As France’s private climbing-gym market struggles, the independent gym network The Roof looks like it’s found another way forward. Built on a cooperative structure and a mutual-aid network that’s unusual in France, these gyms aim for shared governance, capped pay gaps, and deep local roots. This is a look inside a model that’s holding up—somewhere between hard-nosed financial discipline and what its builders call a “sincere utopia.” The Roof team in Toulouse © Julien Petitpierre The scene has become a modern cliché. Stand in the right spot and you can take in the whole mural commercial climbing gyms have learned to paint: stylish twenty-somethings sipping beer in the warm glow of a trendy bar. Only in the back—behind big glass walls—do you finally spot the panels of steep terrain studded with bright holds. Like plenty of others, The Roof’s gym in Toulouse checks the boxes of what people now call a “third place” (a hangout that’s not home or work). People drift through the big entry hall with the body language of regulars. Lots of them won’t climb. They’re here for what the place is —and, sure, for the craft beer and the small plates too. A Good SCOP The Roof Toulouse opened in 2023 inside Les Halles de la Cartoucherie, a former factory turned cultural hub in western Toulouse. Since its makeover, the place has become an institution in the Pink City, drawing more than two million visitors a year. You pass the gym’s terrace—palm trees and all—before stepping into the vast nave that holds the city’s biggest food court, plus a performance venue, coworking spaces, and even squash courts. Planted right in the middle of it all, The Roof feeds off the buzz. On this winter weekend, the gym is even hosting an eco-focused festival with Les Halles, called “Faire écologie,” bringing together nonprofits, activists, and public figures for two days of discussions. That’s probably why Pierre-Olivier Dupuy—co-founder and co-manager of the climbing gym—looks even more slammed than usual. Between scanning people in at the door, pouring pints, and getting ready for classes, he’s also greeting the next panelist and making sure the conference room is set. “We wanted to open a gym, but we could see where the business world goes wrong. We didn’t want to become a standard company” Pierre-Olivier Dupuy, co-manager of The Roof Toulouse Somewhere in the middle of his thousand daily tasks, Dupuy sits down to talk about the model behind his gym. He’s 44, and he’s celebrating the start of The Roof Toulouse’s third year in business. He rubs his scalp, glances around, then smiles. “See this festival?” he says. “This is exactly what we wanted here—bringing a bunch of different people together around shared values. For me, that’s what The Roof is. Not just a climbing gym, but a place that actually means something.” A former academic researcher, Dupuy has been nursing the dream of making a living from climbing since 2015. Back then, he was climbing in a club with his friend Aurélien Guesdon, who would become his first business partner. “We wanted to open a gym, but we could see where the business world goes wrong,” he says over an espresso. “We didn’t want to become a standard company. At the same time, we didn’t want to stay a nonprofit either, stuck depending on time slots and public subsidies.” The “third way” they landed on was France’s Entreprise Sociale et Solidaire  (social and solidarity economy). That’s where they found the legal structure that, in their eyes, checked every box: a SCOP—a Société Coopérative Participative , essentially a French worker cooperative. It took Dupuy and Guesdon seven years before they could finally open the doors. Linked to the massive redevelopment project at Les Halles de la Cartoucherie, The Roof Toulouse depended on a complex project package, bank negotiations, and plenty of administrative headaches. But since opening in 2023, it’s done fairly well: €1.6 million in revenue, up 14% from 2024 to 2025. That number looks even more striking next to figures recently shared by L’Observatoire de l’escalade , which reports an average 5% decline in revenue for private climbing gyms in France. Today, Dupuy’s company employs 22 people—eight of them are also member-owners. That, he says, is what he’s proudest of. “We decide together,” he says. “That was one of our guiding principles from the start.” Like a conventional company, a SCOP has a general assembly where members vote on big decisions: strategy, investments, pay, leadership appointments, and more. The difference is that in a cooperative, one person equals one vote. “Decision-making is disconnected from capital,” Dupuy says. “Aurélien and I each put €30,000 into the company. Our vote still carries the same weight as someone else’s who put in three times less.” Under the Same Roof The Roof Toulouse’s SCOP bylaws give employees three years to decide whether they want to buy into the cooperative. So far, most of the first wave of staff have said yes, and two more people are expected to join this year. For Dupuy, it’s “a real lever to get involved in strategic decisions instead of just executing.” It’s also how the model’s other pillars take shape: pay gaps capped at 1-to-3 (editor’s note: in conventional companies, the average is closer to 1-to-7), and a required minimum share of profits that must be reinvested in the company—at least 15%. “Most of the value created has to be put back toward the people who actually work here,” Dupuy says. Those choices help explain why The Roof says it sees very little turnover—despite running a gym with 750 square meters (about 8,100 square feet) of climbable surface, plus a yoga and Pilates studio, a restaurant, and a bar. Les deux co-fondateurs de The Roof Toulouse, Pierre-Olivier Dupuy à gauche et Aurélien Guesdon à droite © Julien Petitpierre Still, a SCOP doesn’t protect you from everything. The broader economy hits everyone the same way, and in 2025 it has landed hard on climbing gyms. “We might have good revenue, but we’re barely breaking even,” Dupuy says. With 2,500 members, The Roof Toulouse’s attendance hasn’t dipped. But everything around it keeps rising: food, energy, holds, cleaning—while customers’ purchasing power slides the other way. It’s a tough equation, and it demands strict management if you want to avoid what just happened next door: Les Halles de la Cartoucherie, despite growing popularity, has been placed into court-ordered reorganization. To better ride out headwinds, The Roof Toulouse is also part of a larger network: The Roof France, itself organized as a cooperative—more specifically a SCIC  ( Société Coopérative d’Intérêt Collectif , a French “collective interest” cooperative). The network now includes nine gyms across France: Bayonne, Brest, Poitiers, Rennes, Le Havre, Saint-Brieuc, Albi, Bourg-de-Péage—and Toulouse. “Each gym is completely independent—free and autonomous in its decisions and choices,” Dupuy says. “At a minimum, we share a name—The Roof—a visual identity, and a collective commitment to help each other.” Every Thursday morning, the managers across the network meet in a “co-dir” (a co-leadership meeting) to compare notes. “For a lot of us, it’s our first time building a business,” Dupuy says. “So we all feel the need to share our thinking—our doubts, our challenges, and what’s working.” When Dupuy and Guesdon first heard about The Roof network at the start of their own journey—more than ten years ago—it didn’t take long to buy in. “We’d just gone all-in on the social and solidarity economy, and the people there already shared those values,” Dupuy recalls. “Everyone was trying to build an alternative to the excesses of the standard economic model.” In other words: a whole crew of committed builders—led, at the beginning, by a trailblazer who didn’t exactly plan on becoming the face of a national network. UCPA, Mont Blanc, and Isabelle Autissier The story starts not far from Toulouse, in Durfort-Lacapelette, in 2012. Benoît Lacroix, then a specialized educator at Fondation d’Auteuil, didn’t know it yet, but he was about to fall hard for something besides climbing: the city of La Rochelle. On a weekend trip with his then-partner, the two became so taken with the “Ocean Gate” that they started hunting for local crags to climb. Problem: Charente-Maritime is famously short on real relief. So on the train back to Montauban, they scribbled a wild idea on a scrap of paper: build their own climbing gym. “It was sincere and kind of utopian,” Lacroix tells me over the phone. “We were kids—maybe 23 or 24—but we had a sense of the values we wanted in the project. We wrote that our goal wasn’t to extract value at all costs, but to make sure the value flows back to the people who make the place run. But once you say that, you still have to choose a structure—and we had no idea how.” So they did what most people do when they need help: they called friends. With a small crew in Montauban, they took over a former boat dealership building and built the gym the old-fashioned way—by sheer effort. Along the way, they crossed paths with people from the world of ecology and cooperation, including the sailor Isabelle Autissier. They convinced elected officials and local stakeholders, and soon The Roof La Rochelle opened its doors—in December 2013. The gym took off quickly—and it drew the attention of other local project leaders, first in Bayonne, then in Brest. “That’s when I started thinking the model could be shared,” Lacroix says. “I wrote this document called ‘Recipe for Making a The Roof’ and started supporting other entrepreneurs. And I realized I’d developed a real passion for putting projects together.” The expanded team of Cabanes Urbaines in La Rochelle during El Capp Fest in 2023 © courtesy of Benoît Lacroix Lacroix, it turns out, collects passions. The former Montauban resident also got hooked on solo offshore sailing. “That’s actually what pushed the first Roof gyms toward the Atlantic coast,” he says, laughing. “At the start, I thought it’d be cool to visit them by boat!” He never did, but that sailing obsession led to a meeting that would reshape The Roof network. “I was training for a Mini-Transat and looking for sponsors,” he says. “I’d met the guy who was going to become CEO of UCPA during a climb on Mont Blanc, so I knocked on his door. He told me, ‘Your Mini-Transat doesn’t interest me, but your climbing thing does—I want us in.’” That’s how UCPA—the large French nonprofit known for outdoor sports centers—entered the The Roof France project. And it changed a lot. “They first put equity into the network structure, which indirectly helped finance the creation of The Roof in Brest,” Lacroix explains. “Then we benefitted from their financial backbone, legal support, and expertise.” The First Cracks Years later, UCPA is still there. The organization even holds the presidency of The Roof France within the SCIC. And every Thursday morning, it’s Ludovic Marchant—head of sports activities and events development—who runs those co-leadership meetings for The Roof managers. “We stay humble and at a distance,” Marchant insists. “The cooperative is really run by the gyms. We do have signing authority as president, sure, but the gyms remain the majority.” Marchant calls himself “an administrative link.” But his inbox is where the first membership requests land. He’s also the one who calls the group together when a local project looks promising. Candidates then go through an onboarding path: they present their project to the network and get challenged on it. “We’re not thirsty for growth. We’re not ultra-capitalists. We don’t blow money. We stay careful. We help each other. It forces us to constantly question ourselves. And it reaffirms our values.” Marine Papa, co-founder of The Roof Bayonne By his own account, that structure reassures people. “We’re a big organization, and bankers like seeing that we’re there when it’s time to put together a financing package,” he says. Dupuy agrees. “Without UCPA, we probably wouldn’t have as much room to maneuver,” he says. “Even if, again, you still have to know how to stand on your own.” UCPA was drawn in by the agility and social-economy values The Roof network carried. But it also saw a growing market. Looking back, Lacroix puts it plainly: “I think there was an idea of using the engineering we’d developed with our projects to get a foot in the door. Was that fully clear to them at the time? I don’t know. What I do know is that later on, I was asked a lot to help them think through their own UCPA Sport Nation model.” During a contest at The Roof Bayonne in November 2025 © William Desse Today, across France, UCPA has built five indoor-sports centers, and each one includes a climbing wall. If UCPA gives the network a stronger backbone, it also helps it push through turbulence. In 2016, after UCPA joined The Roof France, things sped up. Toulouse started to emerge. Rennes came knocking. “But those were projects on a totally different scale,” Lacroix says. “Two gyms tied to massive redevelopment programs—Les Halles de la Cartoucherie in Toulouse, and Hôtel-Dieu in Rennes.” Lacroix poured time into it—lots of time—and got pulled under. “Between that, my Mini-Transat project, and other stuff, I think I ended up projecting a kind of instability back onto Brest and Bayonne,” he says. The result: in 2018, Lacroix was voted out of the presidency. A year later, he and his former partner removed their La Rochelle gym from the network. “It was one of the worst moments