Can You Afford to be Sponsored?

January. It's that time when contracts are sent out by various climbing-related manufacturers. In what may be a first, Beal (the French climbing company and no relation to me) posted a photo of British climber James Pearson actually signing a contract, a move that will almost inevitably be replicated throughout the industry. This echoes the practice of professional sports teams and companies throughout the world displaying athletes with contracts, while surrounded by logos, wearing gear etc. and marks one more step in the mainstreaming of climbing.

James Pearson signing with Beal

The significant difference is that in climbing you will rarely actually receive real money, at least when compared to sports such as football or basketball. Even very highly regarded climbing athletes such as Chris Webb-Parsons are not getting that much support, at least if this interview  at 8a.nu reflects his actual situation.

"But there is no glamour, not even a shoe sponsor, just very hard work and absolutely no financial support from his Australian federation.

'I'm in debt on my credit card right now due to the last WC season costing me so much money. I'm slowly paying off my debt now although as soon as the 2012 WC season starts the credit card will come out again. I have to pay for everything including my uniform to compete in, my IFSC license, my climbing association membership, competition entry, hotel, travel etc.... So it all adds up.'

This aspect of being a "professional" climber is one that is rarely if ever discussed. Climbing is a pursuit a lot like yacht racing or showing purebred dogs in that a substantial amount of personal and social capital is assumed to be on hand to cover the expected day-to-day expenses of participation. In other words, to even initially obtain, let alone maintain sponsorship, it is expected that an athlete will maintain a high profile in the sport, usually through travel and extended sojourns at fashionable climbing areas, participate in competitions (very expensive for travel, accommodation, and fees) and be available for other promotional responsibilities such as video shoots, shoe demos or climbing festivals. Such requirements are generally incompatible with genuinely remunerative employment of any kind, meaning that someone or something else is ultimately footing the bill for most if not all the professionals below the very thinnest sliver at the top. This is the simple reality of climbing today.

In other words, for every hundred dollars worth of "free" product, a climber may have to invest 10 to 20 times as much hard cash, maybe more, maybe less, to maintain the lifestyle required to obtain and keep that sponsorship. This of course is not counting the staggering opportunity cost of missed educational opportunities or actual gainful employment, costs that will eventually be counted against many aspiring "pros" when they realize they can no longer maintain elite participation in the sport or in the outdoor industry. As mentioned above, this hard reality is passed over in the media and rarely discussed in public by the athletes themselves. Kudos to Webb-Parsons for mentioning it.

This theme was on my mind in particular when I recently received an email from Moon Climbing informing me that I was being dropped from their team. Now for me, sponsorship is not a matter of financial necessity, it is a matter of my desire to help promote companies that I respect and whose products I personally use and recommend. But on reflection, I realized that looking back, the efforts that I made to fulfill my responsibilities towards the company in the end cost me more out of pocket than the value of the products themselves. Not to say that it wasn't nice to get some "free" gear, but that in the end, at best, I estimate the net financial value to me cashed out in negative terms. Would I do it again? It really depends on the company and its vision for the future. There were certainly some concerns with Moon that I should have heeded.

I understand that for a teenage climber with adequate familial financial resources and no particular obligation in the immediate future towards a career or other responsibilities, climbing sponsorships are great. And there are actual professional climbers out there, not many, but some. But it seems to me that a more public discussion of the actual costs involved in elite-level participation, especially with the increased media presence of sponsorship, as with Beal mentioned above, in concurrence with the rise in numbers of competitive youth teams, might be enlightening to aspiring athletes, their families, and the climbing community in general.

Back to the Future: Evaluating the Breakthroughs of Climbing

A fascinating interview showed up at Planet Mountain recently which created some buzz in the climbing Interwebs. It consisted of Adam Ondra's thoughts about routes he hadn't done yet. It is a comment on the voracious manner with which Ondra has dispatched many of the marquee testpieces of European sportclimbing (not to mention bouldering) that a story on the climbs he has NOT done would garner so much interest. But a sub-theme was his inability to complete the 1990 Ben Moon route Hubble, located at Raven Tor in the heart of England's Peak District. Ondra put it like this: "The world's first 8c+, which could be easily even 9a in my opinion. It is not the most inspiring line, it seems more like a boulder problem with a rope and easier topout, but one must admit that it is of revolutionary difficulty for its time and I believe that it isn't by any means easier than Action Directe, the world's first 9a established a year later." This generated some reaction at sites like UKClimbing.

