클라이밍의 부상: 틈새 스포츠에서 올림픽 종목으로: 클라이밍의 부상

### 클라이밍의 부상: 틈새 스포츠에서 올림픽 종목으로: 클라이밍의 부상
* 🧗 클라이밍은 지난 4~5년 동안 참가자가 **매일 400~500%씩 증가**하는 등 인기가 급증하며 틈새 활동에서 **올림픽 정식 종목**으로 자리 잡았습니다.
* 🏅 2024 파리 올림픽에서는 **볼더링과 리드 클라이밍 결승전**이 열리며, 클라이밍이 올림픽 종목에 포함된 지 2년째를 맞아 **더 많은 영국 선수들이 이번 대회 결승전에 출전**할 수 있게 되었습니다.
* 🏢 실내 클라이밍은 영국에 약 **450개의 클라이밍 벽**이 있을 정도로 빠르게 성장하고 있으며, 현재 **75%의 클라이머가 실내에서만 연습**하는 등 전통적인 야외 클라이밍에서 벗어나 실내 클라이밍으로 전환하고 있습니다.
* 🎉 2016년 클라이밍의 올림픽 정식 종목 채택이 발표되자 업계는 흥분했지만, 일부 전통적인 클라이머들은 **환경에 미치는 영향과 스포츠 문화에 대한 우려**를 표명했습니다.
* 📈 도쿄 2020 올림픽 이후 클라이밍 선수들의 소셜 미디어 참여가 급증했으며, **올림픽 챔피언 알베르토 힌츠 로페즈의 팔로워 수가 300% 증가**하는 등 클라이밍의 새로운 인지도를 확인할 수 있었습니다.
* 🌍 스포츠의 성장은 **파라클라이밍에도 긍정적인 영향을 미쳐 인지도와 자금이 증가**하여 보다 포용적이고 환영하는 클라이밍 커뮤니티에 기여하고 있습니다.
* 💼 클라이밍이 상업화되면서 **엘리트 선수들이 주요 브랜드를 유치**하는 등 스폰서십 기회가 확대되고 있으며, 이는 스포츠의 전문화를 알리는 신호탄입니다.
* 🔮 클라이밍의 미래는 **올림픽에서의 존재감과 폭넓은 매력**에 힘입어 지속적인 성장과 문화적 진화에 대한 기대와 함께 성숙해지면서 유망해 보입니다.

클라이밍의 인기가 급상승하면서 틈새 종목에서 올림픽의 주류 스포츠로 변모하고 있습니다.

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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클라이밍은 지난 몇 년 동안 참여자가 400~500% 증가하며 틈새 스포츠에서 올림픽 무대로 옮겨가고 있습니다.

실내 클라이밍은 빠르게 성장하여 영국에는 약 450개의 벽이 있으며, 현재 클라이머의 75%가 실내 활동에만 집중하고 있습니다.

2011년 제드 맥도날드가 설립한 클라이밍 행거는 50개 이상의 장소로 확장할 계획으로 업계 성장에 중요한 역할을 해왔습니다.

쇼나 콕시의 등반 여정과 올림픽 영향력

영국의 유명 클라이머인 쇼나 콕시는 4살 때부터 등반을 시작하여 월드컵 금메달을 여러 개 획득하며 빠르게 이름을 알렸습니다.

2016년 클라이밍의 올림픽 정식 종목 채택 발표는 젊은 층과 소통하고 스포츠의 인지도를 높이기 위한 것이었기 때문에 기대와 우려를 동시에 불러일으켰습니다.

올림픽에 클라이밍이 포함되면서 클라이밍에 대한 관심이 급증하고 새로운 체육관이 문을 열었으며, 클라이밍 선수를 꿈꾸는 젊은 선수들의 도전이 활발해졌습니다.

올림픽이 클라이밍에 미치는 영향

도쿄 2020 올림픽은 클라이밍의 인지도와 인기를 크게 높였으며, 대회가 끝난 후 선수들의 소셜 미디어 팔로워 수가 급증했습니다.

올림픽은 클라이머들에게 특별한 플랫폼을 제공했고, 클라이밍에 대한 관심과 참여가 증가했습니다.

올림픽의 성공은 애비와 같은 시각 장애인 클라이머들이 인지도와 지지를 얻게 되면서 파라클라이밍에도 긍정적인 영향을 미쳤습니다.

지난 12년 동안 클라이밍은 크게 변화하여 암벽이 더 멋지고 친근하게 바뀌고 다양한 사람들이 참여하게 되었습니다.

클라이머의 수는 400~500% 급증했으며, 이에 따라 다양한 상품이 등장하고 패러클라이밍에 대한 인식도 크게 개선되었습니다.

특히 디지털 세대를 중심으로 인기가 높아지고 올림픽 정식 종목에 포함되면서 기업 스폰서가 유치되고 스포츠가 전문화되고 있습니다.

클라이밍 선수 스폰서십의 진화

클라이밍의 선수 후원은 아직 발전 중이며, 특히 선수들에게 큰 돈을 벌 수 있는 기회는 거의 없습니다.

올림픽은 엘리트 클라이머들에게 새로운 노출과 상업적 기회를 제공하고 있으며, 동호인 수준에도 도움이 될 것으로 기대됩니다.

다양한 이유로 클라이밍에 참여하는 사람들이 늘어나면서 클라이밍은 더욱 성숙한 단계에 접어들고 있으며, 클라이밍 문화는 앞으로 흥미로운 시기를 맞이할 것입니다.