What is the average height of the best competition climbers?

While preparing a recent post "Tall or short: what's better for climbing hard?" I was looking for data on height of the best climbers in order to find an answer to the question posed in the title. For rock climbing it's tricky - even if such data was easily available, it's hard to make strong claims comparing climbers based on the grade they have climbed, when the routes they have sent are in different countries or different continents. In competitions, on the other hand, athletes are tested in a very controlled environment against exactly the same challenges thrown at them by the routesetters. If there were a strong tendency towards a certain stature among the best competition climbers, it would clearly indicate an underlying advantage, at least on plastic. Therefore, I was hoping to find multiple analysis of the height statistics of competition climbers on the internet, or at the very minimum a clear answer to what is the average height among the best competitors.

Surprisingly, I found only one blog post with data about the 2022 IFSC World Cup finalists. What about scientific publications? There is not much research on competition climbers, I discussed the studies that exist in the previous post, and only one is interesting in the context of this article - I mention it later. Going back to the blog post, the data is beautifully visualized with an interactive histogram, but it has two limitations - the data is for a single year only (this is not that bad on it's own, I would not expect huge changes from year to year, although I was surprised by the 2018-2019 results I got below) and, more importantly, it takes into account exclusively World Cup finalists, creating a very particular selection criterion. I mean, without a doubt finalists are some of the best climbers of the season, but is someone who got into the final once during the whole season and didn't even get the semis on other occasions better than someone who scored just out of the final in every single competition? Fortunately, we don't have to answer this question, since the IFSC already did by preparing their rankings, where all official competitions are taken into account.

 

The usual suspects on the women's lead podium during the 2022 IFSC World Cup in Briançon. Photo by Lena Drapella/IFSC.

 

Moreover, IFSC maintains profile pages for the athletes, like this one of Janja Garnbret, with their results, age, and in many cases height and other metrics. There couldn't possibly be a better source of information on the best competition climbers and their stature. Given the lack of other analysis of this data, I decided to write a Python script to download the rankings and the height of ranked athletes from their profiles to finally learn what is the average height of the best competition climbers. If you are interested in all the details, additional plots, statistical tests, and specifics of the implementation, you can check out this HTML version of the Jupyter Notebook with my script. If you would like to play around with it, reproduce, or extend my results, here you can download the original notebook together with the data files. If you just want to know the results, continue reading, and if you want only a simplified summary, check out the bullet points at the very end.

The data

Before discussing the results a few words about the data I used, so you can decide for yourself whether it represents well enough the best competition climbers. The first data source is the IFSC Boulder & Lead World Ranking in the state as for late November 2023 for both men and women. The World Ranking is created based on the events held during the last 12 months and is continuously updated, therefore it always contains the best athletes at the moment. Competitions that are taken into account are: Olympic Games, World Championships, World Cups, Continental Championships, International Climbing Series, and Continental Cups, but the maximum number of events considered is 6 for each athlete. In some competitions up to 80 highest scoring climbers are given points and World Championships give twice as many points as World Cups. You can find all the rules in the link at the bottom of the ranking page. The World Ranking is also created for lead climbing and bouldering separately. However, here I consider the joint ranking to have as general result as possible.

The second source are the IFSC World Cup Rankings for the years 2013-2023, without 2020 since only one competition was held that year due to the covid-19 pandemic and the ranking was not created. They are similar to the World Ranking, but they are created separately for each calendar year and take into account only World Cups. There are around 100 athletes present in the ranking each year. In this case, I consider lead climbing and bouldering separately for both sexes to see whether there are any differences between the disciplines.

For the athletes that are present in the rankings I look for their height on their IFSC profile pages. I do it with a script, so if someone doesn't have their height indicated I just leave it blank, I wasn't keen on looking it up manually for all the missing athletes. Unfortunately, many climbers don't have their profiles updated with this information. For some years, the majority of climbers in the ranking are lacking height data and taking into account only those who do have their profile updated could create a selection bias. However, in the Jupyter Notebook you can see that for every single year and for both disciplines the average rank of climbers with the height data available is lower (i.e. better) than the rank of those without height on their profile page, especially in recent years the difference is significant. Therefore, there is a selection bias towards climbers obtaining better results in the competitions - the exact group I am interested in, the best competition climbers.

