The Rise of Climbing I FT Scoreboard

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There is a sport that has gripped the public's imagination.

I'd say in the last four or five years, it's just grown and grown in popularity.

The change has been huge.

We've got something like 400 to 500 per cent more people going climbing every day now than we did at the beginning.

Climbing has gone from niche sport to the Olympic stage.

So we're here at Stronghold in London Fields, and we're screening the men's finals for the bouldering and the lead climbing at the Paris 2024 Olympics. It's the second year we've had climbing at the Olympics. We've got a few more GB athletes this year that have qualified for finals as well.

I've been climbing for about two years now, and it was just a friend that suggested it to me one day. Came down to this climbing centre and have been into it ever since. It's become really popular in London. I'd heard a lot more about people doing it, and it became more of a thing in my social circles, so that was what got me into it, really.

Historically, climbing was solely done outdoors. But the increase in the need for urban activities has seen indoor climbing grow at a rapid pace.

There's now around 450 walls in the UK. Bouldering walls are the most popular. They're growing at the fastest rate.

Indoor climbing didn't exist until maybe around the '80s or '90s, when climbers started using brick walls and plastic holes on the side of buildings and stuff, and in gymnasiums to try and train for outdoor climbing. And then, gradually, indoor climbing has just become a pursuit of its own. 75 per cent of people who climb right now are solely indoor climbers.

According to Sport England, around 370,000 people participate in indoor climbing and bouldering at least twice a month.

In the UK, climbing was so counterculture for a long time. And it was outside. It was non-commercial. The rise of the urban and the commercial and the indoor feels like anathema to the original mission.

So I think you have a spectrum. You have people who only climb outside. You have people that only climb inside. And you have people that dip in and out of both.

Gem MacDomhnaill is the founder and CEO of the Climbing Hangar...

...the first UK climbing company to gain private equity investment.

We opened the climbing hangar on 8th of January, 2011, hot on the heels of the financial crisis in a very, very fierce winter. It was a passion project at the beginning through and through. I had so little money. I had to live in a store cupboard, where I lived for 18 months. We're planning to be somewhere around 50 sites in total, maybe north of that.

The whole industry at the time was basically people like me, people who were just climbing, climbing, climbing, and then, slowly, slowly moved away from someone who'd seen it because their kid had been to a birthday party to they'd done it themselves or other adults had done it.

But when, in 2014, Shauna did her first World Cup. She podiumed. And then Red Bull and Adidas sponsored Shauna. And for me, that was the bellwether.

Red Bull in particular can sponsor anyone. I mean, they do the raddest things. Why are they focused on us?

Shauna Coxsey is one of the UK's most decorated climbers. She's won 11 World Cup gold medals, podiumed over 30 times, and has won the bouldering world title twice.

I started climbing at the age of four, and when I started things looked very different. I started because I saw climbing on the TV, French free climber Catherine Destivelle climbing on cliffs in Africa without ropes. And it just captivated me.

I was seven years old when I started competing. I have this vivid memory of watching the older girls climb and do things that seemed impossible, and I wanted to be just like them.

In 2016, the climbing world received a major announcement.

So climbing was confirmed as an Olympic sport in August 2016 during the Rio Olympics. The response initially was one of excitement.

My god, this is going to change the game. Obviously, people in the industry themselves are very excited about sales potential, uplift, all of that sort of stuff, whereas I think the more kind of sober amongst us were like, it's a trial sport.

In a bid to show that the Olympics could connect with younger audiences and help safeguard the future of its multibillion-dollar broadcast deals, organisers added a handful of new urban events to the Tokyo 2020 programme. Sports climbing was one of them.

For climbing, the Olympics means more eyeballs, more interest, more attention. And I think at first some people who were more traditional climbers, more outdoor-focused, they were worried about the impact on more people in the sport going into the outdoors and the impact on the environment, the impact on the sports culture as well.

As soon as something's in the Olympics that will bring it to a wider audience than ever before, which is against the grain of people that prefer things to be niche, so when your favourite band suddenly gets a proper deal and they can pay to travel to gigs. 'Sold out', some would say, others say 'pays the bills'.

It's a huge dream of any athlete to make the Olympic games. But for many years before it was an Olympic sport we just couldn't really aspire to that. So for younger athletes, it was a huge boost for them.

When it was announced that climbing was going to be part of the Olympics, I had already had the career that I'd dreamed of. But it was a new challenge presented, and I couldn't stop the urge to see if it was possible for me to compete.

In the build-up to climbing's Olympic debut, the buzz around the sport was building. Free Solo, a movie about daring climber Alex Honnold, won an Oscar. But the Olympics impact was on another level.

The sport was growing before we saw many climbing gyms opening and a lot of change within the sport, a lot of development. And then Tokyo just snowballed that. Being part of an Olympics is huge. It's the biggest sporting stage in the world. There are so many more eyes on our sport.