Ben Moon on Hubble

To me what was interesting was not the merit of the specific case of Hubble, which is probably valid, but the tendency for these kinds of ascents to emerge over time as breakthrough grades. There has been a fair amount of this recently. I begin by citing the case of Dan Goodwin, whose 1984 route Maniac was just recently repeated after over two decades and confirmed at 5.13c/d. This would have made it the hardest route in the country by far at the time and one of the hardest in the world.

Story from Climbing last year

Then there was the likely first 9a+ (5.15a) of Alexander Huber in 1996 with Open Air, a real beast of a pitch with a likely V11 finishing crux. The ClimbingNarc discussed this one pretty thoroughly but read also the interview with Alexander Huber where he sets his own routes in perspective against the "9as" of the present. It is worth mentioning that Huber's 1992 route Om was repeated only in 2009, also by Ondra. For even deeper perspective, check out this image from Climbing 47, from the spring of 1978 showing Ray Jardine on the iconic Valley route, The Phoenix. The caption describes it as one of the current 5.12's in Yosemite."

Does this look like "5.12" to you?

Now what do these routes have in common? I suggest there a few factors that lead to this, the primary one being the people involved. With the exception of Ben Moon, the climbers of these routes were relatively unknown or outside the circle of elite climbers for their time. Ray Jardine for example was regarded as a renegade in Yosemite for his method of working routes and even the use of Friends was seen by some as "cheating." Both Dan Goodwin's reputation and the location of his route ensured it would not be taken seriously at the time. It is hard to believe it now but in an article in On The Edge a now defunct British magazine, the author had to introduce his readers to Huber by pointing out that the British stars had done very few routes 8c and up compared to Huber. He was certainly unknown in the States prior to his free ascent of the Salathe Wall.

The issue with Hubble, in my view, was that the route was completely out of step with the vision of sport climbing that dominated the continent of Europe at the time. Long, stamina-oriented pitches were typical, occasionally with chipped holds to even out the difficulty. The likelihood of someone from abroad investing the time and energy in building up the power to do V13/14 on a rope and then finding the right conditions for a tiny route on a notoriously finicky crag was slim. Nevertheless Hubble was given an 8c+ grade, still regarded as a breakthrough but only by a letter grade. Only now is the record being rethought as hard bouldering has been maturing and a climber like Ondra has proven to be the equal of someone like Moon and Moffatt in bouldering hard and climbing on a rope hard.

Are we dealing here with the blinding effects of whatever is/was the current paradigm, a mode of seeing the world that hinders the understanding and inhibits knowledge? I think the question takes on importance with the rise of "professional" climbing. In other words, does professionalism imply subscribing to the dominant present paradigm and by implication, stifling innovation and creativity? A deeper exploration of that specific question belongs to another post but as I notice the recent crop of reevaluations of the historical record of sport climbing and bouldering, I am struck by the inconsistency of that record and the ways in which it has denied or delayed recognition of the real pioneers

Interview with Carlo Traversi

If you are interested in learning more about what makes an elite-level boulderer tick, please check out my interview with Carlo Traversi. As part of my bouldering book blog, I plan on talking periodically with leaders in the sport about what they think is important for developing as a climber.

Carlo Traversi: Alpine Sessions from Five Ten on Vimeo.

January 2012

Welcome to the long dark days of winter. The snow finally melted off here in Boulder and bouldering outside is once more an option. Not that I have been doing much of that. A couple of weeks off due to weather and various illnesses and suddenly my Christmas break was over. Before Christmas, I felt as though my training was going quite well and now I am trying to recover that standard, little by little.

I have very nice simple but effective training set-up in my basement which has been very helpful in focusing on my fingers and core strength. I am trying to get sufficiently in shape to start heading up to RMNP in March to start working Element of Surprise as I think early spring is the most feasible time to try this problem.

There are many lower projects closer to town I have in mind as well and not all of them at Flagstaff either. I see this year as a time to consolidate my strength and knowledge in an attempt to reach the V13 level, a goal that feels a bit unlikely given my age and free time. Nevertheless, I feel as though I am as strong as I have ever been.

Unlike many other bloggers, I will not be delivering my views on the climbing year that was other than to say that everyone is playing for second place when compared to Adam Ondra. He simply had a phenomenal year and clearly is poised to achieve things that will reset our expectations of what sport climbing and bouldering will look like in coming decades. It will be very interesting to see who, if anyone, can rise to this standard, especially in the USA.

