Why Climbing Is Political, Full Stop

Let’s start with a simple compass: at Vertige Media, we will never separate the move from the moment.

Martin Stranik - 2025 Chamonix World Cup © David Pillet

Climbing is not a portable voting booth, or a clean little escape hatch from the noise of the world. It is the opposite. It is a doorway. A lookout. From private gyms to besieged cliffs, from worn-out bodies to brand logic, we want to document what this century is doing to climbing, and what climbing throws back in the century’s face.

We believe lived passions tell us more than disembodied editorials ever will. A climbing wall can say more about the state of our social fractures than a cable-news panel packed with experts paid to perform decline. A plastic hold, a monthly gym membership that keeps getting more expensive, freelance route setters—the people who design the climbs—running on dreams, a locked Paralympic selection system: that is our raw material. This is not a cute lifestyle item at the end of the paper. It is the main story.

Vertige Media was born from one conviction: climbing is not a harmless niche pastime. And for anyone who thinks it is too small to matter, beware the blind spots. That is exactly where the social order likes to hide its worst violence: in the folds of everyday life.

We can already hear the eternal gatekeepers choking on their chalk: why contaminate the pure movement with politics, gender, class struggle, ecology, or postcolonialism?

Let’s flip the question. How can anyone talk seriously about climbing today while pretending the rest of the world is not in the room?

To cover the boom in urban climbing gyms without looking at gentrification and the exclusions it creates is not neutrality. It is blindness. To write about the rush on outdoor crags—climbing cliffs, basically—without naming conflicts over access and the stripping of shared resources is complicity. To talk about performance without examining ableism in para climbing or the financial precarity of elite athletes is a lie.

And the mountains? They are not exempt from grand national myths or from the aggressive commercialization of our desire to get somewhere “wild.” The world does not stop at the landing pads, the mats below the wall. It is already on the wall. We are simply refusing to look away.

This is not a lecture. It is a method.

We care about the world because we find it in something physical: a face, a frustration, a lived experience. Cognitive science and social psychology have shown it clearly enough: lasting attention comes from concrete friction with reality, not from moral instruction. We care when a subject collides with our own private map.

Knowing is no longer enough. People need to feel it

That is where climbing becomes a powerful journalistic tool. Not a trick for sneaking sociology into distracted climbers’ diets. We are not asking people to abandon their passions in order to look at society. We are showing them that society is already waiting for them inside those passions.

That is our answer to the numbness of contemporary democracy. We are drowning in a flood of frightening information that almost nobody still has the energy to metabolize. Crises, wars, climate collapse, class domination: everything has been documented to the point of disgust, and then paralysis. Knowing is no longer enough. People need to feel it.

When psychological distance turns collective tragedies into faraway abstractions, journalism cannot just keep shouting along with everyone else. It has to find side trails.

Ours run through grades—the rating systems climbers use to measure difficulty—that split a community in two; everyday sexism; a cliff closed because biodiversity is hanging by a thread; the route setter paid next to nothing; the broke champion; the outdoor brand selling a fantasy of anti-establishment freedom while locking down its financial messaging.

We believe in the power of story. Not the pretty story used as packaging, but story as a tool for disruption and understanding. Narrative transportation is not a cocktail-party concept. A strong story moves the line, shakes loose old assumptions, and gives facts a body. It gives political flesh to what had been a cold statistic.

Sport loves to wrap itself in the convenient myth of childish neutrality: pure, innocent, protected from human ugliness

That is why we prefer the micro to the macro, the body to the concept. A Ukrainian climber who lost a limb does not represent war in the abstract. He shows what war does to a life, directly, physically, brutally. An athlete shut out of a Paralympic future is not a footnote on ableism. She shows us the machinery working in real time. A climbing-gym chain does not “sum up” urban capitalism. It offers a small working model of it.

This is not about forcing politics onto climbing. It is about refusing to keep stripping politics out of it out of cowardice.

Sport loves to wrap itself in the convenient myth of childish neutrality: pure, innocent, protected from human ugliness. That is a fraud. From Pierre Bourdieu to Loïc Wacquant, sociology has been cutting that myth open for decades: movement is social. No one climbs in a vacuum. We climb with our money, our free time, our class legitimacy, our family history, our gender. Sport sorts, ranks, and separates as much as it brings people together. Sometimes it frees people. Often it excludes them, while leaving our consciences plenty of room to stay comfortable.

Climbing should not be ashamed of its contradictions. A culture that wants to grow up has to break with ready-made thinking. You can love climbing and still refuse to buy its own mythology. It will only become more alive, more critical, and more free. That is Vertige Media’s obsession: taking climbing too seriously to leave it to the merchants alone.

Make room for reporting, analysis, irreverence, and humor, too. Because climbing is an industry, a geography of bodies, a knot of ecological tensions and economic power struggles. Who climbs? Who pays? Who cleans the crag? Who makes the decisions behind the scenes? Who gets erased by the big heroic story of performance?

This text is our ridgeline.

We will write about climbing fully, passionately, and without turning it into a shadow play for people chasing disconnected thrills. We will look at the holds, of course. But we will never forget the hands worn down on them, the bodies that fall, the monopolies being built, and the resistance taking shape.

Climbing is not where we go to disappear. It is where we hit the world head-on.