The smallest sample of heights was 13 climbers for 2013 Men's Bouldering World Cup (out of 115 climbers in the ranking), for years 2014-2017 it's between 20 and 50 athletes, and from 2018 onward it's usually at least 50, with 2022 and 2023 rankings containing almost a hundred of climbers with height indicated on their IFSC profile page. In total, there are 171 male and 159 female climbers with with the data available, creating respectively 921 and 928 meaningful entries in the annual World Cup Rankings.

The World Ranking 2023

"The average height of climbers ranked in the IFSC World Ranking for bouldering and lead after the 2023 season was 174.8 cm for men and 163.3 cm for women."

Men's Lead & Boulder

First, let's consider the current best generalists in competition climbing. In late November 2023 the Men's Lead & Boulder World Ranking had 106 athletes classified, of which 72 had non-empty profiles. Their average height was 174.8 ± 6.4 cm (after the plus/minus sign I indicate the standard deviation, here you can convert all the numbers to the Imperial system). The full distribution of heights is presented in the histogram below (the average value is marked with a solid line and the range within one standard deviation with dashed lines). Before you ask, the super-tall outlier is Paul Jenft of France at mighty 198 cm (EDIT: turns out that the IFSC has an error on their profile page of Paul Jenft, in this interview he says that he is 190 cm tall; I tried excluding outliers before and without him the average decreases by almost 1 cm; I will try to update the analysis in the future). He is an outlier indeed, given that the next tallest climber measures 188 cm, Meichi Narasaki from Japan, and then Adam Ondra from Czechia with 186 cm. The shortest ones are Shion Omata from Japan at 162 cm, Sean Bailey at 163 cm and Dillon Countryman at 164 cm from the USA, and Sascha Lehmann from Switzerland at 164 cm. Consider this, among the best 20 male climbers of 2023 there is one 198 cm tall and one 162 cm tall. And they say that routes on plastic are highly height dependent. Apparently, IFSC routesetters are doing a great job at not creating a completely limiting disadvantage for athletes of unusual stature.

How indicative is this number given that some climbers are not included due to the lack of height information? Well, first of all those who have their data provided have an average rank of 40, and those who are missing have 82, so this result describes the best from the best generally speaking. But we can be more precise and take only the best 50 performers from the ranking - then there is only one climber with missing height. The resulting average height is 174.7 ± 6.8 cm, which is almost the same as for the whole sample (without Paul Jenft it would be half a centimeter lower).

The most successful countries, in terms of the number of climbers registered in the ranking, were Great Britain and Italy, both with 7 athletes. Just behind with 6 climbers on the list were the USA, Austria, Japan, and Slovenia, followed by France, South Korea, Canada, and Israel having 5 athletes in the ranking. In the notebook you can find the full list of countries with the average height per country, as well as a histogram for the top 50 climbers.

 

Women's Lead & Boulder

In the Women's Lead & Boulder World Ranking there were 112 climbers, of which 76 had non-empty profiles. The average height was 163.3 ± 5.3 cm, you can see the distribution of heights in the histogram below. The shortest athlete ranked was only 150 cm tall Chaeyeong Kim from South Korea, followed by slightly taller Jain Kim of the same nationality and Laura Rogora from Italy, both having 152 cm. The tallest ones were 175 cm tall -  Staša Gejo from Serbia and Julija Kruder from Slovenia, and one centimeter shorter Flavy Cohaut from France. Note that the histogram bins represent 1 cm intervals closed from the left and open from the right, except for the last (right-most) bin - this one is closed on both ends. The last bin, therefore, includes all three climbers 175 and 174 cm tall.

Again, one could ask how would those who have missing height change the result if included. Their average rank was 87 and for climbers with the data available it was 42, which is much better. Similarly to the men's ranking, we can take only the best 50 women present in the ranking and in this case there is no climber with her height missing. The resulting average height is 163.6 ± 5.5 cm, not a big change. Among the ranked countries the best was the USA with 9 athletes in the ranking, with Slovenia just behind having 8 athletes. France and Japan had both 7 climbers making it into the ranking, while Germany and South Korea had 5.

 

Ten years of World Cup rankings

Men's World Cup rankings

"The average height of male climbers ranked at least once in the IFSC World Cup Ranking between 2013 and 2023 was 174.0 cm in lead climbing and 174.6 cm in bouldering. The average for those ranked at least five times was 173.6 cm and 175.6 cm respectively."

