the center of gravity away from performance and invite us to redefine success. Not limiting ourselves to numbered goals, and making room for the quality of commitment, pleasure, and understanding of movement, are also possible paths. These dynamics already exist at different scales. Some climbers are moving away from the classic model of performance and communication to invest in slower practices built around exploration and encounter, as Nicky Ceria, Seb Berthe, and Soline Kentzel have done, while others choose less visible forms of commitment. Collectives centered on sharing and transmission are also emerging, including Eska Gang, Palestine Climbing Association, and Greenspit. At the level of private gyms, alternatives are appearing through cooperative climbing gyms, for example. Other organizations are finding ways to celebrate climbing outside competition and pure performance. At the club level, or in youth development programs, this means creating safer environments that recognize mistakes as part of learning. Feedback can value strategy, commitment, and progress rather than only the goal, the achievement, or the lack of improvement. At the institutional level, it means diversifying practices, integrating well-being and health, thinking seriously about inclusion, education, and the protection of athletes and staff, while also rethinking which pathways are highlighted and how their stories are told. These are shifts, and they are concrete attempts to bring time, meaning, and collective life back into a practice shaped by the constant pressure to raise the stakes. Downclimbing does not mean dreaming of a pure version of climbing that never existed. It means questioning the conditions in which we climb. It means putting limits back into a vertical world where everything pushes us to move beyond them.

Ten days before the World Climbing Europe Youth Series Brussels 2026, the Brussels climbing gym Le Camp de base says it will no longer make its venue available for the international youth competition. The breaking point: the failure to reach a compromise over Israeli athletes competing under a neutral flag. © Courtesy of Base Camp This is no longer an ultimatum. The door is shut. After several days of talks with World Climbing, the international governing body for climbing, along with Belgian officials and the Israeli federation, Le Camp de base has made its decision: the gym will not host the Brussels stop of the World Climbing Europe Youth Series, scheduled for May 30 and 31. At the time of publication, the event was still listed on World Climbing’s official calendar. But the private venue’s leadership confirmed to Vertige Media that it will no longer provide its walls, staff, or its new high-performance climbing space for the competition. Moving an international youth event on such short notice would most likely mean canceling it altogether. One thing is certain: this is an exceptionally rare moment in the organization of international sport. And in competitive climbing, it is a first since the escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Compromise That Fell Apart From the start, Le Camp de base’s position was clear: Israeli athletes could compete, but only under a neutral flag. The request was not about excluding individual athletes or targeting them as people. It was about refusing to host an official Israeli national representation in the current context, marked by the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the case brought before the International Court of Justice, and the occupation of Palestinian territories. “Everyone needs to make commitments, and the responsibility cannot keep landing back on the organizers and the final venues that host these events” Florian Delcoigne, co-founder of Le Camp de base According to Florian Delcoigne, co-founder of Le camp de base, that request could not be carried out in time. “For them, granting neutral status to the Israeli athletes just wasn’t possible to put in place within 15 days,” he said. That impasse raises an obvious question: why did World Climbing not anticipate this decision, when the issue has been building for months across the international climbing world? A version of a compromise was discussed during negotiations between Le Camp de base, World Climbing, the Belgian climbing federation, and the Israeli climbing federation. One option would have allowed Israeli athletes, sent by their federation, to compete while removing visible signs of national representation: flags, livestream references, communications, bags, clothing, and protocol. Le Camp de base said it was ready to accept that imperfect solution. Another, murkier option would have involved keeping certain symbols off display under the cover of “technical issues” or omissions. For the Brussels gym, that was exactly the trap to avoid: pretending, fudging the line, and sweeping the politics under the procedural rug. In the end, the compromise collapsed. The Israeli federation did not accept the removal of national symbols. Its delegation was therefore expected to compete under the Israeli flag — an option Le Camp de base said it could no longer accept. Values, Security, and Bodyguards The Brussels decision did not come out of nowhere. Last year, during a previous European Cup hosted by Le Camp de base, the presence of bodyguards connected to the Israeli delegation had already created discomfort. According to Florian Delcoigne, they arrived the day before the event, without a framework agreed in advance, potentially armed, and without prior approval from local police. “That was not OK,” he said. The gym raised the issue internally and with Belgian officials. Since then, Le Camp de base says it has tried to plan ahead. From the beginning of the year, the organization had again expressed its concerns: on one hand, the difficulty of calmly handling an exceptional security setup without a clear framework; on the other, a deeper disagreement with hosting an Israeli delegation under a national flag. Meanwhile, World Climbing kept pushing the issue down the road. A general assembly was supposed to settle the matter, or at least move it forward, in the spring. But part of the discussion was ultimately postponed to an extraordinary general assembly scheduled for July. Too late for the Brussels event. “This is where our responsibility lies: staying rooted in our values” Florian Delcoigne, co-founder of Le Camp de base That is the political core of the story. By delaying its decision, World Climbing is effectively passing the problem down to national federations, local organizers, gyms, and the crews on the ground — the people building walls, setting boulders, managing check-in, credentials, podiums, crowds, tensions, and sometimes threats of disruption. In climbing, boulders are short, ropeless problems; routesetters are the people who design them. “We just want a decision to be made,” Delcoigne said. Then he added: “Everyone needs to make commitments, and the responsibility cannot keep landing back on the organizers and the final venues that host these events.” In a forthcoming statement obtained by Vertige Media, the board of Le Camp de base writes: “As a climbing gym, the owner of the venue, and an employer, it is our responsibility to determine whether an event can take place in peaceful, safe, and viable conditions.” Le Camp de base knows the decision will come at a cost. The competition was supposed to serve as the launch event for Camp avancé, its