"The Battle" Norway

One of the two walls set for women’s and men’s finals. From the left, men’s 1, women’s 1, women’s 2, men’s 2.

This comp is cool because the competitors get to set their own problems. A very small field of 5 men and 4 women got to set their own problems and work on all of the problems yesterday. Today are finals, and each competitor gets 4 minutes per problem to try and send. They climb in rotating schedule, so they can get up to 12 minutes (women) and 16 minutes (men) rest in between climbs. If someone sends fast, the rest is shorter though. Women’s routes are in red, men’s are in teal.

The other wall. From the left, women’s 3, men’s 3, women’s 4, men’s 4, men’s 5.

The problems were set on 2 awesome looking Walltopia walls, one with a big eyeball feature in it. (above). 2 problems for girls and 2 for guys on the first wall, 2 girls and 3 guys on the second wall. The climbers climbed in order of their problems, with women climbing first and men later after they’d stripped the women’s problems. Here are the women:

Set problem 1, climbed first on each. Magnus’ sister.

Set problem 2, climbed 2nd on each problem.

Set 3rd boulder, climbed 3rd.

Set last, climbed last.

And the men:

Set problem 1, climbed 1st on all.

Set 2nd boulder, climbed 2nd.

Set 3rd boulder, climbed 3rd.

Carlo set the 4th boulder and climbed 4th.

Set the last problem and climbed last. The home country favorite.

Everyone said they were tired from setting and forerunning yesterday, but they still managed to put on a great show. The live feed was excellent, the best I’ve seen in terms of feed quality, plus the graphics were good and the instant replays were instant. Very nice job on that, and it makes sense since it was apparently done by Norway’s national broadcasting organization. It’ll be good to see more high quality feeds at other climbing events in the future (we can only hope!).

2 upcoming posts will lay out the women’s and men’s problems and results. Stay tuned!

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