of my life—hell,” Lacroix says. “But that’s the game. They didn’t want me as president anymore. I knew the rules of democracy. That’s how it goes.” He has since launched another climbing-related project in La Rochelle called Les Cabanes Urbaines . After that rupture, UCPA took the helm and kept supporting the network’s growth in places like Albi, Saint-Brieuc, and Le Havre. From behind the bar noise in his Toulouse gym, Dupuy zooms out. “Like any human organization, being a cooperative doesn’t exempt us from a lot of issues—financial difficulty, management problems, burnout,” he says. He even points to a hard truth: “Overwork is a real issue in SCOPs. You see the same pattern of over-investment from some employees because the work feels meaningful. You throw yourself fully into projects you care about—and it can lead to mental overload and trouble unplugging.” Alone, With People All Around You Every The Roof gym founder says some version of the same thing: you have to learn to rebalance your life, and you often have to give something up. Dupuy says he’s lost friendships. Julien Muller, a director in the Vercors, learned what it means to work 90-hour weeks. In Le Havre, Antonin Salze learned to live on the SMIC—the French minimum wage. Even so, while financial results vary from gym to gym—The Roof Vercors saw a 20% revenue increase from 2024 to 2025, while The Roof Le Havre saw a 17% drop—every gym in the network is at least breaking even. “It’s very solid,” Marchant says. “Every Thursday, I’m surrounded by people who love climbing—but first and foremost, they’re business leaders.” Agile, sincere, and convinced their model can’t survive without a certain amount of hard rationality. “We’re not thirsty for growth,” says Marine Papa, co-founder of The Roof Bayonne. “We’re not ultra-capitalists. We don’t blow money. We stay careful. We help each other. It forces us to constantly question ourselves. And it reaffirms our values.” “We wanted to do social good, so we had to be social all the way through,” adds Muller, whose Vercors gym runs sport-and-health programs and works with local associations to broaden access to climbing. In Le Havre, Salze and his team welcome groups of patients in remission from long illnesses or addiction, as well as children with disabilities. Most of all, none of them say they would have opened their gym without first getting a green light from the nearby clubs and associations. “Those groups became our ambassadors—bringing in more climbers,” Salze says. “That’s the heart of The Roof,” Dupuy says. “These are projects rooted locally. UCPA, the network, the other gyms—they help. But what matters most is what you manage to do with your own local ecosystem.” “In the cooperative model, there’s a collective toughness that feels incredibly safe. It gives you this warm, steady energy. As an employer, it carries me. And this collective adventure I’ve fantasized about forever—I feel like I’m living a piece of it.” Benoît Lacroix, founder of Cabanes Urbaines in La Rochelle For more than a decade now, the independent gyms in The Roof network have been carrying a different model than the big commercial chains. With no outside investors and no promise of double-digit growth, they even seem to be holding up better than their competitors now that the market has flattened out. Dupuy, though, won’t declare victory. “Is our model more resilient?” he says. “Only the future will tell.” Back at the beginning of this cooperative horizon, Lacroix never imagined that an idea scribbled on a train would grow this big. Today, with Les Cabanes Urbaines , he’s careful too. Still, when he looks in the rearview mirror at SCOPs, SCICs, the PACTE law, and the rise of “mission-driven companies,” he allows himself one breath of relief: “Clearly, this isn’t a year where we’ll be handing out bonuses or big raises,” he says. “But in the cooperative model, there’s a collective toughness that feels incredibly safe. It gives you this warm, steady energy. As an employer, it carries me. And this collective adventure I’ve fantasized about forever—I feel like I’m living a piece of it.” Lacroix quotes his business partner, Serge Papin—former president of the Système U cooperative and current Minister for SMEs, Commerce, Crafts, Tourism, and Purchasing Power: “Purpose creates the reason for being, which creates the reason to come.” Proof the model attracts interest: UCPA’s development director says he has counted around a hundred inquiries in his inbox over the last three years. In the summer of 2026, the network is set to welcome its tenth independent gym—in Cherbourg.

We treat chalk like a given in climbing: you slap some on, you stick. But friction isn’t a belief system—it’s a messy equation with a bunch of variables. Depending on humidity (in the air and in your fingers), the condition of your skin, and the texture of the rock, chalk can boost friction… or quietly make it worse. This piece follows the trail of studies that don’t agree with each other and turns the mechanics into simple, usable takeaways: when chalk helps, when it sabotages you, and why “more” can end up meaning “less.” © David Pillet The chalk bag has become a comfort object. You dip a hand into it like you’re reaching back for certainty—especially when you can feel the crux coming. The problem is that between living skin and uneven rock, certainty is a terrible measuring tool. If you stick to everyday experience, the story sounds straightforward: chalk “dries” sweat, so of course it improves grip. But the research literature tells a less tidy story. One lab study published in the Journal of Sports Sciences in the early 2000s actually found a drop in friction with chalk. The authors offered a simple explanation: too much powder can form a gritty layer that shears and slides, and drying your skin too much can stiffen it so it doesn’t mold to tiny features as well. A few years later, another study in Sports Biomechanics measured a clear friction gain on a hangboard. More recently, work by researchers at the University of Sheffield adds the missing piece: the effect depends heavily on both rock type and humidity—to the point that, on certain minerals, chalk can be counterproductive. So the question isn’t “Is chalk useful?” It’s “Under what conditions, on what rock, with what kind of skin, and how much chalk?” That’s the thread we’re going to follow: understand friction, and get back to a practice based on reading conditions—not reflex, not faith, but diagnosis. Grip Doesn’t Have a Moral Compass In climbing, friction isn’t a character trait. It’s not a reward handed out to the deserving or a punishment for everyone else. It’s resistance to sliding between two surfaces—contact, materials, forces. Researchers often boil it down to a number—the coefficient of friction—which feels comforting, like you could end all arguments with enough decimals. Except climbing is basically the art of what refuses to stay constant. That coefficient shifts with how hard you pull, how quickly you load a hold, the direction of force, the presence of dust, temperature, and microscopic wear. Most of all, it changes with what you can’t see but that decides everything: an invisible film of water, a barely-there deposit, a surface polished slick by repetition—or, on the flip side, “woken up” by brushing. And then there’s the most underestimated variable: your skin. A fingertip pad isn’t a stable industrial material. It’s living tissue—hydrated, compressible, swelling and stiffening, wearing down and rebuilding, constantly trading moisture with the air. Talking about friction in climbing means talking about an encounter between an organism and a mineral—not a standardized contact between two clean, identical plates. Humidity, the Fake Villain This is where humidity stops being “bad conditions” and starts acting like a double agent. Most climbers know the confusing part: a little bit of moisture can feel grippy, while perfect dryness can turn a decent hold into soap. That only seems like a paradox if you assume the goal is to be bone-dry all the time. Skin that’s too dry loses its ability to deform. It doesn’t mold into micro-textures as well, doesn’t “print” fine features, doesn’t anchor the same way. But add too much water and the physics flips. Past a certain point, moisture doesn’t help contact—it creates a thin interface layer that behaves like lubricant. Your skin isn’t working against the rock anymore; it’s working against a film. Grip gets twitchy. What felt like sticking turns into slipping faster, and the sense of control can vanish all at once. Chalk operates inside that fragile window—not as a talisman, but as a tuning tool. It pulls some water out, stabilizes the interface, and makes the feel more predictable. And that’s exactly why it’s not a universal law: if the air is heavy, if sweat comes right back, if your skin has already stiffened, or if the hold needs really direct contact with the texture, chalk can push the dial too far. It stops correcting an excess and starts changing the nature of the contact. Three Studies, Three Stories, One Reality The science around chalk is interesting because it reads like an investigation: serious results that don’t match, and a truth hiding in the conditions. In 2001, a lab study in the Journal of Sports Sciences— “Use of ‘chalk’ in rock climbing: sine qua non or myth?” —landed on a conclusion that clashes with intuition: chalk lowered the coefficient of friction. The setup was tightly controlled, measuring fingertip sliding on a flattened rock sample. In that context, the authors proposed two mechanisms that make sense: drying stiffens skin and reduces how well it conforms to texture, and the powder can form a granular layer that sits between skin and rock and shears under load. © « Use of ‘chalk’ in rock climbing: sine qua non or myth? » In 2012, the scene changes and the movement gets closer to real climbing. Eleven experienced climbers hung from a hangboard-style device while the angle increased until they slipped. This time, chalk clearly improved grip, with measured gains on limestone and sandstone—and with a takeaway that matches what people feel on rock: not all stone offers the same friction, even with the same skin. © The effect of chalk on the finger–hold friction coefficient in rock climbing Then a more recent piece of work arrives and feels like a relief because it finally accepts complexity instead of hiding it: the effect depends on humidity and, crucially, on the rock itself. When you test multiple stones—with different roughness levels—under “dry” and “humid” conditions, you see what many climbers have long suspected: on some textures, especially certain very “bitey” limestones, chalk can become counterproductive. Not because white powder is magically “bad,” but because it changes an interface that, in that specific case, needed more direct contact. The “Third Body,” or How You Get in Your Own Way The most useful concept here is simple: the “third body.” We tend to imagine a straight relationship between skin and rock, but the second chalk shows up, a third element inserts itself. That third body can do what you want—absorb moisture, stabilize, even things out—but it can also turn the contact into something else: a thin film that fills in useful micro-features, a layer that shears, a material that slips precisely because it’s made of particles. © The effectiveness of chalk as a friction modifier for finger pad contact with rocks of varying roughness This is where the most stubborn myth collapses: “The more you use, the better it sticks.” As long as the layer stays thin, chalk works like a small adjustment. When it gets thick, it stops “drying” and starts replacing direct contact. And in a sport where success can come down to tiny texture, swapping rock-on-skin contact for a dusty, gritty layer can make a move suddenly feel inexplicable. At that point, chalk becomes a very clean way to sabotage yourself: something meant to reassure you ends up changing the mechanics at the worst moment. It also explains a familiar pattern: the hold that gets “worse” try after try. That isn’t always the climber falling apart. Sometimes it’s the interface loading up. Your skin heats up, moisture returns, powder accumulates, deposits shift around, the surface subtly changes. It’s easy to mistake that mechanical slide for a confidence problem when it’s really material saturation—a hold that needs to be brushed. Less Reflex, More Reading The takeaway isn’t a moral verdict (“chalk: yes” or “chalk: no”). It’s a way of reading the situation. The real question isn’t “Does chalk actually work?” It’s: Under what conditions, on what rock, with what skin state, and at what dose does it genuinely improve grip? That reframing does something immediately useful: it turns a cultural reflex into an adjustable tool. Seen that way, chalk goes back to what it should have always been: a minimal intervention on a fragile interface. A thin layer can stabilize things and bring you back into a “useful” humidity zone. A thick layer can insert a slippery third body. Skin that’s too dry can lose its ability to conform; skin that’s too wet can start lubricating. And the same action—chalking up again—can produce opposite results depending on the hold, the air, and the skin you showed up with that day. There’s something kind of satisfying in the conclusion, honestly: climbing isn’t just a strength sport. It’s a conditions sport. Chalk isn’t a miracle. It’s a dial.

