In Part 5 of this series breaking down boulder styles, we look at how well the top 20 men and women did across the attributes, compared to those ranked 21+ across the series.
This is inspired by the paper “Athletes’ performance in different boulder types at international bouldering competitions” by Claudia Augste et al. In their paper, they only categorised climbs into five different styles: dynamic, volume, crimps, slabs, and mantles.
They found that for the top 20 athletes across the years 2017 and 2018:
Lower ranked female athletes were significantly worse than the top 20 athletes in the dynamo, volume, and crimp categories, whereas men were worse in the categories dynamo, and slab.
In this newsletter, we look at how this has changed in 2024.
How Successful were athletes?
Recall that Matias Ochoa Marcos and I looked at five different attributes: direction, dynamic move type, hold type, style, and wall angle.
On average across all the sections, women were successful on zone sections 71% of the time and 30% on top sections. Men were successful on zone sections 79% of the time and 38% of the time on top sections.
For the women, the success rates for top sections going left is half compared to sections going right. For the men, it is the opposite, with more athletes being successful when the top section goes left.
For the women, coordination is the hardest style across both zone and top sections. For the men, physical sections had the lowest success rates.
Overhanging sections for both men and women had one of the highest success rates for the zone section and the lowest in the top sections.
For both men and women, closed holds like crimps had a similar success rate to open hand holds, apart from on the men's top section.
How Do the Top 20 Compare to Those Ranked 21+?
For men and women, we see that both groups have similar success rates for closed holds. We do see that the top 20 are significantly better at open holds than those ranked 21 and above.
For both men and women, overhanging zone sections had a significant difference. There was also a big difference on both vertical sections for women, and vertical top sections for men, but they were not necessarily significantly different.
For both men and women, we can see that coordination sections saw a significant difference between the top 20 and the rest. For men, we also saw a difference on physical zone sections, but not on the top sections where the success rates were similar for both groups.
What do we mean by significant?
Like last week, we used the Fisher Exact test to compare the success of the Top 20 to those ranked 21+.
However, this week, I used a significance level of 0.01 instead of 0.05 to mirror the analysis in the previous paper. There were 15 values with p-values < 0.01, 8 of which were < 0.001.
Next week, we have the last part in this series. I will take a look at how well these attributes can predict the number of tops and zones, metrics often used by routesetters when trying to estimate the level of the problems.
News
- The last Lead World Cup of the season starts in Koper, Slovenia, on Friday. Erin McNeice and Alberto Ginés López lead the series standings. Chaehyun Seo and Satone Yoshida are just behind them in second place.
We see the return of Jakob Schubert and Adam Ondra to competition. Ai Mori and Annie Sanders won't be competing though.
Janja Garnbret and Jain Kim are both competing and both have won 30 Lead gold medals. Janja has the chance to pull away from Jain to be first in the all-time list of Lead World Cup gold medals for the first time. - Tickets for the IFSC Climbing Grand Finals Fukuoka 2025 event in Japan are now on sale. The schedule for the event has also been released:
- October 23rd (Thursday)
- Morning: Team Lead Preliminary Round
- Afternoon: Team Boulder Qualifying
- October 24th (Friday)
- Morning: Boulder loser revival match
- Afternoon: Lead Final
- October 25th (Saturday)
- Morning: Para Climbing Qualifying
- Afternoon: Boulder Final
- October 26th (Sunday)
- Morning: Paraclimbing Final
- Afternoon: Exhibition
- October 23rd (Thursday)
Media Recommendations
Xian and Dipi visit Climbing Gym Sen, the newest climbing gym in London.
Jonathan Sin goes to a World Cup training camp in Paris and shares his experience.
Niki chats with routesetter Yann Genoux about the final routes at last year's World Cup in Koper.
Miho Nonaka shares the process of setting a boulder in NextGen.
Is it really V2 in my gym? Mike Boyd takes a look.
Where to Buy Tickets
Koper IFSC Lead World Cup
When: 5th–6th September
Where: Slovenia
Where to buy tickets: Tickets are available through the Slovenian ticket seller eventim (Google Translate is quite good).
Guiyang IFSC Lead World Cup
When: 12th–13th September
Where: China
Where to buy tickets: Tickets are available locally.
Seoul IFSC World Championship and Para Climbing World Championship
When: 20th–28th September
Where: South Korea
Where to buy tickets: Tickets will be needed for the following (all indoor events):
- Paraclimbing Finals
- Speed Qualification and Finals - Women and Men
- Lead Semi-Finals and Finals - Women and Men
- Boulder Semi-Finals and Finals - Women and Men.
All other events are free of charge. Access to the venue is limited. Entry is restricted to first-come, first-served.
Tickets for the indoor events are available through Interpark Global. The indoor rounds are held in the KSPO Dome in the Olympic Park.
IFSC Climbing Grand Finals Fukuoka 2025
When: 23rd–26th October
Where: Japan
Where to buy tickets: The competition will be held at the Chikuho Green Park / Iizuka Sports Resort The Retreat in Fukuoka Prefecture. The location is inaccessible by public transport.
Tickets for the event are now on sale. You can buy them through HIS Visit Japan.
Laval IFSC Paraclimbing World Cup
When: 24th–26th October
Where: France
Where to buy tickets: You can buy tickets for the Para Climbing event and the Continental Speed event here.