new high-performance space. For six months, the team had been pushing to finish the work in time. Money has been spent. Employees, routesetters, volunteers, and partners had been mobilized. Legal and financial consequences are also possible. “There are cancellation fees that World Climbing could claim from us directly, or at least the Belgian federation could,” Delcoigne said. He also noted that Le Camp de base is not directly tied to the international federation as the organizer, but to the Belgian federation through the venue agreement. Inside the gym, the decision was not made lightly. Le Camp de base is an engaged climbing space, but it is not a perfectly unified political bloc. Some staff members, routesetters, and volunteers share the position in principle while also recognizing the professional risks of such a move, especially in a high-performance climbing world where international opportunities matter. Management chose to take responsibility. “This is where our responsibility lies: staying rooted in our values,” Delcoigne said. He added that several staff members did not want to work under those conditions anyway. In its statement, the leadership also stresses that “the disagreement concerns governance, national representation, and the lack of a credible framework. It does not concern athletes as individuals and must not lead to any form of discrimination.” More Pressure Ahead What is happening in Brussels now extends far beyond Belgium. For months, pro-Palestinian climbers have been organizing internationally, often informally, through groups such as Climbers for Palestine. They share information, pressure federations, amplify calls for a sports and cultural boycott of Israel, organize solidarity events, and raise funds. Some of those actions are publicly documented, including by Climbers for Palestine Spain and by American journalist Andrew Bisharat on Evening Sends. According to Pascal Etienne, a member of Grimpe Solidaire Internationale, that global organizing has accelerated around the request brought by the Palestinian federation to World Climbing. “From now on, World Climbing should expect mobilization at all of its competitions” Pascal Etienne, member of Grimpe Solidaire Internationale “There are pro-Palestinian climber groups in many countries around the world,” he said. An informal coordination now reportedly brings together volunteers from about 20 countries, with the goal of putting more direct pressure on federations and competitions on the international circuit. Le Camp de base’s decision does not appear to have been organized with that international network. Etienne himself makes that point clearly: the Brussels gym already had its own activist history, its own internal discussions, and its own red lines. The international collectives have instead rallied around a decision that suddenly embodies what they have been denouncing for months: World Climbing’s inability to make a call on a situation other sports bodies have already had to confront, sometimes by imposing neutral status, sometimes by suspending delegations, but always by acknowledging that international sport does not exist outside the world. The next flashpoints may come elsewhere. Wherever World Climbing takes its calendar, pro-Palestinian collectives now intend to make that pressure visible. “From now on, World Climbing should expect mobilization at all of its competitions,” Etienne warned. Awareness actions, demonstrations, public pressure campaigns: the forms of action remain open, and in some cases deliberately unannounced. For World Climbing, the Brussels case is a warning. The former IFSC is being caught up by the very thing its new name now carries: the world. Le Camp de base is not claiming the right to decide on behalf of World Climbing or to become the final referee of global sport. It is asking, more simply and more bluntly, that governing bodies take back the responsibilities they are now allowing to slide all the way down to the venues on the ground. An international sporting event being canceled because of Israeli athletes’ participation is rare when the move comes from within the organizing structure itself. It is not, however, without precedent more broadly. More often, that pressure has come from civil society, as in 2025, when more than 100,000 pro-Palestinian protesters disrupted a stage of the Vuelta, Spain’s major cycling tour, near Madrid. For now, almost no federation has taken a clear position on excluding Israeli competitors or requiring them to compete under neutral status, despite growing pressure. And by continuing to postpone political decisions in the name of sporting neutrality, those same federations may end up creating exactly what they hoped to avoid: local crises, broken trust, venues closing their doors, and a community slowly realizing that “apolitical” is sometimes just the polite word for doing nothing.

With the R1 Ultralight Hoody, Patagonia is not just trying to sell yet another lighter fleece. The brand is aiming at a problem climbers know well: how to stay comfortable between pitches, when the hard work pauses but the day keeps going. Patagonia R1 Ultralight Hoody In the usual climbing fantasy, gear exists for the climbing itself. A shoe has to bite on a tiny edge. A rope has to catch a fall. A harness has to disappear once it is on. But on a long multi-pitch route, a climb broken into several roped sections, the reality is usually less glamorous: you spend a lot of time not climbing. You belay. You wait for the party ahead to get moving. You manage ropes at the anchor. You cool down. You put a layer on. You take it off. You start climbing again either too hot or already too cold. That gray zone is exactly where Patagonia has placed the R1 Ultralight Hoody. Not as armor against the elements, but as a transition layer. A piece built for those awkward in-between moments when your body is stuck between the heat of movement and the chill of standing still. Not Really an R1 The R1 has a small mythology of its own at Patagonia. It is the technical fleece, the one that has spent years on the shoulders of climbers, alpinists, and that small tribe of people who insist they are never cold. The Ultralight version arrives with a name that sounds like the original simply went on a diet. That is not really what is happening here. It does not feel like a classic R1 with material shaved off. It feels more like a garment designed from a very specific use case: long free routes, shaded belay stations, and approach hikes where you start sweating before you have even touched the rock. The idea behind the piece comes from a familiar habit. After a hard approach, a lot of climbers peel off a damp T-shirt and pull a fleece directly over their skin. That explains the hybrid construction, somewhere between a comfortable technical baselayer and a stripped-down midlayer. That is where the hoody gets interesting. It does not promise down-jacket warmth. It does not claim to protect like a wind shell. It tries to cover that annoying middle ground where you need a little bit of everything without wanting to carry anything extra. In that sense, “Ultralight” should be read less as a big performance claim and more as a clue to how the piece is meant to be used. This R1 is not made to impress on a hanger or carry some alpine legend all by itself. It is trying to disappear: under a harness, in a pack, beneath a shell, under a helmet. That is not always the easiest thing to sell in a gear world