Self-taught photographer, purebred city climber, and a perpetually “in-transition” lawyer, Hugo Perez has made a habit of turning climbing’s failures into something worth staring at. Chaos is his latest photo project: a close-up, personal notebook where skin splits, bodies hit the ground, and poetry shows up—happily—right in the mess. © Hugo Perez Climbing is usually sold as an airy dance between holds. Perez is clearly more into the sketchier version: the one where you hesitate, slip, swear, and end up with wrecked fingers and an ego in pieces. With Chaos, this 29-year-old Parisian puts his finger on what’s most moving about climbing: how it can leave you exposed. And honestly, it’s beautiful. The good mess of failure Fifteen years grinding away on the plastic in Paris gyms will sharpen your eye like a razor-thin crimp. Perez came up with that first wave of gym-raised urban climbers. “I was climbing almost every day around Antrebloc,” he tells us, with the easy calm of someone who wore out resin holds before it was cool. Pretty quickly, like a lot of people on that track, he got pulled toward the “sacred forest”: Fontainebleau—the bouldering mecca where you learn to fall hard as often as you learn to move well. No federation certificate, no formal coaching. Perez owns that DIY split without making a big deal of it. “I didn’t turn it into a job, and I wasn’t really trying to,” he says—more interested in working a flash than clipping carabiners. A photo book—without the polish The project started with a public photography class offered by the City of Paris. The assignment: make a photo book. Perez didn’t take long to decide. It would be climbing—but the rebellious version. “I was tired of the overly polished Fontainebleau shots. Sometimes it feels like you’re going in circles,” he says flatly. Instead of chasing perfect movement and squeaky-clean boulders, he points his flash at what usually gets edited out: the repeated failures, the bleeding fingertips, the tight smiles after the tenth fall. “Most of the time, we show the final photo—the nice move, done perfectly. But failure? We don’t really show that,” he explains. And yet, he insists, “they’re still good moments.” Someone had to say it. © Hugo Perez Blur as a choice: when the photographer loses his footing With an unapologetic mix of blur and flash, Perez isn’t trying to gently unsettle you—he wants to knock you off-balance. Where classic climbing photos turn bodies into graceful shapes floating in clean air, Chaos draws different lines: the line of the fall, the uncontrolled skid, the openly owned wipeout. “It was about breaking the lines, creating new ones—especially the lines of the fall,” he says. The approach calls to mind American photographer Chad Moore, known for leaning into blur, raw grain, and the kind of rough-edged poetry that comes straight from real life. Perez builds a joyful choreography where bodies stall out, wobble, and slam down without shame—an ode to gravity, literally and otherwise. A geological—and existential—poetry With the title Chaos, Perez isn’t just going for a provocative vibe. He’s also slipping in a small geology lesson. In the Fontainebleau area, “chaos” can refer to a natural, jumbled pile of boulders—common in places like the Apremont gorges. It’s a fitting image for the way bouldering can feel: a joyful mess. But Perez, committed to the idea, pushes it further. His “chaos” turns metaphorical, even existential: the stubborn, absurd fight of a climber against a piece of rock that refuses to be “conquered.” In a single flash, a plain old fall starts to look almost philosophical. © Hugo Perez What’s next: cliffs—and women in the frame Chaos is already a strong first chapter, but Perez wants more. He’s quick to name what’s missing—“There aren’t any women, for example”—and he wants to widen the project toward outdoor cliffs. Friends even gave him a rope specifically so he can spend hours hanging in space, shooting from the wall. The long-term goal: turn Chaos into a more ambitious book, open to more kinds of climbers, able to speak to a broader audience. In the meantime, he hopes to exhibit the photos in Paris gyms—bringing a little poetry into these modern temples where, too often, only success gets the spotlight. With Chaos, Hugo Perez isn’t just showing the “behind the scenes” of climbing. He celebrates it—with real, giddy swagger. By fully embracing imperfection, he reminds us that climbing, like life, is often a story of beautiful failures and modest wins. With Perez, the chaos starts to look downright appealing. You almost find yourself wanting to fall more often. To view Chaos online, it’s right here.