For the World Cups I consider lead climbing and bouldering separately. Let's start by looking at the aggregated rankings for the last ten years, it will give an idea about the average stature of competition climbers during the last decade. I know, competition climbing has changed substantially over this period - we will have a look at these changes later. So, the average height of male athletes present at least once in the World Cup ranking in years 2013-2023 was 174.0 ± 6.4 cm in lead climbing and 174.6 ± 5.9 in bouldering.

Below you can see a histogram presenting the distribution for both disciplines, with the average values marked with dashed and dotted lines. The biggest outlier is again 198 cm tall Paul Jenft, who was ranked 3 times in bouldering and 4 times in lead climbing. On the short side we have only 155 cm tall Giovanni Placci from Italy, who was ranked twice in lead and 158 cm tall Dimitri Vogt from Switzerland, ranked 8 times in lead. Looking at the histogram, it's fair to say that it's unlikely to meet highly successful male climbers shorter than 162 cm and taller than 185 cm.

 

One might say that the average height of all the climbers making it at least once into the ranking during the last decade does not represent the best athletes that well, because a climber ranked 10 times has the same importance as one who got only once into the ranking. Fair enough. We can also compute the average for each year separately and then compute the average of those averages, so a climber who was in the ranking 10 times is taken into account also 10 times. This way, the average would increase by approximately 0.2 cm for lead climbing and 0.7 cm for bouldering. Another way to adjust the results towards the best of the best is to compute the average height of those who made it into the ranking, for instance, 5 times or more - it would decrease the average height for lead by 0.4 cm and increase it for bouldering by 1 cm. All of this suggests that the top boulderers tend to be slightly taller than the top lead climbers (up to 2 cm on average, when considering only those who were ranked at least half of the analyzed 10 years). However, it might be more informative to just study the data year by year, what we can do by looking at the box plots below.

Box plots are a convenient way of illustrating the main properties of distributions for each year without plotting ten histograms. The average value is marked with an x symbol, the green line is the median, and we can have an idea about the spread of distributions from the box sizes and the whiskers (you can find the details on Wikipedia). The red dots indicate outliers, but whether someone is an outlier can change from year to year depending on the height of other athletes present in the ranking. In the first box plot for the Lead World Cups we can see that Paul Jenft and Giovanni Placci are outliers (at opposite ends) for all years they were ranked. The spread of the height distribution was stable over the years, being slightly smaller only in 2013, which might be due to the smaller sample size. But the standard deviation was generally between 6 and 7 cm.

The average height experienced a jump between 2018 and 2019 from 173.6 ± 6.8 cm to 175.1 ± 6.9 cm (it is also well visible in the median). This jump, as any change in the ranking, was caused by short climbers leaving the ranking after 2018 and, at the same time, tall climbers coming in in 2019. For example, Hyunbin Min (162 cm), Veddriq Leonardo (162 cm), Marcin Dzieński (166 cm), Jeremy Bonder (168 cm), and Masahiro Higuchi (169 cm) were ranked in 2018 but not in 2019, and Paul Jenft (198 cm), Meichi Narasaki (188 cm), Mikel Asier Linacisoro Molina (184 cm), Nathaniel Coleman (182 cm), and Campbell Harrison (182 cm) the other way around. From 2013 to 2014, on the other hand, the average height dropped by over a centimeter, but I would attribute it mainly to the very small sample size of 15 climbers in 2013.

In bouldering the average height has been more stable over the years. Again, there is a small drop between 2013 and 2014, but as for lead the sample size in 2013 is very small - only 13 climbers. Other than that, the average height was fluctuating between 175 and 176 cm. The distribution, however, got wider in this period and the standard deviation increased by 1 cm. Perhaps, it means that the new style of setting in bouldering is more inclusive for different statures, since it's not so heavily based on strength to weight ratio and tests a wider set of skills. Perhaps, it's just a statistical artifact. Interestingly, climbers 188 cm tall (Jan Hojer, Meichi Narasaki) are classified as outliers in the box plot before 2021, but since then they are not. Similarly, 163 cm tall Sean Bailey is an outlier only in 2017.

