The Rise of Climbing: From Niche Sport to Olympic Phenomenon

Climbing's surge in popularity is transforming it from a niche pursuit to a mainstream Olympic sport.

### The Rise of Climbing: From Niche Sport to Olympic Phenomenon
* 🧗‍♂️  Climbing has surged in popularity over the past four to five years, with participation increasing by **400-500% daily**, transitioning from a niche activity to a recognized **Olympic sport**.
* 🏅  The Paris 2024 Olympics will feature **bouldering and lead climbing finals**, marking the **second year climbing has been included in the Olympics**, with **more GB athletes qualifying for finals this time**.
* 🏢  Indoor climbing has seen rapid growth, with around **450 climbing walls** in the UK, and **75% of climbers** now practicing solely indoors, reflecting a shift from traditional outdoor climbing.
* 🎉  The announcement of climbing as an Olympic sport in 2016 generated excitement in the industry, although some traditional climbers expressed concerns about **environmental impacts and the sport's culture**.
* 📈  Following the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, social media engagement for climbers skyrocketed, with Olympic champion **Alberto Hinz Lopez seeing a 300% increase in followers**, illustrating the sport's newfound visibility.
* 🌍  The sport's growth has also positively impacted paraclimbing, with **increased recognition and funding**, contributing to a **more inclusive and welcoming climbing community**.
* 💼  As climbing becomes more commercialized, sponsorship opportunities are expanding, with elite athletes **attracting major brands**, signaling a **professionalization of the sport**.
* 🔮  The future of climbing looks promising as it matures, with expectations for **continued growth and cultural evolution**, driven by its **Olympic presence and broader appeal**.

there's a sport that has gripped the public's imagination, I'd say, in the last sort of 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% 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. The second year we've had climbing at the Olympics. We've got a few more GB athletes this year that qualify 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 center and have been into it ever since. It 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 circle, so that was a 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 sort of 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 holds on the side of buildings and stuff, and in gymnasiums to try and train for outdoor climbing. Then gradually, indoor climbing has just become a pursuit of its own. 75% 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 an ethema to kind of 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. Jed McDonald is the founder and CEO of the climbing hanger, the first UK climbing company to gain private equity investment. We opened the climbing hanger 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, like 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, like people who were just climbing, climbing, climbing, and then slowly, slowly it moved away from someone had 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 the 2014, Shan did her first World Cup, um, she podiumed. And then Red Bull and Anida sponsored Shaa, and for me, that was the bellwether. Red Bull, in particular, can sponsor anyone. I mean, they did the raddest things. Why they focused on us. Shauna Coxy 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 Katherine Desal climbing on cliffs in Africa without ropes, and it just captivated me. I was 7 years old when I started competing, but 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. Oh my God, this is going to change the game. Obviously, people in the industry themselves are very excited about sales potential uplift, all 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 multi-billion dollar broadcast deals. Organizers added a handful of new urban events to the Tokyo 2020 program. 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, you know, 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. It's like when your favorite band suddenly gets a proper deal, and they can pay to travel to gigs, sold out, some would say, others say, pay 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 dreamed of, but was a new challenge presented, and I couldn't stop the urge to see if it was possible for me to compete. In the buildup 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 snowboard that you know 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 3 days before the climbing event in Tokyo and 3 days afterwards. The Olympic champion Alberto Hinz Lopez of Spain, his following went up by more than 300%. 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 sports 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 a new world where we're at the Olympic.

Games every single moment is live-streamed on Discovery Plus, and climbing is one of those sports. I still can't believe that I'm here, that our sports 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 live streams, more people just taking an interest in it. I think almost every day was sold out, people waiting outside with PL cards saying, Are there any tickets? Maybe they could have filled a 12,000-stage, you know. Within 2 weeks of the Paris Olympics, we have seen a 20% 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, now marketing director telling me that the sport climbing category of search terms

on Google went up by 1,000% 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 CA 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. [Music] My name is Abby. 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 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 holds. Any smaller holds tend to disappear, and I struggle to see the details of the holds. 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 like we use big long brushes to clean the chalk off, and sometimes I'll use a brush to kind of just making like 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 kind of this like gray 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 4 to

500% 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 professionalizes 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 sh 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, 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 sort of make things more

effective. So, I think that's kind of like 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.

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Financial Times

Climbing has seen a 400-500% increase in participation over the past few years, transitioning from a niche sport to the Olympic stage.

Indoor climbing has grown rapidly, with around 450 walls in the UK and 75% of climbers now focusing solely on indoor activities.

The Climbing Hanger, founded by Jed McDonald in 2011, has played a significant role in the industry's growth, with plans to expand to 50+ sites.

Shauna Coxsey's Climbing Journey and the Olympic Impact

Shauna Coxsey, a decorated UK climber, started her journey at age four and quickly made a name for herself with multiple World Cup gold medals.

The announcement of climbing as an Olympic sport in 2016 brought excitement and concern, as it aimed to connect with younger audiences and increase the sport's visibility.

The Olympics' inclusion of climbing led to a surge in interest, new gym openings, and a boost for younger athletes aspiring to compete at that level.

The Tokyo 2020 Olympics significantly boosted the visibility and popularity of climbing, with athletes' social media followings skyrocketing after the event.

The games provided a unique platform for climbers, leading to increased interest and engagement in the sport.

The success of the Olympics has also positively influenced paraclimbing, with visually impaired climbers like Abby gaining recognition and support.

Climbing has changed significantly over the past 12 years, with walls becoming nicer and more welcoming, and a diverse range of people now participating.

The number of climbers has surged by 400-500%, leading to a broader range of offerings and a greater impact on paraclimbing recognition.

The sport's growing popularity, especially with the digital generation and its inclusion in the Olympics, is attracting corporate sponsors and professionalizing the sport.

The Evolution of Athlete Sponsorship in Climbing

Athlete sponsorship in climbing is still developing, with few opportunities for big money, especially for those working their way up.

The Olympics are bringing new exposure and commercial opportunities for elite climbers, with hopes of benefiting the grassroots level.

The sport is entering a more mature phase, with more people participating in climbing for various reasons, and there are exciting times ahead for the culture of climbing.