Muscle fatigue isn’t just that heavy, useless feeling in your arms—it’s a whole neurochemical show run by your central nervous system. Between warning signals and built-in protective brakes, your body is way smarter about effort than we give it credit for. Ready for a delightfully brainy dive into what’s really happening behind the scenes when your forearms are blowing up? Let’s go. We all know that climber: the veteran who casually cruises 5.11d (7a) while practically whistling, then hits you with that half-patronizing, half-dad-voice line: “Don’t worry—climbing’s like riding a bike. You don’t forget.” An infuriating thing to hear, especially after three forced months off thanks to a wrecked ankle. But what if, behind that smug little smile, they’re right? Because while your brain is busy holding onto your credit card PIN and the name of the neighbor you’ve “totally met before,” your body is quietly logging every foot placement, every hip shift, every tiny controlled wobble you saved at the last second. Yes—your body remembers how to climb. And the bad news is, it probably remembers better than you do. Are your muscles smarter than you? Quick spoiler so nobody spirals: your biceps don’t think. Your quads have never had an identity crisis. And no, your forearms are not secretly storing your favorite playlists. What people casually call “muscle memory” is really your nervous system doing its job. When you drill the same movement over and over—methodically, stubbornly, sometimes obsessively—control starts shifting away from the prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain doing the anxious, conscious thinking) and toward more efficient systems, including the cerebellum, which helps run smooth, precise movement. The result: you suddenly move in a clean, fluid sequence almost without thinking. Your brain is working in the background. Your body executes. And you’re just there, in the middle, looking talented without being totally sure how you pulled it off. In other words: you climb better than your conscious brain ever gave you credit for. It’s kind of flattering. The brain remodel: when your head gets hooked Every time you repeat the same climbing move, you’re not just pumping your forearms until they feel like overfilled balloons—you’re literally reshaping your brain. That’s not poetic. That’s neuroscience. One study (Di Paola, 2013) found that expert climbers can show an enlarged cerebellum, likely tied to the constant demand for ultra-precise coordination. Translation: the more you climb, the more your brain adapts—sometimes in ways that are objectively fun to bring up at a party if you feel like impressing or boring people. But there’s a catch. Your brain will learn anything you feed it, including bad habits. If you consistently botch a move, you’re teaching that error with the same seriousness as the correct version. Tend to ignore your footwork the second you get stressed? Do that enough, and you’re building it into your default settings. Moral: learn it clean early, or you’ll spend the rest of your climbing life trying to unlearn the thing you accidentally mastered. And here’s the wilder part: your muscles have their own kind of long-term advantage. When you train hard—sets, reps, the whole grind until you’re flirting with that nasty burn—your muscle fibers add extra nuclei. And the evolutionary joke is that those nuclei tend to stick around even after long breaks (thank you, Netflix, delivery apps, and extended couch seasons). A study (Bruusgaard, 2010) showed these added nuclei can persist for months, even years, during inactivity. So when you come back after your “little break” and start climbing again, your strength rebuilds faster than you expect. You think you’re starting from scratch. Your body disagrees. It remembers what it used to be. And suddenly you’re back to form after three sessions—while pretending to be surprised, just to stay humble in front of your friends. Nice little perk, right? Basic instinct Once your movement patterns get automated, you hit the climber’s holy grail: you move on instinct. According to research by Zampagni (2011) , experienced climbers are much better at distributing their weight across all four limbs. Beginners, stuck overthinking everything, often default to hauling with their arms—then wonder why they’re cooked after two moves. The other upside is more subtle: your conscious brain gets freed up from the low-level technical stuff. It can focus on what actually matters—reading the next hold, managing that quiet fear of falling, or, if you’re that type, having a full philosophical moment mid-crux (the hardest part of the route). That’s the real win. When your movement is automatic, you can perform with an ease that feels almost unfair to your climbing partners. And if you’re convinced you’ve “lost everything” after a six-month break? Not quite. Motor memory is stubborn—borderline obsessive. A precisely learned movement can reportedly be reproduced up to eight years after the last time you did it. Eight years. No practice, no reminders, and your feet still know where they’re supposed to go, like some eerie ghost of old beta (the sequence) coming back online. Sure, your raw strength and endurance will take a hit. But your technique tends to return faster than you think. And if we’re being honest, you’ll enjoy it—the quiet, slightly smug pleasure of realizing you still have it. Not because you’re special. Just because your nervous system is doing its job. Three ways to train your brain like you train your body Your body hands you a pretty solid neurological superpower: muscle memory that’s reliable and a little cocky. It would be a shame not to use it. Here are three research-backed tips (that are actually easy to apply) to turn that memory into better climbing. 1) Mix it up (including the stuff that shuts you down) Your brain hates boredom. So don’t feed it the same movement pattern forever. Switch styles constantly: delicate slab, steep overhang, boulders that feel personal, long endurance routes that never end. The more variety you give your nervous system, the richer your movement library gets. Over time, your body becomes a living encyclopedia of climbing options—ready to adapt with an annoying amount of ease. 2) Visualize moves (yes, from the couch) This one is for the fans of “productive procrastination.” Simply imagining a climbing movement in detail activates many of the same brain regions as actually doing it ( Filgueiras, 2018 ). Scientists call it “motor imagery.” You can call it “training without putting on pants.” It’s a legit way to reinforce technique on rainy days, or when your gym is swarmed by an overexcited school group. 3) Sleep like it’s part of your training plan According to Fogel (2017) , the real consolidation of technical skills doesn’t happen standing around after your session or while sipping a protein smoothie. It happens during sleep. Practical translation: sleeping well after training helps lock those movement patterns into motor memory. Thinking about pulling an all-nighter before a session? You might as well try climbing barefoot on broken glass. Your call. The dark side of muscle memory As powerful as muscle memory is, it has a sneaky downside: it can trap you in a very specific comfort zone. If you climb the same style, the same angles, the same types of routes over and over, your body becomes that coworker who orders the exact same lunch every day. Predictable. Repetitive. Not great when something unexpected shows up. The risk is becoming a vertical robot—perfectly smooth on familiar sequences, completely lost the second the route forces a new solution. So build the opposite habit, too: disrupt your patterns on purpose. Seek unfamiliar movement. Put yourself in situations that don’t fit your usual strengths. Keep your motor memory flexible, not locked into one narrow script. Otherwise you’ll spend your entire climbing life playing the same tune—about as spontaneous as an elevator stuck between floors. Your best ally: you After this brainy (slightly irreverent, but scientifically grounded) trip, here’s the takeaway that’s both comforting and mildly unsettling: your body remembers your favorite foot placements better than you remember the name of your last climbing partner. Muscle memory, paired with the brain’s remarkable ability to rewire itself. Put those two together and you get the climber’s real superpower: moving better, moving smoother, moving without overthinking every micro-decision. Your brain adapts. Your body stores the pattern. You end up with a built-in motor intelligence that’s always quietly running. So next time someone tells you climbing is just about strong arms and brute force, smile—just a little—and say, calmly: “Sorry. Climbing is mostly about a brain that knows how to talk to your muscles. And mine’s wired up just fine.”

“So what do you do?” You’ve probably noticed that this question—almost automatic everywhere else—rarely makes it through the door of a climbing gym or out to the base of a crag. Nobody leans over between burns on a route and asks about your job title. Nobody sizes you up by your résumé before offering beta (route advice on how to do a sequence). Why is that? Maybe it’s because climbing creates the conditions for something the French sociologist Bernard Lahire calls the “plural actor.” Let’s unpack that—and look at what climbing does to our sense of who we are. (cc) Sean Benesh / Unsplash The 9-to-5 Identity Trap It’s almost funny when you think about it. Leaning against the fridge at a party, stuck between strangers at dinner, chatting with the neighbors—no one ever asks if you climb 5.11 (roughly French 6c/7a). No one asks if you’re a solid cook or a killer chess player. But in most social settings, one question dominates: “So what do you do?” Modern Western societies are fixated on what happens between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. That question shapes introductions, small talk, even first impressions. It flattens people fast. And yet, those same societies are deeply differentiated. On any given day, most of us move through a handful of social worlds: family, work, friends, sports, volunteer groups. We should be identity chameleons, shaped by all those environments. Instead, we’re pushed to present as one thing. A job. A degree. A background. A single, tidy version of ourselves. Lahire has spent much of his career breaking down that illusion. In The Plural Actor, he argues that we are made up of multiple “repertoires of action”—ways of thinking, feeling, and acting shaped by different social contexts. Each context leaves a mark. Those layers don’t cancel each other out; they stack. We are plural by construction. But socially, that plurality gets compressed into one dominant identity—usually professional. Lahire describes a tension between what we are (multiple, layered) and what society expects (coherent, unified). That tension can hurt—especially for people who move between social classes and feel pulled in different directions. Pierre Bourdieu, two decades earlier, showed how sports themselves are distributed along class lines. Working-class sports emphasize contact, endurance, physical sacrifice—boxing, soccer, rugby. Upper-class sports lean toward control, technique, distance from impact—tennis, golf, swimming. Sports reflect and reproduce class dispositions. Climbing sits in a more complicated spot. Why Climbing Feels Different Climbing demands raw strength—holding tiny crimps, pulling through steep terrain—but it also rewards precision and movement quality. You don’t just muscle your way up; you solve sequences. You manage pump (forearm fatigue), read the crux (the hardest move), and refine beta. But what really sets climbing apart is social. Knowledge flows sideways, not top-down. You trade beta. You talk through foot placements. You break down a sequence together. The dynamic isn’t coach-to-athlete or opponent-to-opponent. It’s peer-to-peer. Lahire points out that context has the power to activate or inhibit parts of our past. In simple terms: different environments bring different parts of us online. At work, your professional habits kick in. With family, other patterns take over. In leisure spaces, different dispositions surface. Climbing—because of its structure—can temporarily quiet the identities that dominate elsewhere. They don’t disappear. But they stop being the main lens through which people see you. On the wall, your paycheck doesn’t matter. Your job title doesn’t matter. Your LinkedIn doesn’t matter. The wall calls up other parts of you. Bernard Lahire Taking the Fold Every regular practice leaves traces in the body and mind. Climbing does too. The void—whether you’re 20 feet up in the gym or higher on a sport route—shifts from pure threat to something you learn to manage. Effort changes meaning. Failure stops feeling like a verdict and starts feeling like process. You fall, you lower, you try again. You project (work a route over multiple attempts) without shame. Belaying—managing the rope for your partner—creates a rare kind of trust. It’s literal interdependence. You’re tied in together. That’s not common in most modern relationships, which tend to be more transactional. Sharing beta builds a cooperative culture. You’re not hiding information to win. You’re helping someone else send (complete the route cleanly). Over time, you develop a physical vocabulary—a sharper sense of balance, body tension, timing. All of that becomes part of your repertoire. Saying “I’m a climber” doesn’t erase “I’m a teacher” or “I’m a parent.” Those identities stack. Lahire borrows the idea of a “fold”: each socialization creates a fold in us, layered over others without flattening them. We’re less like a solid block and more like laminated layers. That’s not abstract. It shows up in real life. A stressed-out manager might rediscover a slower sense of time while climbing—and carry some of that calm back to work. A manual laborer who experiences horizontal respect in a gym—where their beta counts as much as an engineer’s—may incorporate that into how they see themselves. Someone used to being marked first by their origin might find that, on the wall, what matters most is whether they stick the crux. These are transfers between contexts. Climbing adds flexibility to the system. The Limits None of this means climbing escapes social reproduction. Access costs money. Gym memberships, shoes, harnesses, travel. It also requires cultural familiarity—the idea that spending weekends chasing routes is normal. Social networks matter too; many people get into climbing through friends. The demographic data reflects that. In the U.S. and Europe, climbing skews urban, college-educated, middle- and upper-middle-class. The aesthetic codes—technical puffy jackets, Sprinter vans, outdoor slang—signal that background. So yes, climbing can soften dominant identities inside the space. But the door into that space is still filtered. That doesn’t contradict Lahire’s framework. It sharpens it. He distinguishes between contexts that reinforce our existing dispositions and those that create partial misalignment—spaces where different parts of us can emerge. For those with access, climbing can be that kind of space. Not a revolution. Not a total reset. But an interstice—a gap in which a secondary identity gets room to breathe. Conditions for Flourishing Lahire goes further and asks a political question: under what conditions can people actually express their internal plurality? The more social worlds you move through, the more varied your dispositions become. If you’re confined to a single world—by economic constraint, geography, or culture—your repertoire shrinks. Climbing can create what Lahire calls favorable conditions for the plural actor. It opens a context where you’re not reduced to your administrative or professional identity. You’re a body moving on stone. A mind solving problems. A partner in trust. But as long as access remains uneven, that function stays partial. Internal plurality isn’t total freedom. Lahire rejects that kind of romanticism. Your past, your upbringing, your resources—they still shape what’s possible. Climbing doesn’t magically free you from social structures. What it does offer is margin. Another fold. Another set of habits. Another way of being that can coexist with the rest. A Different Way of Being Seen Back at the fridge. At dinner. With the neighbors. That same narrowing question waits: “So what do you do?” Climbing doesn’t eliminate that pressure. But it shows, in miniature, what it feels like to step outside it. On the wall, you are not primarily your profession or your background. You are the sum of what’s activated in that moment: your strength, your balance, your problem-solving, your trust in the belayer, your willingness to fall and try again. For a pitch, a session, a season, another version of you gets airtime. That version doesn’t cancel the others. It folds in. It expands your range. And maybe that’s the quiet power of climbing—not that it erases identity, but that it multiplies it.