where products often shout louder than the people using them. But it may be what makes this hoody feel so well judged. The Quiet Kind of Comfort In use, this kind of layer is judged less by a wow factor than by the small things it does not do. Does it pull under the arms when you move? Does it ride up under the harness as soon as you reach overhead? Do the pockets still work once you are tied in? On that terrain, the ergonomics make a lot of sense. The deep half-zip lets you vent without the bottom of the fleece popping out of your harness. The two chest pockets avoid the usual absurdity of hand pockets, which a harness waist belt makes almost useless. The close-fitting hood is designed to slide under a helmet without adding an annoying lump around the neck. Still, it is worth being clear about what this product is not. This R1 is not a warm fleece. It will not replace a real puffy at the belay if the wind picks up, and it is definitely not a softshell when the weather turns ugly. Its value is mostly in smoothing out temperature swings. It is a moving layer, not a standing-around layer. That is probably where some climbers will be disappointed. “R1” suggests reassuring warmth. “Ultralight” suggests something close to a technical feat. The truth is less dramatic: this is a very well-designed top, but for a narrow use. Outside that use case, it can quickly look like a thin fleece with a high price tag. So the awkward question is also the fair one: who is this really for? For the gym, short single-pitch cragging, or everyday use with a vague outdoor flavor, the case is hard to make unless you simply like Patagonia. For climbers who spend real time on the wall, who know the belays where you get cold too fast and the pitches where you need to move without feeling boxed in, the proposition becomes much stronger. The R1 Ultralight is not the most impressive fleece in the lineup. It may simply be one of the most honest about what it is built to do: a thin, technical, specialized layer that does not oversell itself, but does help you climb a little more smoothly. In plain terms, the Patagonia R1 Ultralight Hoody is not a miracle piece. It is a multi-pitch tool, designed to reduce the small irritations of a long day on the rock: the cold creeping back in, sweat hanging around, gear getting in the way, the zipper you keep adjusting every few minutes. It is expensive, not especially warm, and probably too specific for the average climber. But within its lane — climbing smoothly, waiting often, and starting again without rebuilding your whole layering system at the belay — it makes real sense. A fleece for the parts of the day when you are not climbing, then. Which, on a long route, can end up being a surprisingly large part of the day. Tech Specs - Patagonia Men’s R1® Ultralight Hoody Type: Ultralight technical hooded fleece Intended use: Multi-pitch climbing, climbing, active layer / midlayer Fabric: 100% recycled polyester Construction: Breathable double-knit fabric with a smooth, abrasion-resistant outer face Fit: Slim Closure: Deep half-zip Hood: Close-fitting, helmet-compatible Pockets: Two vertical zippered chest pockets Cuffs: Low-profile finish designed to reduce bulk Claimed weight: 280 g Made in: Vietnam

Founded in 1955 by two women who hid their gender behind initials, Summit was one of the first great American climbing magazines. In 2024, Michael Levy brought it back as Summit Journal. This is the story of a stubbornly independent editorial bet. © Courtesy of the Summit Journal Michael Levy does not wear suits often. Almost never, really. But in early fall 2023, he was heading into a meeting where he had no idea what to expect. So he dressed the part. The young climber-journalist had landed an appointment at one of New York’s most selective clubs: the Harvard Club. Buttoned up and slightly out of place, he was there to meet an 82-year-old man he had never seen before. Then David Swanson appeared. A former president of the Explorers Club, Swanson is a well-known figure in the American mountain world. They sat down in a wood-paneled room. Levy laid out his plan to revive the magazine. Swanson listened closely. Then he nodded and set one condition: if the magazine was not profitable within five years, the rights would go back to him. Deal. The Inheritor With a handshake, Michael Levy had taken responsibility for the legacy of one of the most iconic climbing magazines in the United States. Sixty-eight years of vertical stories, strange detours, and American climbing history were now on his shoulders. And yet, when Levy appears on a video call, he does not look crushed by history. Calling in from Colorado, where he grew up, the thirtysomething publisher smiles broadly beneath a cap. A little more than two years have passed since “his” Summit Journal first appeared. Since the February 2024 issue, with a climber hanging above the sea on the cover, things have been going, he says, “pretty well.” He has just sent the fifth issue to press. When we speak in February 2026, he has also just learned that Summit Journal has been nominated for a National Magazine Award in the category of Best Still and Animated Illustrations. It is one of the most prestigious honors in American magazine publishing, with results due in the coming weeks. “Awards don’t really matter to me,” he says, brushing it off. “But being recognized alongside The New York Times, The Verge, or The Atlantic still means something.” At the top of the stack is the February 2024 issue, the first after a 27-year hiatus © Courtesy of Summit Journal Nearly three years later, that handshake at the Harvard Club looks like a good deal. But the story of Summit did not begin with Michael Levy. It did not begin with David Swanson, either. It began in 1955, in the basement of a small brown house perched on a granite spur in Big Bear Lake, in California’s San Bernardino Mountains. That is where Jene Crenshaw and Helen Kilness stitched and stapled the first issues of America’s first monthly climbing magazine. The two women had met during World War II, while serving as radio operators in Georgia. After the armistice, they pooled their modest savings, bought a motorcycle, learned to ride it, and crossed the country together. Once they reached the West Coast, they launched Summit Magazine with a simple conviction: the United States needed a serious climbing magazine. And apparently, no one else was going to make one. To claim that space, though, the founders had to change their names. In a world completely dominated by men, Jene signed as “J.M. Crenshaw.” Helen became “H.V.J. Kilness.” From the beginning, the magazine had a distinctive spirit, one Levy now describes as an “egalitarian ethos.” “Royal Robbins, one of the great figures in North American climbing, was an editor there from 1964 to 1974,” he explains. “So you had his columns about the first ascents of El Capitan and Half Dome. But on the very next page, you might have a story from a mother writing about going climbing with her son.” That refusal of elitism, paired with a desire to speak to regular climbers, became one of the magazine’s most durable signatures. The print run eventually reached 10,000 copies. The founders did not want it to grow beyond that. Too much success, they feared, would cut into their climbing time. Sometimes they even skipped issues because they had gone climbing for several weeks. In 1989, Crenshaw and Kilness sold the magazine. Summit became Summit: The Mountain