One thing is certain - the best athletes in bouldering were, on average, taller than the best in lead climbing. The difference, however, became much smaller in 2019, as we can see in the next figure. It shows the average height for both disciplines with the standard deviation interval indicated by a colored shade. In bouldering we can see rather decreasing, if any, trend over the years. In lead climbing the trend is increasing until 2019 when it starts to decrease. In years 2013 to 2018 the difference in average height between bouldering and lead was around 2 to 3 cm, but from 2019 onward it was not bigger than 0.7 cm. The initial discrepancy is more intuitive, it's often said that tall climbers can do better in bouldering than on a lead wall, due to the endurance factor of the latter - taller people are generally heavier, what causes higher energy expenditure. Of course, they can also grow bigger muscles, but the two things don't scale equally. I covered this differences in the previous post.

So, what happened in 2019? We can only speculate, keeping in mind that the standard deviation is substantial. My guess is that the routesetting in lead climbing caught up with the new school style ("comp style") in 2019, while in bouldering it was already present before. Currently, there are no lead competitions without big volumes, comp-style dynos, or even run-and-jump sections just before the anchor. Maybe on these coordination-based routes being as light as possible is not crucial, hence slightly taller climbers can also shine. But it's just a speculation.

It is interesting to see who was ranked the biggest number of times. Combining the two disciplines the most consistent competition climber over the last ten years was Jakob Schubert (176 cm) - he missed out being in the IFSC ranking only once and only in bouldering, i.e. he was ranked 10 times in lead and 9 times in bouldering. It's even more impressive if you take into account his outdoor achievements which he had to squeeze in between comp seasons. Sean McColl (169 cm) was second with 8 rankings in lead and 10 in bouldering under the belt, so 18 in total. The third was Kokoro Fujii (176 cm) making it into the ranking 17 times, 7 in lead and 10 in bouldering. In lead climbing there were 7 athletes who were ranked in all 10 years, apart from Jakob Schubert it was Adam Ondra (186 cm), Martin Bergant (182 cm), Sebastian Halenke (177 cm), Marcello Bombardi (177 cm), Stefano Ghisolfi (169 cm), and Hannes Puman (177 cm). In bouldering only 4 athletes managed to stay in the ranking for the whole decade: Sean McColl (169 cm), Kokoro Fujii (176 cm), Michael Piccolruaz (178 cm), and Jernej Kruder (179 cm).

When it comes to the best countries, three are dominating since at least 2013. Those are Japan which had 62 climbers in the rankings of either discipline, France with 57 climbers, and the USA with 56. Next were Germany, Canada, South Korea, Russia, Austria, Great Britain with approximately 30 athletes each, and Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, China, and Spain having around 20 athletes. Finally, Indonesia, Australia, Iran, Czech Republic, Belgium, Mexico, India, Israel, and Hong Kong had at least 10. Basically, North America, Europe, Asia (South, East, and Southeast), and Australia were the dominant forces setting the standards of competition climbing during the last decade.

Women's World Cup rankings

"The average height of female climbers ranked at least once in the IFSC World Cup Ranking between 2013 and 2023 was 162.9 cm in lead climbing and 163.9 cm in bouldering. The average for those ranked at least five times was 162.0 cm and 165.3 cm respectively."

The amount of available height data is very similar for women. Below you can see a histogram presenting the height distribution for lead climbing and bouldering, with the average values marked with dashed and dotted lines - the average height of the female athletes making it at least once into the World Cup ranking in years 2013-2023 was 162.9 ± 5.5 cm in lead climbing and 163.9 ± 5.6 in bouldering. The biggest outlier, 5 cm taller than the next tallest athlete, was 181 cm tall Emma Horan from Australia, who was ranked 5 times in bouldering. In lead Julia Duffy from the USA was the tallest, having 176 cm and being ranked twice. The shortest climbers were only 149 cm tall: Salomé Romain from France, who was ranked 10 times in lead (i.e. all years), and Miu Kakizaki from Japan, ranked three times in lead. The shortest in bouldering was Chaeyeong Kim from South Korea at 150 cm, ranked once. In general, the best female competition climbers of the last decade fit mostly between 152 cm and 176 cm of stature.

 

All women represented in the histogram can be described as the best competition climbers of the last ten years. But similarly to the men's category, we can look at the best of the best. If we compute the average for each year separately and then compute the average of those averages, effectively giving a weight to each climber equal to the number of times she was ranked, the average height would decrease by approximately 0.7 cm for lead climbing and increase by 0.7 cm for bouldering. If we take into account only those who made it into the ranking at least half of the years, which means five times, the average height for lead decreases by 0.9 cm and increases for bouldering by 1.4 cm. As we can see, the top boulderers tend to be taller than the top lead climbers and the difference is more significant in the women's category (up to 3.3 cm on average, when considering only those who were ranked at least five times).