Legends sometimes start with almost nothing. Alain Robert’s begins with a forgotten set of keys. Everything that follows plays out between an apartment building in Valence, Zorro, Patrick Edlinger—and one brutal accident. Here’s episode two in the wild life of the man they’d later call Spider-Man. Alain Robert © Alain Robert Collection Alain has had a rotten day. In the courtyard, the older kids made his life miserable again—name-calling, mocking, getting smacked around at recess. He’s seven. He’s small, skinny, and doesn’t exactly project “don’t mess with me.” To top it off, he’s locked himself out. He’s standing in front of his apartment building in Valence. His parents aren’t home. It sucks. And it’s also the moment something in his head snaps into place. Without thinking twice, he starts climbing—three stories up to his balcony. He treats the facade like a jungle gym, pulls himself level with the balcony, slides the door open. Done. Little Robert “That day, something unlocked,” Alain Robert says, looking back fifty years later. “I was born a second time, with the feeling that I really could do things I’d always dreamed of doing.” Back then, he wanted to be Zorro, d’Artagnan, Robin Hood. The problem was, he was scared of everything. “I remember a car trip with my parents when we were going on vacation to Toulouse,” he says. “My dad decided to get off the highway and drive along the Gorges du Tarn. I curled up in the back seat. I was terrified of the exposure.” Then an ordinary winter weekend lit the first fuse. Alain, almost seven, finally earns the right to watch the Sunday night movie. In 1969, the TV airs La Neige en deuil (The Mountain), Edward Dmytryk’s film based on Henri Troyat’s novel. Spencer Tracy and Robert Wagner are shown climbing Mont Blanc to rescue plane-crash victims. “That was the first spark,” Robert says. “I’d never seen mountains before, and something happened to me that night.” So it’s not really a surprise that a few months later, Alain does his first full solo—moving balcony to balcony on his own building. What is a coincidence: the building is named “Ailefroide,” after the famous Écrins massif in the French Alps. One thing is certain: after his first “climb,” the kid basically quits using the stairs. Watching from the front row, his little brother Thierry is both horrified and fascinated. “I remember we had a neighbor downstairs who worked as a projectionist,” Thierry says. “And the guy would watch my brother climbing and go, ‘What, the elevator’s broken?’ It cracked me up.” These are the years Alain takes his little brother under his wing—dragging him out to climb around the area, and also into plenty of dumb kid trouble. “For my parents, I was supposed to go to soccer,” Thierry says. “But Alain would take me into these situations… Believe me, sometimes I would’ve preferred practice.” By his own account, Thierry—now a filmmaker preparing a documentary series on his brother’s career—never saw Alain as insecure. “Honestly, it was the opposite. To me he was already a total daredevil. Seriously fearless.” Not far from downtown Valence sits Château de Crussol, a fortress perched on a rocky outcrop above the Rhône Valley. It becomes young Alain Robert’s first real playground—the place where the kid who used to be afraid of heights starts posting up 200 meters above the ground. The Roberts originally come from Saône-et-Loire. One of four kids, Alain doesn’t grow up with much. His mother stays home. His father leaves Digoin for Valence to take what Alain calls “a regular job in telecommunications.” At home, everything is quiet—too quiet. “After his heart attack, my dad spent the rest of his life doing needlepoint,” Alain says. “We didn’t go out. We didn’t do anything.” But once Alain starts climbing, he can’t sit still. So his parents send him to summer camp. There, he slips the counselors and goes off to climb five-meter boulders—naming them like they’re real routes: “The Rooster Rock,” “The Beige Glacier,” “The Finger of God.” Those are his first “ticks” (the little checkmarks climbers use to mark a route they’ve done), and eventually big brother starts backing off because the climbs are getting too hard. That’s when Alain meets someone who matters: Pierre Jamet, a fellow scooter kid. Together they tackle their first serious projects, tying in around the waist and heading for sketchy climbs around Valence. Little by little, they get better. The problem is, they have nobody to measure themselves against. “Back then, nobody around us climbed,” Robert says. Their bible is Gaston Rébuffat’s Glace, Neige et Roc. “We read a ton of mountain stories,” he says. “As teenagers, we knew all the legends and all the tricks—Rébuffat, but also Desmaison, Terray, Bonatti…” Alain Robert making his first ascents near his home in Valence. Bottom right: with his first climbing partner, Pierre Jamet. © Coll Alain Robert A Cliff-Dwelling Bum “I must’ve been 25 and he was 18,” says Laurent Jacob. “It was in Buoux and I was trying to put up a pretty intense route called La Volière. I was alone and needed someone to belay me. That’s when I ran into this kid. It’s funny—I remember a guy with a bit of a gut, not exactly athletic. But he helped me out, and I freed the route.” Jacob, in 1980, is the engine of French sport climbing—one of the pioneers of the era, and the guy credited with inventing the “Lolotte,” a knee-turning trick that buys you reach. When Alain Robert watches him on La Volière, he’s seeing something new: seventh-grade climbing—hard and beautiful. In modern terms, that’s roughly the 5.12 range (French 7s), and it’s Alain’s first close-up look at truly high-level climbing. It turns into an obsession. The teenager pushes beyond his local Drôme crags. He basically moves to Buoux in the Luberon, throwing himself into both the rock and the golden age of French free climbing. He crosses paths with “the two Patricks”—Patrick Berhault and Patrick Edlinger—and with Jean-Pierre Bouvier, known as “La Mouche.” He quickly realizes that if he wants to improve, he has to sleep there. “That’s when I gave up on my plans to become a guide,” Robert says, “and turned into a kind of cliff-dwelling bum.” With a small crew, they shoplift from grocery stores, sleep in barns. Every morning, they wake up in Buoux—the mecca of French free climbing—and run laps on seventh-grade routes, often solo. For them, it’s pure joy. “That’s really where I realized I might be among the best French climbers,” Robert says. “I was doing 7a, even 7b—while still being kind of chubby.” So he heads to Sainte-Victoire, near Aix-en-Provence, full of confidence. It’s February 1982. Bouvier has freed a 7c there the year before—around 5.12d/5.13a (French 7c). Alain wants to test himself on that slab climbing, but first he sets up a top-rope (a rope run from above, so you can work the moves safely) to study the sequence. And then he makes a beginner mistake that costs him. He runs the rope through cord slings instead of a carabiner. The rope saws through. The slings snap clean. Alain drops twenty meters. He lies on the ground unconscious for about thirty minutes before he’s taken care of. Hours later, at the hospital in Valence, it looks like a small miracle: a climber just took a huge fall and walks away with “only” a few fractures. He leaves on crutches. A month later, he’s back on rock—with both arms in casts. Smashed on the Ground “What you have to understand is, this was a childhood dream,” Robert says. “I fell, sure. But I was alive, and I wasn’t that bad off. There was no way I was quitting.” So Alain Robert shows up in Buis-les-Baronnies on crutches, hiking in on approaches where you basically need your hands. He puts on his harness and starts climbing 6b—around 5.10d—while his arms are still in plaster. “People at the base thought I was out of my mind,” he says. “And honestly, I get it. But that was a fundamental period in my life—when I knew I’d never give up on my dreams. When I realized that if you have a goal, you can do some crazy things.” It’s also when Alain Robert starts putting words to his view of climbing. Forty years later, it hasn’t changed. “For me, it has to stay dangerous,” he says. “In the ’80s, a guy like Christian Guyomard”—the inventor of “banzaï climbing”—“when he put up routes, he’d place the first bolt at ten meters, and he’d make sure that if you fell before the second, you’d slam into the ground. That’s anti-conformist. Anti-FFME”—the French climbing federation. “That’s completely my view: climbing is, first and foremost, an adventure.” Alain Robert © Alain Robert Collection Six months later, Alain Robert is chasing that “adventure” every day, back on his favorite crags—Buoux, the Verdon, Cornas. He’s twenty, hungry, ready to bite into rock with both teeth. He’s moved in with his wife, Nicole. But for one summer—1982—he becomes that “cliff bum” again and grinds day and night on a project at Cornas, L’Abominable homme des doigts—his cliff. Two months all-in. Two months getting shut down at the crux, a few meters from the top. Three tries a day, and he can’t do it. Then, at the end of September, while he’s finishing a training session at a nearby wall, he hears voices. It’s a group of beginners from Jeunesse et Sports, asking him to put up a rope by leading the route. He’s experienced. He reaches the top quickly—fifteen meters up. He does his rope setup, then starts to lean back to descend in an alpine rappel (a fast rappel style), trying not to scrape up his knees. He throws one last joke down to the kids. One last look at the little stream of La Goule. The rope goes tight. And then it blows. Immediately. Alain Robert falls backward, headfirst. And this time, when he hits, everything goes completely black. To be continued…

