As a professional speed climber, Olympic hopeful Grace Crowley is familiar with racing against the clock.
But just days out from the Oceania qualification run that could seal them a ticket to the Paris Games in 2024, they face a different sort of time trial.
Speed climber Grace Crowley an Olympic hopeful is facing a race against time. Credit: Jason South
Melbourne has a shortage of auto-belays, the harness required for the event where two competitors race each other, and the clock, to the top of a 15-metre wall with a five-degree incline.
Luckily, the New Zealand team will save the day – flying over their belays in time for Crowley to squeeze in a practice before Sunday’s qualifying event.
Problems like this are not uncommon for the newly inducted Olympic sport, which made its debut at the Tokyo games. There is also a shortage of speed climbing walls in Melbourne, so Crowley has instead trained at traditional bouldering gyms.
The 20-year-old has returned home to Melbourne from Utah, where they moved to access better training, to compete in the International Federation of Sport Climbing Oceania Olympic qualifier, which spans from Thursday to Sunday, and features 60 climbers from Australia, New Zealand and Guam.
Sport climbing has three disciplines: bouldering, lead climbing and speed climbing.
In lead climbing, harnessed athletes climb a wall more than 15m high, navigating complex rock combinations. Whichever athlete climbs the highest in six minutes wins.
In bouldering, athletes don’t wear a harness: a series of walls is a maximum 4.5m high with crash pads at the base. Whichever athlete can climb the most walls in four minutes wins.
The 2020 Games combined the three disciplines into a single event, with average results determining who won the gold, silver and bronze. At next year’s event, speed climbing will have its own set, while lead and bouldering remain combined.
Crowley was 12 when they were first introduced to the sport, and made Australia’s national team after only four years of climbing. They started competing in world cups at the age of 15.
“I was immediately hooked,” the non-binary athlete said. “It’s the problem-solving aspect, and the constant progression of the sport.”
The routes in speed climbing are always the same, and so the puzzle for Crowley is just how efficiently they can scale the wall. They use a lot of visualisation techniques, repeating the choreography over and over again in their mind. By the time of the big race, the climber relies on muscle memory and instinct.
“In training, you definitely think about how to make changes, but by the time you’re competing, you’ve already made all those changes, so you have to trust that you know it, and just do it,” they said.
Crowley has been “hooked” by the sport since climbing their first wall aged 12. Credit: Jason South
Crowley’s progression has been much like their chosen discipline – speedy. When they started in 2019, Crowley’s best time was 14.87 seconds. This year, they’ve shaved it down to 8.2 seconds.
They’re hopeful if they can replicate that time, they’ll be able to qualify on Sunday for the Olympics. In 2022, they were the top-ranked Oceania climber at the youth world championships, finishing eighth in the world.
The men’s world record was set by Indonesia’s Veddriq Leonardo, who won the final at the IFSC Climbing World Cup in Seoul in 4.90 seconds. Meanwhile, Poland’s Aleksandra Miroslaw set the women’s world record in September when she raced to the top in 6.24 seconds at the European Olympic qualifier.
Out of the 68 sports climbers from across the world that will make it to Paris, a total of 28 athletes across both the male and female events will compete in the speed climbing race.
If Crowley qualifies, they plan to celebrate by doing what they love most – climbing.
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