The bouldering  book has been doing well receiving a couple of great reviews recently from Climberism  and Deadpoint Magazine.It has stayed consistently high in the "Rock Climbing" category at Amazon as well.

In the bouldering vein, here is a boulder problem from Poudre Canyon, a destination that practically counts as a road trip for me these days...

Climbing and the Olympics: Will Climbing Lose its Soul?

About a month ago, before I went on unplanned hiatus from writing this blog, I read a very interesting commentary at Kairn.com on the Olympics and climbing. There has been a consistent push in recent years for the inclusion of competition climbing in the Olympics, perhaps in part because the potential resulting higher profile could bring bigger sponsors on board for events such as the World Cup. Here are some thoughts translated from the French, originally authored by Jean Pierre Banville:

"Elle va y gagner la perte de son âme ! La perte des valeurs qui ont fait de l’escalade et de la montagne des sports totalement hors-normes. Je ne suis pas Luddite et certainement pas contre le profit, contre le juste retour de l’investissement. Mais l’escalade s’est toujours positionnée au-dessus des valeurs purement mercantiles. L’escalade est un sport de passion dont les valeurs et l’histoire sont ancrées beaucoup plus profondément dans le psyché humain que la lutte, le golf ou le rugby.

Il n’y a pas de héros dans la lutte ou le golf. De vrais héros. Des géants hors du commun, des êtres hors-normes. Et, non, Tiger Wood n’est pas un être hors-norme. Par contre Cassin et Preuss et Dulfer et Desmaison… ce n’est pas la lutte ou le ping-pong. Guido Lammer, ce n’est pas le curling! C’est l’antithèse du curling… franchement !
On va me traiter de vieux crouton, à ressortir ces figures oubliées. Vous en voulez de plus récentes? Berhault, Bonatti, Arnold… ouvrez les magazines d’ici et d’ailleurs et vous retrouverez ces personnages d’exception qui ont fait et font la montagne mythique !
C’est notre âme collective et c’est ce que nous avons à perdre."

What it will win is the loss of its soul. The loss of values which have made climbing and mountaineering sports completely out of the mainstream. I am not a Luddite and certainly not against profit, against a fair return on investment. But climbing has always placed itself  above purely mercantile values. Climbing is a sport of passion where the values at the history are anchored much more deeply in the human spirit than wrestling golf or rugby.

There are no heroes in wrestling or golf. No true heroes. No heroes beyond the everyday,no superhumans. And no, Tiger Woods is not superhuman. By contrast Cassin, Preuss, Dulfer, and Desmaison...this is not wrestling or ping-pong. Guido Lammer, this is not curling! It's the antithesis of curling...obviously!

You could call me out of touch, to refer to these forgotten figures. You want more recent examples? Berhault, Bonatti, Arnold...open the magazines here and elsewhere and you will find the exceptional people who have made mountaineering mythical.

It's our collective soul and it's this that we can lose.

In essence, I agree with the author of this piece, in the sense that climbing has always set itself aside from other sports in a number of ways. Initially, this was seen in the sport's location, the peaks and glaciers of the Alps which had been rejected as desolate  and frightening wasteland in Western culture for centuries. There was also the ever-present risk of death in this environment which made the game much more serious than most. Finally there was the deliberate search for difficulty, seen in the ever more closely refined definitions of desirable objectives, from unclimbed summits to unclimbed ridges to unclimbed walls and so on. To play this game in any serious sense meant a total commitment of mind and body.

This set of rules was more or less consistently understood until after the First World War when new technologies and an expanding leisure class began to transform the sport, turning it away from the heroic age. In the present era, adventure has had to be even more carefully defined, lending a certain paradoxical air to the enterprise. For example, Tommy Caldwell's epic efforts to free climb the Dawn Wall hinge upon microscopic flakes of rock, with his attempts broadcast to the world straight from the portaledge via Facebook and Twitter. There is no question this is a serious climb with an uncertain outcome. But does it pass the hero test when compared with the aura-laden landmark ascents of the past? Perhaps there is literally too much baggage these days for such a climb to exist.

Maybe a look at the antics (and tragedy) surrounding the first ascent of the North Face of the Eiger will illuminate the issues involved. Similarly high-profile, observable from the safety of a hotel balcony, the climb, which closed the book on the pioneering age of alpinism in Europe, became the object of mass media coverage and its ascensionists were feted by Adolf Hitler. Indeed prior to the 1936 games, Hitler had promised Olympic medals to the first party to climb the route. Ironically, the groundbreaking, even heroic, ascent of the Matterhorn North Face by Franz and Toni Schmid was rewarded with an Olympic medal in 1932. According to most histories of this "golden age" of modern alpinism, much was made of this heroic, even mythic, mode of climbing by fascist governments in Italy and Germany, a phenomenon that may have contributed to the IOC not awarding further medals in climbing.