Journal, a large-format quarterly. That first revival ended in 1996. Then the magazine disappeared for 27 years. Money, Chris Sharma, and a Few Glasses of Whiskey A few years ago, Michael Levy had never heard that story. A fellow writer changed that. In a series of essays published in Alpinist, Katie Ives told the story of Jene and Helen, the “Summit House,” the initials, the motorcycle. At the time, Levy was a journalist and editor who had worked at Rock & Ice and Climbing before both titles were absorbed by Outside Magazine. “Back then, most climbers had never heard of Summit,” he says. “Katie kind of dusted it off. That’s what put it on my radar. And after that, the name, the brand, just stayed in the back of my mind forever.” Back issues of Summit from the summer of 1964 and May 1957 © courtesy of Summit Journal In 2023, Levy decided to act. Tracking down the owner of the rights took time. Jene’s niece, Paula Crenshaw, eventually gave him a phone number. “He might still be alive,” she told him. “He’s in his eighties.” Levy called David Swanson and gave him the pitch in two minutes. Not long after, the thirtysomething journalist found himself dressed up in a New York club room that smelled of old wood and Scotch. In reality, there would be several meetings between Levy and Swanson. Enough to settle the name, the logo, the rights to the legendary covers, and the purchase price. “Modest enough that I could do it with my savings and not ruin myself if the whole thing completely flopped,” Levy says, without giving the figure. The two men also agreed on a clause in the contract: if Summit Journal was not profitable within five years, the rights would return to Swanson. “Not because he wanted to do anything with it,” Levy says. “He just wanted to make sure that if I couldn’t make it work, the legacy of the magazine wouldn’t disappear.” “Summit Journal had been profitable from day one” Michael Levy in The New York Times Before the launch, Levy called Mike Rogge, the publisher of Mountain Gazette, another mountain magazine that had been brought back from the dead a few years earlier. Same path, same fight. Rogge became a mentor and pushed Levy to publish two issues a year instead of four, with one guiding principle repeated three times: “Quality, quality, quality.” “He told me, ‘If you believe in the quality of what you’re doing, other people will believe in it too,’” Levy says. Levy was already finding his own route, and gathering his own origin stories. In one editor’s note, he writes about climbing the south face of the Moose’s Tooth in Alaska the summer before relaunching Summit Journal. At a belay stance — the anchor where climbers stop between pitches — his mind was not entirely on the wall. He was thinking about the mountain of problems waiting for him back in New York: the website running late, the impossible logistics of subscriptions, all the things that still had to be solved. On the climb, he met a guy named Zach. Bad weather pinned them down for five days at base camp. They played cards, drank whiskey, and talked about their lives in the tent. Zachary Runyan was a web developer. He would become Summit Journal’s digital director. The Story Behind the Story For the launch, Levy bet everything on community. He reached out to every professional climber he had ever emailed over the years and told them about the project. “Like influencers,” he jokes, with a slightly embarrassed smile. Adam Ondra, Chris Sharma, Sasha DiGiulian: all of them shared the announcement. Within a month, Levy had reached the number of subscribers — a figure he will not disclose — that he needed to make the project viable. A few months later, he told The New York Times that Summit Journal had been “profitable from day one.” How? A smart preorder strategy and “a lot of luck.” But above all, Summit Journal has a very clear position. The magazine comes out twice a year, in a large format, on thick paper. No articles are published online. Everything is reserved for subscribers, who pay $60 a year. Advertising makes up barely 10 percent of the pages. Levy prefers to call his advertisers “brand partners”: companies rooted in the climbing community, investing because, as he puts it, “it’s good for the industry.” Today, revenue is split roughly evenly between subscriptions and advertising. Levy’s dream? “To run 100 percent on subscriptions.” Recent tariff increases reminded him why. One advertiser, whose business depended heavily on overseas production, pulled out. “That’s 10 percent of my annual revenue gone overnight,” he says. “Print is a little like vinyl. What’s old becomes new again. There’s an audience that appreciates objects you can hold in your hands and put on a shelf. It’s become a little countercultural” Michael Levy, Editor-in-Chief of Summit Journal The editorial budget for each issue runs between $40,000 and $50,000, a threshold Levy exceeds every time. “Because that’s what matters most to me,” he says. One long profile of French alpinist Benjamin Védrines cost more than $10,000 by itself. But the principle remains the same: editorial work has to be the first budget line. The team is still lean. Levy edits and publishes the magazine, with Randall Levensaler leading art direction, his friend Zach running digital, and two part-time collaborators helping out. “I’d love to bring all of them on full time,” he says. “We just need to grow a little more.” The goal is 10,000 subscribers. To get there, Levy keeps coming back to the same thing: editorial quality. And in his view, one way to protect that quality is to commit to print. That means stepping away from the internet. Summit Journal has a newsletter and an Instagram account, but Levy distrusts the web the way a climber distrusts a bad bolt — fixed protection you are supposed to trust, but really don’t want to fall on. “The internet is like drinking from a fire hose,” he says. “There’s too much. A lot of it is good, but you get lost in the noise.” His unhappy experiences at Rock & Ice and Climbing, both of which stopped publishing print editions, left a mark. “Print is a little like vinyl,” he says. “What’s old becomes new again. There’s an audience that appreciates objects you can hold in your hands and put on a shelf. It’s become a little countercultural.” Michael Levy, Editor-in-Chief of Summit Journal © Courtesy of Michael Levy With that inheritance on his back, Levy keeps looking for what he calls “the story behind the story.” When other outlets were chasing a major Himalayan first ascent, Summit Journal took time to find a different angle. The editors discovered that the portaledge used on the climb — a hanging platform climbers sleep on during big-wall ascents — had been designed by a craftsman who sewed it in his garage. The article did not retell the ascent. It told the story of that man. “I’m constantly asking how the magazine can be a vehicle for human stories, and for seeing the world from different angles,” Levy says. “That’s what keeps me up at night.” There are still a few steps left before Summit Journal reaches the summit it has set for itself. In an era when one piece of information drives out the next with a single swipe, one magazine is trying to pause the algorithmic feed, the attention crisis, and the three-second view. Will it work? Either way, “America’s first monthly climbing magazine” has become one of the longest and most stubborn answers to the chaos of modern publishing. And 70 years later, the story is still being written.

