Climbing with the Pros

We coincidentally scheduled our trip to Kalymnos, Greece, during the Kalymnos Climbing Festival, a professional climbing competition held on newly bolted climbs. They brought in some incredible climbers, including the eventual medal winners.

Men’s:

1. Alexander Megos (at only 19, he on-sighted every single route)
2. Kilian Fischhuber
3. Daniel Woods

Women’s

1. Caroline Ciavaldini
2. Nina Caprez
3. Barbara Zangerl

Watching the competition was inspiring and humbling at the same time. The Skalia Cave (the location of the climbs) had just recently been bolted for the competition, and was incredibly tall and overhung. The professional climbers made it look so effortless and graceful that I kept thinking “I want to try climbing that route!” Or course, the routes were far more difficult than their technique made it appear, as the easiest route in the entire competition was an extremely tall 5.13a.

Route Overviews

Men’s

• The Unexpected Journey 5.13a
• Don’t Call Me Greasy 5.13c/d
• Don’t Touch My Balls 5.14a
• Klesha 5.14b

Women’s

• Skin on my Left 5.13a
• Banana Party 5.13b
• Sweet Balls 5.13d
• Match Point 5.14a

The climbing festival wasn’t just for pros, though, and John and I ended up entering. It only cost 20 Euros to compete, which included a goody bag, a t-shirt, and a free dinner. They were selling the extra shirts afterwards for 25 Euros each, so clearly competing had its benefits.

The layman’s competition consisted of trying to get as many points as possible over the course of two days. You compete in pairs (two guys, two girls, or a mixed team), and are awarded points based on the difficulty of the climb and how you climb it. Understandably, the highest score for a climb is given for leading a route clean. However, the shocking thing was just how much leading was valued. If I top-roped a 5.11a without falling, I would get a lower score than if I led a 5.5.

However, John and I only signed up for the swag (and the distinction of saying we competed), and didn’t care about doing well. Our goal in Kalymnos was to explore lots of different climbing areas and enjoy ourselves and the last thing we wanted to do was to burn ourselves out by trying to win an endurance competition. Also, I’d much rather get on harder climbs that I’d probably fall on than do a bunch of easy ones for points. In the end, we were so ambivalent that we didn’t even get on the wall until noon the second day (the competition goes from 9am-5pm), and only did about 8 climbs each day. Clearly, we weren’t the only ones who didn’t care, though since we ended up getting 25th place in our division, in a field of more than 60 teams.