Scarpa offered to let us test the Drago XT with no strings attached. Forty-three sessions later, one thing is clear: this is a shoe built around precision. It takes some breaking in, and it raises the same old question every high-end climbing shoe does—where the balance really sits between comfort, durability, and performance. Scarpa Drago XT © Vertige Media Over the weeks, the Drago XT traced its own arc: early sessions marked by that familiar Scarpa “performance fit” squeeze, then a gradual shift into a shoe that rewards clean foot placements and efficient climbing. The soft rubber loses its edge faster, sure—but it gives you extra confidence in return. The heel won’t work for every foot shape, but the toe is unusually precise. The XT doesn’t reinvent anything. It just sharpens a lot. It doesn’t change how you climb—it makes things easier to read. For a shoe, that’s already a win. Vibram XS Grip 2: instant stick Scarpa puts Vibram XS Grip 2 on the Drago XT, a rubber most climbers know well. It’s soft and sensitive, and it conforms to whatever you’re standing on—slick gym volumes or tiny edges on a limestone slab. That softness is the whole point: the rubber deforms just enough to spread pressure and increase your contact patch. The tradeoff is obvious, and it shows up fast. The softer the rubber, the quicker it wears. After around forty sessions, abrasion started showing up at the big toe—right where the downturn concentrates pressure. Nothing surprising for XS Grip 2. It’s a deliberate compromise: you buy stickiness and feel, and you pay for it in millimeters of rubber. The heel: better, but not a perfect fit for everyone Scarpa reworked the Drago XT heel with a textured design and full-coverage rubber, aiming to address complaints about the original Drago. In practice, heel hooks feel easier to “set” (to really lock in), the hold is more solid, and hooking feels more reliable overall. But there’s no such thing as a universal heel. Depending on your foot shape, you may still notice some dead space—the classic “baggy heel” feeling—and it can seem like the back of your foot never fully seats. So: real improvement, not a one-size-fits-all fix. You’ll need a break-in period Scarpa’s reputation isn’t made up. Sliding into one of their performance shoes has never meant instant comfort. The first sessions remind you what that looks like: noticeable pressure in the forefoot, an arch held under tension, and the sense that the shoe sets the terms before it starts working with you. The Drago XT uses microsuede, a synthetic material that mimics suede. Unlike leather, it won’t stretch enough to “gain” half a size, but it does soften, pack down a bit, and eventually conform better. After two or three sessions, the initial stiffness eases, the pain fades, and the XT finds its groove: demanding but manageable, technical without feeling like a punishment. A downturn that steers your climbing The Drago XT’s downturn is built on Scarpa’s FZR last—one of their most aggressive shapes. It’s a tight profile designed to funnel power onto the front of the shoe. That lets you load the big toe efficiently and use tiny footholds that would feel sketchy in a flatter shoe. That setup takes some adjusting. If you’re coming from a more neutral shoe, you’ll need to relearn how you place your feet: more precision, more targeted pressure, and more attention if you want to avoid burning through rubber early. Once it clicks, the downturn turns into real leverage. It helps you stand on micro-features, stabilizes hooks, and gives you that “locked-in” feeling that changes how you commit to certain moves. A shoe built for precision, not power After 43 sessions, the Drago XT’s logic is consistent: it rewards accuracy more than brute force. The toe responds when you place it cleanly, the downturn channels pressure, and the rubber amplifies small adjustments. The whole design nudges you toward better footwork instead of letting you muscle through with your arms. It won’t magically level up your climbing overnight. But it does shape habits that last: placing your feet more deliberately, reading sequences with more detail, and accepting a simple truth—precision tires you out less than trying to overpower everything. The XT isn’t just a performance tool. At times it feels like a quiet coach: demanding, but fair. Conclusion The Drago XT isn’t a “for everyone” shoe. The soft rubber wears faster than a stiffer sole. The heel won’t fit every foot. And you do need a real break-in period. But if you stop there, you miss what it actually brings. Session after session, it starts to feel like a progression partner. A shoe that pushes you to climb with finesse instead of force, and that reminds you economy of movement usually beats brute effort. It’s demanding. It doesn’t stroke your ego. But it does make you more honest—and that might be the best thing a climbing shoe can do. Specs Model:  Scarpa Drago XT Upper:  Multi-panel microsuede (synthetic) Closure:  Dual Velcro straps Midsole:  1.0 mm Flexan, floating pad under the big toe Tension system:  PCB-Tension + SRT (M50 rubber) Outsole:  Vibram XS Grip 2, 3.5 mm (1/3 length) Heel:  IHC (3 mm rubber, textured) Downturn:  Aggressive (FZR last, asymmetric profile) Weight:  ~200 g (size 41 / EU; ±10 g depending on size) Sizes:  35–45 (half sizes) Made in:  Italy MSRP:  ≈ €150 (seen roughly €145–€180 depending on retailer) Best for:  Indoor/outdoor bouldering, hard sport routes, precision-focused climbing (not designed for big walls or long comfort sessions)

A climbing helmet is a thankless piece of gear. It doesn’t help you climb harder, it won’t bump your grade, and it doesn’t come with any highlight-reel moments—yet it plays a huge role in whether you make it back in one piece. You just need it to show up: on long days, messy approaches, at belays where rock breaks loose without warning, and during all the repeat transitions where your gear takes a beating right along with you. Black Diamond’s Capitan E fits that mindset. It’s a helmet that treats durability like a feature, not a compromise—less “ultralight showpiece,” more “workhorse for real climbing,” with a clear focus on protection and day-long comfort. The design is built for impacts—and for how climbing actually happens. Built with two kinds of impact in mind The Capitan E uses a two-part approach: a hard shell made from recycled ABS paired with DuraPET, plus a dual-foam setup with EPS and EPP. The logic is straightforward—and smart. It’s designed to handle a top hit (the classic overhead impact) differently than side or rear hits, which are often more subtle but very real in everyday climbing. Black Diamond describes an EPS “puck” at the crown, with more forgiving EPP on the sides, all wrapped in a shell meant to take abuse. The most compelling promise here is coverage: more protection around the sides and back, with an explicit aim to meet stricter UIAA requirements in those zones. No hype needed—nobody “feels” protection until the moment they absolutely need it. But in a sport where the unexpected sometimes gets the final say, taking side and rear impacts seriously makes sense, and it sets this helmet apart from some more minimal designs. A tough helmet can’t be a pain to wear A durable helmet still has to disappear on your head. Black Diamond goes with a low-profile suspension system for fine-tuning the fit, plus removable pads made with bamboo fiber. Those details matter, because they decide whether a helmet gets worn or gets stuffed in a pack (or left at home). The intent here is clear: make this an everyday helmet you can keep on for hours, without turning the day into a constant tradeoff between protection and annoyance. Ventilation stays fairly open, with a straightforward focus on breathability when it warms up. And because climbing days rarely stay neatly inside a “noon to six, perfect weather” window, the Capitan E includes headlamp clips up front and an elastic keeper in the back—simple, but genuinely useful when the day runs long or the approach happens late. Weight, sizing, standards: the numbers The Capitan E sits firmly in the “durable by design” category: 320 g in S/M and 350 g in M/L, for head circumferences of 53–59 cm and 58–63 cm. On compliance, it’s listed as CE/EN and UIAA, and it’s presented as meeting EN 12492, the reference standard for mountaineering/climbing helmets. Conclusion The Capitan E isn’t the helmet you buy to shave 50 grams off your kit. It’s the one you pick when you want something that can take hits, dials in cleanly, stays comfortable over long days, and clearly pushes harder on side and rear coverage. In a market that often chases ultralight everything, this tool-first approach feels reassuring—and, more importantly, it matches how a lot of climbers actually climb. Specs: Black Diamond Capitan E Construction:  Two-piece shell (recycled ABS + DuraPET), EPS + EPP foam Recycled materials:  30% by weight (claimed) Protection:  Increased side/rear coverage (with reference to stricter UIAA requirements) Fit system:  Low-profile suspension Headlamp attachment:  Front clips + rear elastic keeper Pads:  Removable, bamboo fiber Weight:  320 g (S/M), 350 g (M/L) Sizing:  53–59 cm (S/M), 58–63 cm (M/L) Standards:  CE/EN, UIAA (EN 12492 listed by retailers) Country of origin:  China

In the world of travel bags, a duffel is often a necessary evil: great at swallowing gear, miserable the moment you have to carry it anywhere that isn’t the trunk of a car. Osprey promises the opposite with the Transporter—a duffel designed to ride on your back as comfortably as a hiking pack. After several weeks of real use—train stations, muddy parking lots, and improvised bivies—it mostly proves one thing: comfort changes everything once you’re hauling 30-plus pounds. © Osprey Most duffels are the bulky sidekick you put up with because it’s the simplest option. You stuff it, you drag it, you curse it on stairs. But if you travel with a rope, climbing shoes, and a sleeping bag you packed in a hurry, a duffel still makes sense. With the Transporter, Osprey tries to flip the script: take a bag built for volume and make it something you can actually wear—on purpose, not as punishment. A Duffel Meant to Be Worn The Transporter’s big selling point is the harness. Where most duffels settle for token shoulder straps—fine for a two-minute shuffle across an airport—Osprey commits to real backpack-style straps: decent padding, a sternum strap, and, importantly, the ability to stow everything cleanly when you’re checking it. In practice, it changes the whole experience. Even when it’s stuffed to the ceiling, you can carry the Transporter for a few miles without feeling like you’ve got an anvil slung over one shoulder. The load sits well, the bag stays stable, and you can walk normally instead of doing that awkward, hunched-duffel wobble. It’s not a trekking pack, but in the duffel category, very few carry this convincingly—and that’s the real difference. A Fabric That Takes a Beating Osprey currently has two generations of the Transporter. The older version used a 900D polyester with a TPU coating—rugged and a bit stiff, with a “armored” vibe and a plasticky feel. The newer version, launched in 2025, switches to a fabric Osprey calls NanoTough™: 100% recycled high-tenacity nylon, with a carbonate coating meant to improve abrasion resistance and boost water repellency. You notice the change the second you handle it. The fabric feels more flexible, less like vinyl, and the bigger sizes drop a few hundred grams. It’s not a dramatic weight cut, but you’ll notice it when you’re lifting and moving the 95L or 120L. Either way, it’s a durable build, with a reinforced 840D bottom designed to handle repeated impacts—the kind of bag you can toss onto a train platform or into the bed of a pickup without overthinking it. The Transporter doesn’t have the bunker-like thickness of The North Face Base Camp, but it plays a smarter durability game: tough enough to last, flexible enough not to be annoying every time you have to handle it. Water-Repellent, Not Waterproof The zipper flaps, coating, and construction do a good job limiting water getting in. In steady rain, your stuff stays protected, and you can walk outside for fifteen minutes or push through a downpour without panicking. But it’s important to be clear: the standard Transporter is not a waterproof bag. Osprey does make a specific version, the Transporter Waterproof, rated IPX7—able to handle submersion to one meter for thirty