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

After the International Olympic Committee announced that access to women’s events at the Los Angeles 2028 Games would be tied to a genetic test for the SRY gene, several sports organizations, advocacy groups, and independent media outlets — including Vertige Media — are calling for the policy to be scrapped. © David Pillet The debate over who gets to compete in the women’s category at the highest level of sport has entered a new phase. On March 26, 2026, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) introduced a new eligibility rule for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games. Under the policy, any athlete seeking to compete in a women’s event will have to undergo a one-time genetic screening for the SRY gene, generally associated with male sex development. The test may be carried out through a cheek swab, saliva sample, or blood test. Officially, the Olympic body says the measure is meant to protect fairness and safety in sport. The rule will apply starting with qualification events, as well as at the Youth Olympic Games. Its most immediate effect would be to exclude transgender athletes from women’s competitions. The IOC does, however, allow for exceptions for some people with differences of sex development, or DSD, particularly when it can be established that they do not have a physical advantage linked to testosterone. Backlash In France, several sports and advocacy organizations are already challenging the decision. In a joint op-ed published by Sport et plein air, the grassroots sports outlet of the FSGT, a French multisport federation, the coalition denounces what it describes as the return of “femininity tests.” Alongside the FSGT, the statement is signed by Rouge Direct, FC Paris Arc-en-ciel, Paname Pride FC, Anestaps, the Fédération sportive LGBT+, Fondation Fier, Vent Debout, and Vertige Media. “The world of sport has a duty to protect women. Not by excluding some of them, but by changing a system that has always used them, harmed them, and dominated them” Excerpt from the op-ed. The statement, scheduled for coordinated release this Friday, May 15, at 11 a.m., condemns mechanisms the signatories see as discriminatory, arguing that they would reinforce “the stigmatization and control of women athletes’ bodies.” According to the organizations, transgender and intersex athletes are the first targets. But they argue the symbolic reach of the policy goes further, touching every woman competing at the highest level. The issue brings back a long history of policing women’s bodies within the Olympic movement. Asked about the IOC’s decision, French Sports Minister Marina Ferrari recalled that “these tests, introduced beginning in 1967, ended in 1999 because of strong concerns from the scientific community about their usefulness.” She called the move “a step backward” and warned about the ethical, legal, and medical questions raised by the widespread use of genetic testing. The French National Olympic and Sports Committee (CNOSF) has taken a more cautious position, but it has raised concerns as well. The organization acknowledges that SRY testing raises “major ethical and scientific questions” and points to a concrete legal problem: in France, bioethics law and the Civil Code strictly regulate genetic analysis, which could prevent these tests from being carried out in French laboratories. The Wrong Test Beyond the legal fight, the controversy raises a central question: can eligibility for women’s events be reduced to a single genetic marker? For opponents of the policy, the answer is no. They argue that testing for the SRY gene imposes an overly binary reading of biological sex, even though intersex, medical, and genetic realities often do not fit neatly into administrative categories. The op-ed also places the IOC’s decision in a broader political context, one shaped in recent years by intensifying debates over the participation of transgender women in sport. For the signatories, the IOC is adopting a logic of suspicion that, under the banner of protecting women, risks excluding some of them. “The world of sport has a duty to protect women. Not by excluding some of them, but by changing a system that has always used them, harmed them, and dominated them,” the organizations write in their joint statement. For its part, the IOC says it wants to bring consistency to a regulatory landscape that has, until now, been highly fragmented. Several international federations — including World Athletics, World Aquatics, and World Rugby — have tightened their criteria for access to women’s categories in recent years. The Olympic body’s stated goal is to create a common framework across the Olympic movement. But that attempt at standardization does not end the debate. It moves it somewhere else. By turning a complex sporting, medical, legal, and political question into a standardized genetic criterion, the IOC has opened a fight that is likely to extend well beyond the Los Angeles Games. For the coalition of sports and advocacy groups, the goal now is to prevent the defense of women’s sport from becoming a justification for a new form of surveillance over women’s bodies. To read and sign the op-ed, go here.

In HBO’s documentary series The Dark Wizard, Alex Honnold is framed as the cool-headed rival who cracked the late Dean Potter’s ego. On his podcast Climbing Gold, the American climber pushes back against that version of the story, restoring some complexity to a relationship built more on admiration than animosity. Dean Potter © The Dark Wizard In The Dark Wizard, HBO’s series about Dean Potter, Alex Honnold almost becomes the perfect counterpoint to Yosemite’s “dark wizard.” On one side: Potter, mystical, restless, self-styled as both artist and risk-taker, obsessed with danger, performance, and the mark he would leave on the Valley. On the other: Honnold, younger, colder, more methodical, arriving with an almost irritating ability to climb the big vertical dreams Potter had carried around for years — sometimes before him, sometimes better. In our story on the series, Peter Mortimer and Nick Rosen explained how Honnold’s arrival eventually cracked Potter’s ego. “Dean Potter could have been a mentor to Alex Honnold,” Rosen told us. Instead, the relationship became a messy handoff between eras: the icon watching the future walk in. Honnold, though, seems less convinced by the “villain” role the documentary gives him. A Rivalry, Cut for TV On a recent episode of Climbing Gold, titled “Getting It Right: Charlize Theron and Beth Rodden” and released May 1, 2026, Honnold spoke briefly about HBO’s production. The episode is mainly about Apex, the film in which Charlize Theron plays a climber with Beth Rodden’s support behind the scenes. But in the introduction, Honnold also says a few words about The Dark Wizard — enough to reopen one of the documentary’s most sensitive threads: his supposed rivalry with Dean Potter. “Dean was like my childhood hero. I was like, what a dude” Alex Honnold Asked whether it felt strange to be presented as the story’s villain, Honnold does not make a big deal of it, but he does not dodge the question either. “Kind of. Yeah,” he says. “We did like twelve hours of interview and they basically took all the most extreme stuff and like turned into, like deeply competitive, hates Dean, you know.” Then he adds: “It’s like slightly annoying.” Honnold is not trying to settle scores with the