The sun is scorching at Le Bourget, the small climbing temple that Paris 2024 has built in the north of the city, the only facility built specifically for the Games. The 20 climbers taking part in the bouldering and difficulty categories screw on their climbing shoes, up to four sizes smaller than their usual size, and varnish their hands with magnesium while they wait for the megaphone to announce their name. The fight for the second Olympic gold in this sport, which was first won in Tokyo, then begins. The first was won by an 18-year-old boy from Cáceres called Alberto Ginés, almost unknown, a success so unexpected that it ended up overwhelming him. “It was crazy, I wasn’t used to that. I was a boy who was sometimes interviewed by a climbing magazine and who sent the article to his family. And suddenly… gold, fame, interviews all the time, awards, galas and everyone telling me how good I was,” he recalled in Morning Express before the Games, at the CAR in Sant Cugat where he trains.
That Alberto Ginés no longer exists. When the organisers of the event present him as the champion, the crowd burst into applause. There is a noise from a group of about 30 people, including family and friends, who push him when he faces the first exercise. Olympic climbing is an evolving being, and if in Tokyo 2021 the gold was shared by uniting the three modalities, bouldering, difficulty and speed, in Paris the first two go hand in hand, and in Los Angeles 2028, the centre of street sport, each one will go its own way. This Monday is the qualifying session for bouldering, a 4.5-metre wall divided into four independent sections, each of them with holds that award 5, 10 and 25 points (low, high and top zone) for whoever grabs them for at least three seconds. That is, a maximum score of 100 for an impossible perfection in five minutes per block. Wednesday will be the turn of the difficulty or rope, a 15-metre wall scored from bottom to top from 0 to 100 (the higher you climb, the more difficult it is and the more it counts). The eight best from both events will go on to the final on Friday.
Ginés is a specialist in difficulty, and he is clinging to that, to the comeback, after a discreet session in bouldering, 14th position with 28.7 points distributed as follows: 9.9, 9.7, 4.1 and 5. In the first two challenges he climbed to the top zone. In the last two, only to the bottom. No tops. “It was a difficult round, I am not happy, but everything will be decided on Wednesday on the rope, which is my strong point,” he says, white hands, a dragon tattooed on his forearm, optimistic because he is only 5.5 points away from eighth place. Then the Japanese prodigy Sorato Anraju, 17, competes, flying, two tops, and scores a 69. Another level.
The competition has skyrocketed since Tokyo. And the division of specialties has turned this part of the tournament into a contest of pure climbers where the Czech Adam Ondra and the German Alex Megos also compete, two men accustomed to discoveries in the rock, to the routes that only they see. That is not the world of Alberto Ginés, who locks himself away in the CAR of Sant Cugat with David Macià, his long-time coach, finally with the facilities they demanded, and there they prepare first for the pre-Olympic in Budapest where the man from Cáceres achieves qualification, and then these Paris Games. He no longer lives in the same centre, but at 21 years old he has rented a house nearby and there he disconnects, cooks, reads (he has finished The game of the angelby Carlos Ruiz Zafón), is into video games.
Her gold medal has also fuelled the fever for sport climbing in Spain, with almost 350 climbing walls, Madrid and Barcelona at the forefront of a passion that never stops growing. Leslie Romero, the other Spanish representative in Paris, has been fuelled by this passion, finishing eighth in speed (climbing the 15-metre wall as fast as possible, which she does in 7.26 seconds) and will compete in the quarter-finals on Wednesday.
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