minutes. That’s a different conversation: kayaking trips, river missions, and places where “dry” is non-negotiable. The standard duffel is built for travel and everyday abuse, not for floating down a torrent. It shrugs off rain, damp platforms, and the mud of a crag parking lot, but it’s not trying to replace a dry bag. Translation: an excellent travel-and-field companion—as long as you don’t ask it to do a job it wasn’t designed for. Minimal Organization, Done Right The Transporter stays true to duffel DNA: one big main compartment, no obsession with pockets. Access is through a wide, lockable U-shaped YKK zipper, which makes it easy to see everything you’ve thrown in there at a glance. On the outside, an end pocket holds the small essentials you want handy—keys, headlamp, train tickets—without dumping the whole bag. Inside, a zippered mesh pocket helps separate clean clothes from the stuff that’s already been worked over. No frills, but the details matter. Internal compression straps keep the load from turning into a loose, shifting mess after a few transfers. And when it’s empty, the bag packs down into the included mesh storage sack—easy to stash in a car trunk, or use as a laundry bag on the road. It’s intentionally simple, focused on function over gimmicks—which is exactly what you want from a duffel. From 30 to 150 Liters: Pick Your Lane The Transporter Duffel comes in six sizes, from 30 liters (almost a daypack) to 150 liters (closer to a soft rooftop cargo box than a “bag”). Each size points to a different use case. The 40L is the most versatile: compact enough to be considered for carry-on depending on the airline, but roomy enough for a long weekend with climbing gear. But the real sweet spot—yes, the actual sweet spot—is the 65L. It’s the balanced choice for one to two weeks on the move, with enough space for a rope, shoes, layers, and a sleeping bag without turning into an unmanageable blob. It’s still a bag you can carry on your shoulder or wear as a backpack without wrecking yourself. Go bigger—95L and 120L—and you’re in a different category: trips where you’re bringing the whole kit. You can still carry them, but these sizes are really built for checked baggage and long hauls. And the 150L is almost daring you to overpack: big enough for pads, ropes, a giant sleeping bag, and food for an expedition—while being obviously miserable if you have to navigate a crowded subway staircase. The Trade-Off That Matters The Transporter isn’t the most armored duffel out there. By feel and by looks, The North Face Base Camp still wins the “thick tarp that might survive the apocalypse” contest—and it’s reassuring, even if it comes with extra weight. Osprey takes a different approach. The Transporter doesn’t try to impress you with brute toughness. It tries to be a duffel you can actually carry, and that’s usually where the real difference shows up. You don’t remember the exact fabric weight months later. You do remember trudging across a train station with nearly 40 pounds of gear on your back. In that context, the Transporter earns its keep. It doesn’t claim to be indestructible. It just makes a strong case for being one of the most believable duffels when you need a storage bag to function like an actual carry system. It’s a deliberate compromise—and it chooses real-world usability over tough-guy marketing. Specs: Transporter Duffel 65 Capacity:  65 L Dimensions:  62 × 35 × 40 cm Weight:  1.206 kg Fabric:  NanoTough™ (recycled 630D high-tenacity nylon, carbonate coating) + 840D reinforced bottom Closure:  Lockable YKK EYL U-zip + rain flap Carry:  Stowable backpack-style straps + sternum strap Organization:  Zippered end pocket, internal mesh pocket, compression straps Water resistance:  Water-repellent, not submersible Available sizes:  30 / 40 / 65 / 95 / 120 / 150 L Made in:  Vietnam (bluesign®-certified site) MSRP:  Around €150 (varies by retailer) Best for:  Travel and expeditions, hauling bulky bouldering or sport-climbing gear, mixed road-and-crag use

In climbing, there’s this stubborn myth that your shoes are supposed  to hurt—like pain is the cover charge, proof you’re serious, some vaguely ridiculous rite of passage. In reality, your first pair of shoes is mostly about learning: how to place your feet, how to trust an edge, what sticks (usually) and what skates (sometimes). That’s exactly where the Black Diamond Women’s Momentum lands. It’s an entry-level shoe with a neutral, flat last, two Velcro straps, and a design built to stay on your feet for a long time. It’s meant to support the kind of progress that comes from hours of repetition—not an immediate hunt for millimeter-level precision. A “forgiving” build—without turning into a slipper The Momentum is built around a pretty straightforward idea: make the shoe breathable and accommodating without letting it collapse into full-on “house slipper” territory. The upper uses Black Diamond’s Engineered Knit Technology, paired with a microfiber liner in the forefoot to help limit stretch and keep a baseline of structure over time. The goal here is comfort you can actually climb in, session after session, without the shoe turning into a baggy sock. There’s also a detail that sounds like marketing until you live with it: a hemp footbed. It fits the whole point of the shoe—something you can wear long, often, and comfortably, rather than a pair you suffer through for two “performance tries” before it gets banished to the bottom of your pack. “Women’s specific” is mostly about volume Black Diamond frames this as a women’s-specific fit—meaning lower overall volume and a shape intended for certain foot morphologies. In practice, the Momentum has a pretty welcoming forefoot and an overall comfort-driven feel. That plays especially well for longer sessions—gym climbing, moderate routes, and days when you’re climbing more than you’re “projecting” (working a route over multiple tries). The flip side is predictable: a forgiving shoe forgives a lot , sometimes at the cost of a more “locked-in” feel if you’re chasing a very technical fit—especially around the heel. On sizing, Black Diamond offers guidance by goal. For “all day comfort,” the brand generally recommends sizing down modestly from your street shoe—snug, but not painful. In the real world, the most common mistake with a comfort-first shoe is overcorrecting: trying to force the compression of an aggressive, downturned model out of something that simply isn’t built for that. 4.3 mm molded rubber: durability, by design The Momentum uses a 4.3 mm outsole aimed squarely at durability, with molded rubber (rather than rubber cut from a sheet). Black Diamond positions that as a way to optimize consistency, weight, and comfort. Either way, the message is clear: this is a shoe for people still building footwork. That thicker rubber is more forgiving when you’re missing placements and grinding your toes on gym holds. It doesn’t demand the delicacy of a super-soft, ultra-sensitive shoe. There’s a known tradeoff, of course. The more rubber you put underfoot, the more you dull that fine feedback from tiny features. But for someone progressing, it’s usually the rational compromise: better a shoe that survives the learning curve than a “scalpel” that’s trashed before your feet get precise. How it feels on the wall: where it shines, where it taps out Black Diamond positions the Momentum for vertical climbing and long-wear comfort, with a “soft flex” midsole (more supple, more forgiving) and a neutral shape. In plain terms, it holds its own on: Gym climbing (slabs, volume-heavy walls, training routes) Moderate crag days where footholds are readable and generally solid Long sessions where comfort translates into consistency But once you move into very steep terrain, razor-precise edging on tiny nubs, or sequences where every millimeter matters, the Momentum calmly reminds you what it is: an entry-level shoe built to support progression, not to chase the tightest “performance fit.” Updates that target the usual weak points The Momentum isn’t stuck in time. Black Diamond lists a handful of updates aimed at the classic shortcomings of comfort-oriented shoes: an updated knit with a softer lining, softer toe rands, a reworked heel geometry for more consistent tension, and—most importantly—an updated midsole intended to improve edging ability. In other words: same DNA, but reinforced where it counts—fit security and overall coherence. Verdict: a smarter first shoe than it looks The Women’s Momentum succeeds where a lot of beginner shoes miss: it lowers the barrier to entry without turning learning into punishment. It gives you time—time to climb, repeat, adjust—and that’s what actually builds skill. Its comfort and forgiveness aren’t a flaw. They’re the method. The limits are real and worth stating clearly: this isn’t a steep-project weapon, and it’s not a micro-precision tool. But as a progression shoe, an everyday trainer, a comfortable backup, or a solid option for moderate multi-pitch days, it’s impressively consistent—and exactly what a first shoe should be. Specs: Black Diamond Women’s Momentum Last/Shape:  Neutral, flat (comfort / vertical focus) Closure:  Two Velcro straps Rubber:  4.3 mm molded outsole Midsole:  “Soft flex” (comfort / sensitivity) Upper:  Engineered Knit + microfiber forefoot liner Footbed:  Hemp Claimed weight:  440 g (US Women’s 5) Made in:  China MSRP:  Around €90 on Black Diamond Europe

Light like a skimo (ski mountaineering) harness, but kitted out like a do-it-all model, the WHISPER is trying to bridge two worlds that usually don’t mix. For years, ultralight harnesses have had the same problem: you put them on like emergency gear, grit your teeth for a couple minutes hanging in space, then bury them in the bottom of your pack and swear you’ll only pull them out when you absolutely have to. Whisper harness / Petzl © Petzl The WHISPER is trying to break that pattern. At well under 200 grams, it’s the kind of harness you can forget in your pack—and still actually want to use once you’re at the base. Long limestone multi-pitch, an alpine ridge with a handful of nuts and cams, or just the desire to travel light without going full monk: this harness is making a simple point. Ultralight doesn’t have to mean miserable or weirdly compromised. Light, but fully featured The first surprise is that the WHISPER doesn’t feel like it was designed in the “diet” aisle of the gear shop. In use, it feels like a real harness, not a skinny backup you tolerate out of principle. You get five properly sized gear loops: two big, stiff front loops that can handle a full set of quickdraws or a few cams without sagging; two rear loops that stay usable even with a pack on; and a fifth, softer loop for a cordalette or the small mess you always end up bringing. Add two slots for a CARITOOL—load them with an ice screw, a water bottle, or a pair of gloves—and the picture is complete. In other words, you’re not stuck playing Tetris with your rack. The WHISPER assumes you might climb with real gear, and it can handle it. That changes everything. At 170 g in a size M, you’d expect something you toss in