filmmakers. He calls the series “amazing” and says he is glad it exists. “The Dark Wizard’s amazing. It’s like, I’m glad they made it,” he says. But to him, Potter was never just an inconvenient rival in the Yosemite archive. “Dean was such a hero of mine,” Honnold says, “and really the whole generation of climbers.” It is a short line, but it puts back some of the nuance that documentary storytelling often strips away. Even nonfiction needs clean arcs: a hero, a flaw, a rival, a fall. In The Dark Wizard, Honnold becomes the natural rival — the person who does not merely challenge the throne, but eventually sits on it. Honnold’s point is simple: being seen as a threat is not the same as setting out to be one. Taken together, the facts do make the rivalry easy to understand. In 2008, Honnold made the first free solo of Half Dome — free soloing meaning climbing without a rope, where a fall is not an option — on a project Potter had wanted for himself. In The Dark Wizard, Potter’s hurt is stated plainly. Speaking about Honnold’s Half Dome solo, Potter says in archival footage used in the series: “Fuck. I wanted to do that.” He describes his younger rival as “a competitive little asshole” who had come in and done projects he knew mattered to him. In other words, HBO did not invent the rivalry out of thin air. It sharpened it, shaped it for the screen, but the tension was real. In 2012, Honnold dominated Yosemite. He set the speed record on the Nose with Hans Florine and completed the Yosemite Triple Crown as free solos. In the series, Honnold sums up that year with his usual bluntness: in effect, he had done almost everything Dean Potter had already done or still dreamed of doing, often faster, sometimes in a cleaner style. On screen, that makes for a compelling story: the young gun stepping all over the older legend’s ground. Honnold prefers a less dramatic reading. He does not deny being competitive. He just puts that competitiveness back into the culture of Yosemite at the time. “Competitive in the same way that I was competing with literally everybody else in the Valley,” he says. “But no, I mean, didn’t have any particular mean Dean was like my childhood hero. I was like, what a dude.” Then comes the very Honnold part, blunt and almost clinically simple: “At a certain point you realize that you can do all the things that your childhood hero is doing and you’re just kinda like, cool, I’ll do all this.” It is a hard line, but it is also very Honnold: respectful, admiring, and still unable to give up the cold analysis. The Wizard and the Method That is where the discomfort at the heart of The Dark Wizard becomes interesting. The series shows, with real force, what Honnold’s arrival did to Potter. But Honnold is reminding us that being perceived as a threat does not mean you meant to be one. In Potter’s eyes, Honnold may have been the guy who came along and broke the spell. In Honnold’s memory, he was still the kid staring up at an extraordinary figure. That is what makes their shared story more powerful than a simple ego war. Potter built a near-mythic persona around himself. Honnold represented almost the opposite: the climber stripped of myth, practical and unromantic, able to turn someone else’s artistic vision into a series of executable moves. Potter wanted to give the void a cosmic meaning. Honnold showed that the same void could also be managed with climbing shoes, a photographic memory for holds, and an almost terrifying control of fear. Despite his issues with the edit, Honnold does not dismiss the series. For him, the bigger point is that The Dark Wizard puts Dean Potter back at the center of climbing history, where a younger generation might otherwise miss him. “It makes me slightly sad that people that get into climbing now will have never heard of him because, you know, he died in 2016,” Honnold says. “And so it’s nice to sort of remember his legacy in some way.” That lands almost like a right of reply. In HBO’s documentary, Honnold is the climber who surpasses the master. In his own memory, he is still the kid who watched Potter go first, then realized he could step into that space too. Maybe that is where The Dark Wizard gets it right, even when it takes shortcuts. Myths are never passed down cleanly. They rub against each other, contradict each other, and eventually get overtaken. Dean Potter wanted to fly. Alex Honnold climbed. And while HBO chose to see a dramatic rivalry, Honnold seems to see a story that was just a little too perfect.

At 32, Lucas coaches kids, sets routes, and works a few front desk shifts at a major national climbing gym chain in France. On a permanent 28-hour-a-week contract, he agreed to open up his finances for Vertige Media’s new series on climbing workers in France. (cc) Tofan Teodor / Unsplash We were right to call Lucas* on a Thursday afternoon, during his break. Three hours later, he probably would not have picked up. Or maybe he would have, but we would not have gotten much out of him. “On Thursday nights, don’t talk to me,” he says over the phone. “I go home, take a nap, and then maybe I can have an evening.” There is a reason for that. By then, the climbing coach is usually coming off four hard days in a row. Lucas’s week is not as predictable as a corporate office job, but it does have a rhythm. On Mondays, he usually spends eight hours route setting — building the climbs on the wall. On Tuesdays, he coaches, sometimes until 10:30 p.m. Wednesdays usually mean seven and a half hours of classes, with two breaks in the middle. On Thursdays, he teaches a high school class, then stacks two or three coaching sessions back to back. “If I have two or three classes on Thursday, I’m cooked,” he says. Then comes one day off. After that, he has to put his shoes back on for a weekend day. Sometimes Sunday. The Work and the Pay Lucas has been a climbing instructor for six years at a large national chain. Before that, he worked at summer camps. “I was making two euros an hour, but I was having the time of my life,” he says. That is when he started to see working with kids as a calling. So he decided to combine it with his passion for climbing and earned the French state certification that allowed him to be hired as a work-study employee at the same gym where he still works today. Now in his early thirties, Lucas has a permanent contract at 80 percent. “I work 28 hours a week,” he says. “But honestly, nobody at the gym is on a 35-hour week except management. Very few people could handle that pace at 35 hours.” Lucas coaches, sets, works the front desk, tidies up, carries gear, cleans, organizes, and watches the floor. All of it for €1,408 take-home pay a month — about €1,850 gross. There is no 13th-month bonus; his employer does not offer one. Overtime is annualized, taken back as time off, not paid out, unless the total is over the limit at the end of August. Even then, it is capped at 20 hours. To bring in a little extra, the coach-routesetter-front-desk-worker could in theory count on bonuses. Lucas says “it’s complicated.” What matters is this: the gym uses a collective performance bonus system. “We all have targets for membership sales, average food and drink spend, and even the gym’s Google reviews,” he explains. The rule is simple. If the team hits the target, everyone gets the bonus. If it misses, no one does. “I think that’s fair,” Lucas says. “The quality of the gym depends as much on the routesetter as it does on the person at the register. It