All of which is to say that the issue of the relationship of climbing to organized sports, indeed organizations of all kinds, is an old one and the heart of the debate is still alive and beating. It seems unlikely that the face of climbing in the Olympics will be anything other than competition climbing as we already know it, in all its sanitized, athletic and commercialized senses. I am not sure that inclusion in the Olympics will change anything in climbing from what it is already, a multifaceted game with all kinds of players and places and ways to play. I am not saying that climbing being in the Olympics will be the huge benefit to the sport that some claim but I doubt it will be the downfall of climbing as we know it. The history of climbing seems to show otherwise.

About that Citibank Ad (or why I will never be in an Outside Magazine Top 10 list)

In a previous post, I discussed my feelings about the transformation of climbing into a luxury sport, at least at a certain end of the socio-economic spectrum. I posted a Youtube Video of an ad made by Citibank that features Katie Brown and Alex Honnold.

Here's the video:



Given the dismal economic picture in the US right now and the fact that big American banks in particular have had a great deal to do with it, it was natural that the ad would spark a certain degree of controversy. A forum post on Mountain Project and another on Super Topo both alluded to Alex Honnold selling out to the "1%", an argument that was roundly quashed by most of the people who bothered to respond.

I thought to myself, this is interesting. Since when did climbing become so capitalistic? Obviously climbers have "sold out" before. We all have to some degree. But that a cadre of apologists for squillionaires in suits would praise their economic masters in a climbing forum caught me a bit off guard. A remarkable number of posters stood up to defend Fortune 500 companies (and thank heaven for that) because, somehow, without them we would be unable to, well, do pretty much anything. And this was offered up without a trace of irony, nor any suggestion that such a state of affairs might be less than desirable, especially given the self-image of climbers as individualistic, self-reliant, or independent. I saw a few posts suggest that somehow because Alex and Katie received compensation for this ad, that the money was (paraphrasing here) "going back into the climbing community" and this was a good thing. Not sure exactly how that was going to work, anymore than Jay-Z's T-shirts are going to help anyone but Jay-Z himself.

Now I am not suggesting that Alex should do anything in particular with his own money, though we may all want to think before we put our money there. This video provides a useful corrective to the consumerist (and fairly sexist "what girl wouldn't need new shoes?") picture of the world that Citibank would love us to believe in.



To me the bigger and more important question is that of meaning, both in our lives and in the sport of climbing. In other words, is climbing about striving for something outside commodification and marketing? Are there actually values worth sacrificing our material well-being, even risking our lives for? Alex's incredible achievements in the realm of free-soloing, to name but one example, seem to indicate there are. The commercial he was in indicates the opposite.

As I see it, climbing, and on a broader philosophical level, Western capitalist culture itself, is on a collision course with materialism in its deepest sense. The problem with materialism, philosophically speaking, is the basic equation between input and output. Expenditure of power equals a predictable determined result. Basic physics stuff. No sense of moral engagement or ethical questions about the well-lived meaningful life. In the end we are presented with a multi-sensory fantasy of endless and meaningless power played out in all its forms, from political to physical, applied in ever-more spectacular but increasingly hollow actions, creating ever more empty, even hopelessly self-contradictory, forms.

For example, I don't know if anyone else noticed the ironic position of Katie Brown at the end of the ad, a position intended to convey a sense of excitement and desire. She stands suspended over a seemingly infinite expanse of, well, emptiness, perched on a tower of visibly eroding sand, a point that appears to be a dead-end, a place of no hope or return. Maybe this image, intended as the perfect consummation of consumerist desire, is also an apt metaphor for the unsustainable and vertiginous trajectory of the Western economic system, of which Citibank is a prime example. The sport of climbing would do well to think a bit more carefully about how far it wants to go down this path.

Now I know this kind of negative thinking runs against the current of most climbing writing out there on the Web. A climber new to the sport, given the virtual amusement park of videos, blogs, news items, and so on, would think that all was well in the sport. And truth to tell, there are a lot of cool rides out there. But there is a lot of selling going on as well and I wonder if we are all really aware of what we are giving up long-term in our quest to fulfill our short-term desires. Going pro has its cons.