your pack “just in case.” Here it’s the opposite: an ultralight harness that’s built for serious use, without turning climbing into a caricature of minimalism. It’s a welcome counterpoint in a world where shaving grams can become an obsession—often at the expense of what a climbing harness is actually for: carrying gear, and carrying it well. MATRYX®: the material that makes it work If the WHISPER pulls this off, it’s not magic—it’s MATRYX®, a textile that ditches the thick webbing and classic foam approach. The idea is straightforward: individually coated strands of polyamide and high-tenacity polyethylene woven into a thin but surprisingly tough grid. The result is a fabric that’s breathable, water-repellent, and durable—three traits you rarely get together in a sub-200-gram harness. On the wall and in the mountains, that shows up in the details. The harness doesn’t turn into a portable sauna when the approach is long. It dries quickly after rain or after you’ve sweat through your shirt. And it doesn’t fall apart the first time it scrapes against rock. Just as important, it packs down small—once folded, it takes up less room than a water bottle. That’s real, usable lightness. In other words, MATRYX® isn’t just a marketing badge here; it’s what lets the WHISPER be more than a “fast-and-light only” harness, and makes it legitimate for multi-pitch and technical alpine climbing. Minimal adjustments, demanding fit The WHISPER isn’t trying to please everyone. It sticks to a single waist buckle and fixed leg loops held in place by elastic. No extra adjustment points, no dangling straps. You put it on, cinch it down, and climb. The tradeoff is simple: you get a lot less wiggle room to fine-tune the fit. Sizing runs from XS (65–71 cm) to L (84–92 cm), with weight ranging from 140 to 185 g depending on size. Early feedback points to it fitting a bit small—if you’re between sizes, going up is the safer call. That isn’t a flaw so much as a choice: close fit, clean design, efficient setup. The WHISPER is dialed for people who land cleanly in the size chart, and less forgiving for in-between body types. Comfort, in the right context At under 200 grams, nobody is expecting an armchair. The WHISPER doesn’t pretend otherwise. This isn’t a sport-climbing harness you can hang in all afternoon while you work a move (working a route = repeated attempts with lots of resting on the rope). It’s a harness that disappears when you’re moving. Light, flexible, breathable—it stays out of your way on approaches and while you’re climbing. At belays, it does its job: you can sit long enough to handle transitions and rope work without suffering, as long as you don’t confuse “ultralight” with “plush hanging comfort.” The philosophy is clear. This is for climbers who value smooth movement and efficiency, not for folks who spend the whole day taking falls and hanging to suss out the crux. For that kind of repeated hanging, the SITTA still has the edge. The WHISPER is a reminder that you can’t have everything: going light has limits, and it’s better to know them before you buy. Between the FLY and the SITTA, with a real niche In Petzl’s lineup, the WHISPER lands right between two extremes. On one end is the FLY: 100 to 130 g, a stripped-down harness built for skimo and fast missions, but too minimal to carry a real rack. On the other end is the SITTA: 275 g in size M, designed to handle lots of hanging and long sessions—sport cragging, projecting, and steep multi-pitch—but less compact by nature. The WHISPER sits squarely in the middle: more capable than a minimalist harness, far lighter than a classic all-around model. It makes sense for alpinists trying to keep things light, and for multi-pitch climbers who want to cut bulk in the pack. A harness that can carry gear without feeling like an anchor—and one that hits a slot very few competitors really cover. Specs Model:  Petzl WHISPER Weight:  XS 140 g · S 155 g · M 170 g · L 185 g Sizes:  XS 65–71 cm / S 71–77 cm / M 77–84 cm / L 84–92 cm (waist) Construction:  MATRYX® (individually coated HMPE + polyamide strands), reinforced tie-in points and gear-loop zones Gear carry:  5 gear loops (2 very large rigid front, 2 rear usable with a pack, 1 soft rear) + 2 CARITOOL slots Adjustments:  1 waist buckle, fixed leg loops (elastic) Certifications:  CE EN 12277 type C · UIAA MSRP:  approx. €179.95 (sale prices around €150) Best for:  technical alpinism, fast multi-pitch, trad/adventure climbing, light climbing with a full rack

In late January 2026, Indonesia’s climbing federation (PP FPTI) provisionally suspended its head coach , Hendra Basir, after internal reports alleged sexual harassment and physical violence within the national training center. An internal investigative team was formed. The move followed a formal complaint filed on January 28, 2026 by eight athletes at the national center. About a month later, PP FPTI issued an official decision placing Basir on temporary leave while the inquiry proceeds. 2024 Speed Climbing World Cup in Briançon © David Pillet Local reporting has remained careful: it confirms the existence of the complaint and the provisional suspension, but does not publish the athletes’ identities or detailed accounts of the alleged incidents. That restraint helps protect the people involved. It also means the federation controls both the pace and the scope of the process—for now. The timing lands in a specific sporting moment. Since the Paris 2024 Olympics, climbing has taken on heightened strategic importance in Indonesia’s sports policy, especially in speed—an event that has become a high-visibility international showcase. The national training center is more than a place to train. It concentrates selections, funding, and career pathways. So a provisional suspension doesn’t just open a disciplinary file; it triggers an institutional test. Eight voices, one complaint According to multiple Indonesian outlets, eight athletes submitted a complaint to federation president Yenny Wahid on January 28, 2026. The allegations involve sexual harassment and physical violence within the national training program. The same sources say the athletes were supported in the process by the program’s psychologist. Federation secretary general Wahyu Pristiawan Buntoro, quoted by the Antara news agency , said an internal investigative team had been established and that coordination had begun with the ministry responsible for women’s empowerment and child protection. He added that he could not, at that stage, comment on whether a report had been filed with police. He denies any conduct that would constitute sexual harassment and describes his coaching as “strict” At this point, the federation has not disclosed the complainants’ identities or a detailed timeline of the alleged conduct. Reporting has largely stayed within the narrow frame of what can be confirmed: a complaint was lodged, and a provisional suspension followed. The decision PP FPTI issued a formal decision—an SK (Surat Keputusan) numbered 0209/SKP/PP.NAS/II/2026—ordering Basir’s provisional suspension for the duration of the review. As summarized by detikSport , the measure is presented as a way to “ensure protection” for athletes, prevent re-victimization, and preserve the objectivity of the process. In other words, the federation is treating this as a precautionary step. It is not, on paper, a final disciplinary sanction. It is a temporary removal meant to structure the investigative period. That distinction matters: it means the federation is suspending the exercise of his duties without officially pre-judging what the investigation will conclude. The immediate impact is practical. According to Liputan6 , the decision bars Basir from leading training sessions, accessing facilities, or communicating with athletes during the inquiry. Antara adds one more element : Basir’s term was already scheduled to end on February 28, 2026, and the federation says he will not be part of the next coaching staff. The provisional suspension therefore lands at the hinge point of a planned transition. The gray zone Basir disputes the allegations. In statements reported by detikSport , he denies any conduct that would constitute sexual harassment and describes his coaching as “strict.” He points to gestures he frames as support—kissing an athlete on the forehead, hugging during emotional moments—and rejects any sexual interpretation of those actions. That defense doesn’t just argue about what did or didn’t happen. It pulls the conversation into a harder terrain: how interaction works inside a structured hierarchy. In a national training center, the coach–athlete relationship isn’t simply personal. It shapes access to competitions, team selection, funding, and sometimes international visibility. So the question isn’t only intention. It’s also the power structure the gesture sits inside. 59.7% of licensed athletes surveyed said they had experienced at least one form of violence in their current club This is where prevention policies often talk about a “gray zone”: behavior that can be experienced differently depending on where each person stands in the relationship. What one party calls normal can land very differently for the other when structural dependence is part of the picture. Performance pressure as an institutional constraint PP FPTI says the national program will not be paused. Antara reports a timeline : a reorganization of staff, a new coaching team taking over in early March, and preparation continuing for the 2026 Asian Games . The federation is explicit about continuity. In an elite system, a coaching staff isn’t only technical capacity; it’s a human, financial, and symbolic investment. Handling a serious complaint therefore happens inside a structure already built around deadlines and results. Suspend, replace, maintain—each administrative choice has to fit that architecture. The contrast with other recent cases is instructive. In an investigation we conducted into how a sexual assault report was handled within the French national team , the question of a precautionary measure was raised but not activated by the federation, despite statutory tools that could have allowed it. In Indonesia, a provisional suspension was put in place as soon as the internal review opened. The legal contexts differ. So do the regulatory frameworks. But the core question is the same: how does an institution balance presumption of innocence, protection of complainants, and the stability of an elite sports program? Recent published data on violence in sports sheds light on that structural layer. 59.7% of licensed athletes surveyed said they had experienced at least one form of violence in their current club, with higher exposure when participation becomes intensive and competitive. That gradient does not prove a simple cause-and-effect relationship. It does suggest that the most institutionalized spaces also concentrate power imbalances. The Indonesian case is not a mirror of the French cases. But it points to a constant: in elite sport, handling a complaint doesn’t only test individuals. It tests how solid the system really is.