keeps everyone from only looking out for themselves.” In 2025, the team received the equivalent of €800 gross in collective bonuses, or about €60 net per month on average. Lucas also gets the standard benefits that come with working for a small or midsize French company. His employer reimburses 75 percent of his public transit pass. His health insurance is 80 percent covered. He also gets a free membership at every French gym in the network, and he could extend that benefit to a partner. “Honestly, even at competing gyms, I usually get in for free,” he says. “People are pretty good to each other about that.” Gear — ropes, quickdraws, harnesses, helmets — can be borrowed for the weekend, as long as it is not already booked for a scheduled outing. Lucas lives in a large French city and gets by on his salary. He is not splurging, but he says he knows he is “very lucky.” His rent is moderate, and he receives about €100 a month from France’s CAF, the public benefits agency, through the country’s low-income work bonus. When he goes out, he keeps an eye on spending. “I have drinks at home instead of going to the bar,” he says. “A small concert once in a while, but never anything big. And vacations are usually climbing. Not too far away.” “I would never complain again if I got to €1,800 a month,” he says. “Even €1,600 would already feel more in line with what’s being asked of us” What the Job Really Costs Asked whether he can save money, Lucas says no. He recently bought a car. According to him, every coworker with a car is in the same position. “The only people who put a little money aside are the ones who don’t have one,” he says. “And even then, we’re talking 150 euros max.” Then he adds: “We’re not in poverty, but you can’t have expensive taste.” He thinks about buying an apartment. But alone, on this salary, it feels far away. “The coworkers who managed to do it had family money for the down payment,” he says. He does not talk much about money with them. It is not really a subject at the gym. Not with his friends outside climbing, either. What bothers Lucas is not only the number at the bottom of the pay slip. It is the gap between what he earns and the level of responsibility the job demands. “Every night I’m coaching, I could end up at the police station,” he says. “Fifteen seconds at the wrong time and a kid can get seriously hurt, or even die. That stays in the back of your mind.” For him, the level of attention required is real and constant. The pay does not reflect it. “I would never complain again if I got to €1,800 a month,” he says. “Even €1,600 would already feel more in line with what’s being asked of us.” He has tried to negotiate. His employer always gives the same answer: “Technically, we can’t pay more.” Since his work-study contract, Lucas has still received several raises over six years. But at this point, he says the goal is not really to get paid more — he knows that is too complicated — but to ask for specific working conditions. “When I was hired after my work-study program, I had a list of requests,” he says. “It’s not written into my contract. It’s a verbal agreement. But it’s held.” Schedule adjustments. Only one Sunday worked per month. “That’s not nothing,” he says. Lucas is not unionized. He would like to be. He thinks it matters. At the same time, he cannot see himself doing this job for years. “I give myself four or five years,” he says. “After that, I could see myself still coaching, but independently, and more outdoors. People don’t realize how exhausting the noise in a climbing gym is. It’s constant: the drill, kids yelling, music, the bar, the restaurant. It wears you down. At the crag, I’m sure you could work more hours and feel less tired.” That is part of what he wishes customers understood. Behind the front desk smile and the energy he brings to classes, “there are a lot of hassles.” Enough, in any case, for Lucas to offer this advice to young people thinking about getting into the job: “You’ll laugh a lot. Just don’t expect to get rich.” *Name has been changed.

Every week, former soldiers who lost a leg or an arm on the front line come to a stylish climbing gym in Kyiv and work their way up routes. Since 2022, the war is believed to have caused nearly 120,000 amputations, according to some estimates. A report from Ukraine. © Pierre Terraz for Vertige Media Under the stunned eyes of able-bodied climbers, Dima lowers proudly on an auto-belay, a device that catches and lowers a climber without a human belayer. It does not happen every day, but today the joy is all over his face: he has just finished his first route since the attack that changed his life. Once he unclips, he collapses onto a crash pad and throws both arms into the air. A Giant on Steel Feet Dima is 32. He lost both legs on April 1, 2024. Not in a motorcycle crash or from an autoimmune disease, but in a violent kamikaze drone strike — one of those TNT-packed aircraft that can fly up to 150 km/h, about 93 mph, and slam into a target by surprise before exploding. His story is tragically similar to those of tens of thousands of Ukrainians since Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022. On the front, these killer drones have become one of the main dangers for infantry on foot. According to official Ukrainian military data, casualties attributed to drones rose from less than 10 percent in 2022 to nearly 80 percent last year. “That day, I had just been deployed to Pokrovsk, in the Donbas. Our mission was simple: neutralize an enemy position, then get back to the trench in our vehicle. On the way back, I remember our guys yelling at us over the walkie-talkies to speed up, then the sudden buzz of a drone, and then everything went black,” Dima says, sitting in his wheelchair. The rest of the story was told to him later by the six men in his unit. Right after the strike, his teammates managed to get out of the burning vehicle unharmed. Dima was the only one badly wounded. Without thinking, they pulled him from his seat and saw that his legs were shredded. They rushed to put on four emergency tourniquets to stop the bleeding. It was not enough. “I like it because I reconnect with my body. I’ve tried several sports since my amputation: skiing, wakeboarding, even kayaking. But climbing is the only one where I don’t want to quit” Félix, a former Ukrainian soldier Only after long minutes at a “stabilization point” — a kind of makeshift field hospital near the front line — did a doctor decide to transfer him to a surgical unit in the Dnipro metro area, in east-central Ukraine, where both of his legs were amputated to save his life. After months of recovery, 69 surgeries, and just as many doubts, he now makes the trip to this Kyiv gym twice a week to get his head right. On the left, Félix watches Dima doing pull-ups. On the right, Dima in the locker room of the climbing gym in Kyiv © Pierre Terraz for Vertige Media “Before the war and my accident, sport was my whole life. I started weight training when I was 16. They called me Arnold Schwarzenegger,” he says, showing off a little as he knocks out pull-ups on a bar, hands dusted with chalk. For all his giant presence, the stuffed panda clipped to his prosthetic leg makes everyone smile. Climbing with only his arms, which load up fast with lactic acid, increases the strain on his muscles by about 50 percent. “My extensors are stiff, and I get tired faster. The hardest thing is listening to my body and not pushing too hard. Another