How fast will the speed climbers be at the 2024 Olympics in Paris?

Speed climbing will make its debut as a separate event at the Summer Olympic Games that will begin on July 26 in Paris, France. It was included in the Olympics in Tokyo in 2021, but as part of the climbing event together with lead climbing and bouldering. This time there will be two climbing events, speed and combined, in Paris.

The current world records for speed climbing are 6.24 seconds for women and 4.9 seconds for men, both much faster than the performances of gold medalists in Tokyo because speed climbers don't do well enough in comprehensive competitions. Now that they have a chance for a pure race of speed in Paris, the two world records are likely to be broken.

In fact, the records may not stay until July because athletes have a very good chance of breaking them at the Olympic Qualifier Series in east China's Shanghai Municipality and Hungary's capital city Budapest in May and June.

Yuan Guoqing, a member of the Chinese national speed climbing team, told Xinhua News Agency that 4.9 seconds was no longer a challenge for many athletes either domestically or internationally. After the winter training camp, many Chinese climbers can now reach this speed. Samuel Watson of the U.S. even cut his time to 4.77 seconds.

Speed climbing is not an old sport since the International Federation of Sport Climbing didn't decide on the regular 15-meter-long course for it until 2007. However, athlete performances skyrocketed after the Tokyo Olympics. The men's record has been broken 15 times in the past decade and nine of them happened after 2021. The women's record was refreshed 18 times during the same period and eight of them took place in the past three years.

When Veddriq Leonardo of Indonesia set the men's world record at 4.9 seconds in the Speed Climbing World Cup in Seoul, South Korea, in April 2023, it was the best of six recording-setting performances in total in one day.

This year's Speed Climbing World Cup will begin in Suzhou, east China's Jiangsu Province, on April 12.