Following Tokyo 2020, at ukclimbing.com, we looked at the social media followers of the athletes three days before the climbing event in Tokyo and three days afterwards. The Olympic champion Alberto Ginés López of Spain, his following went up by more than 300 per cent. There were millions more followers looking at climbing, learning about climbing, just becoming aware of the sport.

Shauna came 10th at the Tokyo Olympics, but the Games helped give her already-glowing career an extra boost and led to her becoming a TV pundit covering Paris 2024.

I never expected my sport to be part of the Olympics during my professional career. To stand here as an Olympian in climbing still blows my mind. Being part of the games has introduced us to new worlds.

We're at the Olympic games. Every single moment is livestreamed on Discovery+. And climbing is one of those sports. I still can't believe that I'm here, that our sport's here, that we've got such a strong team from GB, and this is doing so much for climbing.

In Tokyo 2020, we didn't have any crowds because of Covid regulations. So going to Paris 2024 this year with a 6,000-strong crowd was really incredible. You had that atmosphere behind the livestreams. More people were just taking an interest in it.

I think almost every day was sold out, people waiting outside with placards saying: are there any tickets? Maybe they could have filled a 12,000 stage.

Within two weeks of the Paris Olympics we have seen a 20 per cent uplift in unique visitors. Now people can see the scale of the stage. And I think, for a long time, the stage was so small in climbing, whereas now it's like, oh, everyone's interested. I mean, our marketing director is telling me that the sport climbing category of search terms on Google went up by 1,000 per cent in the week following the Olympics.

So Toby's just won gold. I was told that his followership went up by 20,000 in a day. It's a sea change, isn't it? It's not just a little bit. It's a really big change.

The popularity of climbing has also helped push its sister sport into the limelight.

My name is Abbie. I'm a visually impaired climber. I climb for the B2 women's category in paraclimbing, and I'm the current world champion.

So I've got a condition called Stargardt's macular dystrophy, which affects my central vision. So my peripheral vision is fine, but my central vision is really poor. But what that looks like on the wall is I tend to see big blobs where there are holes, any smaller holes tend to disappear, and I struggle to see the details of the holes.

So quite often, when I'm climbing, I'll have a guide. And if I'm climbing on my own, I'll quite often use... we use big long brushes to clean the chalk off. And sometimes I'll use a brush to just make an extended arm and feel the edges that way.

I started climbing around 12 years ago now. And the change has been huge over that period. So when I started climbing your typical climbing wall would be this grotty old gym in an industrial estate. And they are still in industrial estates, but they're a lot nicer and cleaner now.

It was very male-dominated. It would usually be a lot of big strong blokes with their tops off pulling hard and power screaming. And I feel like now, when you come into a climbing wall, there's a space for everyone, and it feels really welcoming. And I've spoken to so many people who are new to climbing, and they've sort of... they've found a community within that, which has been really cool to see.

The standards have changed radically. You've kind of got way more people going climbing. We've got something like 400 to 500 per cent more people going climbing every day now than we did at the beginning. So it's a bigger group of people, more diverse range of interests, more diverse range of expressions of where they want climbing to take them. Broader market means that you have a broader range of offerings.

As climbing has gained a bit more exposure, I think that has had an impact on people's recognition of paraclimbing. There's still a lot of work to be done. But you can see a massive difference in the competitions now. The amount of funding and resources that are in those competitions compared to when I started just six years ago is incredible.

Climbing's wider appeal with the digital generation, and its popularity at the Olympics is attracting a new audience - corporate sponsors.

The role of sponsorship in climbing is changing as the sport professionalises and the reach gets wider. There's cash in it now. Climbers used to be sponsored - shoes, T-shirts, bags, gear - so the supply chain would give them things for free, whereas I think Shauna, probably not the first, but she was certainly one of the first wave of what we would expect from an athlete sponsorship now, like with an agent, media contract.

I think there's been bigger opportunities for athletes at the very top of the sport. They're getting sponsored by car companies, banks, Red Bull, Coke, all these major companies. But that's very few and far between. If you're working your way onto the World Cup circuit or working your way up it, there's still very few opportunities to make big money in climbing.

I think, for our sport, it's so young. There is a lot of development that needs to happen. But the Olympics bringing new doors for us to open and new relationships to explore, that's definitely happened.

As more exposure leads to more commercial opportunities for elite climbers, those who make a living from the sport hope to feel the benefits at the grassroots level.

I think, from an industry perspective, we'll see some consolidation. We'll see more investors move in, a greater use of marketing and marketing technologies to make things more effective. So I think that's kind of the first stage.

Climbing is now entering into this more mature phase where more people go climbing. Climbing is a normal thing. Some people use climbing as exercise. Some people will use it as a social setting. Other people are well into climbing, like me. Just nothing's really changed. There's just more people to talk to.

So, yeah, I think this... what we're about to see now is the next chapter, which will be a really interesting maturing chapter. What will the Olympics do? What will that scale of appeal and awareness do? I still think we've got loads of exciting times left to see how the story unfolds. There's some really exciting times ahead for the culture of climbing.