tricky part is learning how to manage where I put my weight. That’s where I’m going to improve this year,” the former soldier says. Superhumans, Land Mines, and a Second Wind Every week, six to eight participants, all amputees who have lost a leg or an arm, come to climb the gym’s walls. The classes, which have been running for nearly a year, are organized by Second Wind, a Ukrainian nonprofit that offers indoor and outdoor activities for veterans. Hikes in the Carpathians, mountaineering in Nepal, bouldering, roped climbing — the group keeps building inclusive projects around amputees. On Friday, April 24, Vertige Media met several participants in Kyiv, including Dima. On one side of the ultramodern gym, able-bodied climbers work slab routes — low-angle climbs that demand balance and precision — and film themselves in the steep overhangs. On the other side, men wearing prosthetics aim for the tops of routes. More slowly, but with more determination. As the music shifts between European-style electro and Ukrainian rap, Felix, another participant, adjusts the prosthetic on his injured leg. More introverted than Dima, the 29-year-old is still deeply marked by the accident that happened 11 months ago. That morning, Felix had set out on a reconnaissance patrol in the village of Shcherbynivka. When he lit a cigarette, his foot brushed a land mine. His leg was blown apart. He blacked out immediately. Leaning against one of the gym walls, he remembers that traumatic day. “They operated on me right away in a house on the front line. It was very hard. It was cold, and there wasn’t much equipment. I stayed less than a day before being transferred to the Superhumans Center in Lviv, where I started rehab,” he says, tears in his eyes. It was in the halls of that state-of-the-art trauma center, largely funded by American foundations and located near the Polish border, that he first heard about Second Wind. As soon as his custom prosthetic was ready, he decided to move back to Kyiv and start climbing. “I like it because I reconnect with my body. I’ve tried several sports since my amputation: skiing, wakeboarding, even kayaking. But climbing is the only one where I don’t want to quit,” Felix says as he puts on a harness. Félix on the overhang in the Kiev hall © Pierre Terraz for Vertige Media “Come on, let’s move, man. Saddle up!” Alina Bielakova calls out, clipping a carabiner to his harness. With care and energy, she gives Felix advice on where to place his prosthetic, how far to reach, and when to rest when she senses his confidence slipping. Placing an artificial foot well, without the sensation of touch and with distance hard to judge, is almost impossibly difficult. So for nearly two hours, as she does every week, the 33-year-old climber throws herself fully into her role as coach. After starting her career in design, she discovered climbing in 2020 in a worn-out gym in Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine. Today, her hometown is constantly bombarded by the Russian army and lives to the rhythm of air-raid alerts. Climbing gave her a second breath. “It was climbing or death. The first time, I was so happy that I told myself I wanted to do this for the rest of my life” Alina, a climbing coach in Kyiv “It was climbing or death. The first time, I was so happy that I told myself I wanted to do this for the rest of my life,” she says, smiling as she scrolls through photos of her first competitions on her iPhone. Between Reels of French climber Oriane Bertone, there are clips of Alina tearing through boulders from Kyiv to Lviv, then Poland and Italy. Unlike men, who are no longer allowed to leave Ukraine because of the general mobilization, women can still travel abroad. She improved quickly and stood out, reaching V7 in bouldering, or Font 7A+, and 5.13b in sport climbing, the U.S. equivalent of French 8a. “In other countries, they’re ahead of us. Some climbers live from climbing. Here, you need another job on the side,” she says, determined. To keep climbing as much as possible, she got hired at this Kyiv gym. Her contagious good mood quickly made her the obvious choice to coach these former soldiers. Dima climbing, belayed by Alina © Pierre Terraz for Vertige Media “At first, I was nervous,” she says with a smile. “During the first classes, I was afraid I’d say the wrong thing. They all have different stories, different traumas. Look at Dima — he’s so strong. We had a good laugh when he was surprised that someone as small as me could climb such hard boulders. We became friends. These guys are family to me now.” Sitting on the mat, her students listen closely as she talks. That kind of intimate openness is still fairly rare in Ukraine, so they take advantage of the curious journalists in the room to hear Alina unpack what she feels. They all owe her a lot. Every session, she is everywhere at once, running herself down, taking the work seriously. “I was injured myself three years ago. Not near death, of course, but it makes you think. I had an open knee fracture after a rock hit me outside. For months, I learned to climb on one leg. In a way, I experienced a version of their disability, and that helps me guide them,” she says. At the same time, one of her students, Erman, a lean 37-year-old, is fighting his way up an impressive overhang on lead, climbing with the rope and clipping protection as he goes. Rope clenched between his teeth, he has had a prosthetic on his right leg for two years. A former soldier, he also stepped on a land mine in the brutal Donbas region. Alina Bieliakova cuts the interview short to cheer him on, filming his effort in 4K so she can break it down with him afterward. After a brutal section, the former serviceman manages to flash the route — sending it on his first try. Above the Horror Back on the crash pad, he modestly says the performance comes from his long life as an athlete. A former cyclist and standout swimmer, he could not imagine giving up his competitive streak after the accident. Quite the opposite. “I come every week. I want to get better than Alina. That’s my number-one goal,” the new climber says from his six-foot frame, needling her a little. “I’m kidding. More seriously, the adrenaline does me a world of good. Now I’m waiting for the NGO’s summer trips outside. Bouldering is great, but I need air.” Second Wind is planning mountain trips for August 2026, a prospect that has these veterans excited. After completing their service in the armed forces, they can once again cross Ukraine’s borders. “The destination hasn’t been set yet. My dream would be for all of us to go climbing together in Turkey,” Alina Bieliakova says, visibly moved, as she coils her ropes. Ukraine releases almost no information about the number of soldiers wounded at the front, for both strategic and psychological reasons. In 2026, President Volodymyr Zelensky put the figure at nearly 400,000 wounded. According to the National Health Service, about 120,000 amputations have been performed since the war began four years ago. The conflict has also forced millions of people to flee their homes, inside and outside Ukraine, making it the largest war in Europe since World War II. But sometimes, out of all that horror, extraordinary stories still emerge. In 2025, two former members of Ukrainian intelligence, both amputees, inspired the internet by climbing several Himalayan peaks back-to-back. Proof, maybe, that aiming for the summit can still land you somewhere in the clouds.