I present the height distribution for each year in two box plots - the one above for lead climbing and the one below for bouldering. As before, the average value is marked with an x symbol, the green line is the median, and the red dots indicate outliers. The spread of the distribution for lead, as well as the standard deviation, fluctuates quite a bit, with the former changing from 6.7 cm in 2014 to 5.0 cm in 2019. The average height of female climbers in lead was generally increasing, although not always, from 161.3 cm in 2013 to 162.7 cm in 2023. We can also see that more climbers, in comparison with the men's category, are classified as outliers in the box plot. Depending on the year, climbers 152 cm and 173 cm tall can already be outliers. This is because in the women's category distributions are more narrow with most of the best climbers fitting into a smaller range of heights.

Female climbers who could be classified as outliers in lead (at least in some years), apart from those already mentioned two paragraphs before, are Staša Gejo and Julija Kruder (175 cm), Flavy Cohaut (174 cm), Katja Debevec and Oceania Mackenzie (173 cm) on the tall side, and on the short side Jain Kim, Dinara Fakhritdinova, Laura Rogora, Rebeka Kamin, and Natsuki Tanii, all 152 cm tall.

In bouldering the average height has been changing more turbulently, quickly increasing from 162.6 cm in 2013 and reaching it's decade-maximum of 167.6 cm in 2015, to mainly decrease since then and stabilize around 164 cm in the last four rankings. Interestingly, much fewer climbers are classified as outliers in bouldering. From among the tall climbers it's only super tall Emma Horan (181 cm), who actually in 2015 was not even classified as an outlier (!), and Julija Kruder (175 cm), but only in 2013. From the short climbers only 152 cm tall Jain Kim and Dinara Fakhritdinova were outliers in earlier rankings, and in 2023 even 150 cm tall Chaeyeong Kim was not outside of the whisker.

The steep increase of the average height between 2013 and 2015 was a result of many shorter climbers leaving the ranking in the first two years and some very tall ones being ranked in 2014 or 2015 for the first time. In the first category we have for example Jain Kim (152 cm), Dinara Fakhritdinova (152 cm), Manon Hily (154 cm), Mei Kotake (155 cm), Anne-Sophie Koller (160 cm), who were present in the ranking in 2013 and/or 2014, but not 2015. In the second category there are Emma Horan (181 cm), Staša Gejo (175 cm), Katja Debevec (173 cm), Allison Vest (171 cm), Hung Ying Lee (170 cm), Franziska Sterrer (169 cm) - all of them ranked in 2015 and/or 2014, but not before. It seems that this sharp peak of the average height was caused mainly by a change in the tails of the distribution, or, in other words, by very short becoming taller and very tall becoming even taller (figuratively speaking, any particular climber didn't grow). We can deduce it from much smaller variability of the median height, which even dropped between 2013 and 2014.

As in the men's category, the top climbers in bouldering were taller than in lead climbing during the last decade and the difference is more pronounced for women. In 2015 it was a stunning 6.6 cm more on average. More recently, the difference decreased and in 2023 it was the lowest at 1.1 cm. Again, it seems that the best athletes in both disciplines are becoming more similar in their stature. We can clearly see that in the next figure below presenting the average height in bouldering and lead climbing with the standard deviation interval indicated by a colored shade.

Surprisingly, the average height of female climbers also experienced a bigger change from 2018 to 2019, but in this case it was a drop, not a raise, for both disciplines. The decrease is slightly bigger in bouldering than in lead climbing and is caused by, obviously, many tall climbers being ranked in 2018 but not in 2019, and many short climbers the other way around. The average height of athletes present in the bouldering ranking only in 2018 (out of those two years) was 169.2 cm, and of athletes present in the bouldering ranking only in 2019 was 161.6 cm. Similarly for lead, the corresponding numbers are 165.6 cm and 161.8 cm. Therefore, the tall climbers disappeared in 2019 and shorter ones made it into the ranking (the list of names is quite long and you can find it in the Jupyter notebook). 

As for the most consistent female climbers of the last ten years in both disciplines the three women on the podium all appeared 17 times in the rankings. Chloe Caulier (166 cm) was ranked every year in bouldering and 7 times in lead, Jessica Pilz (165 cm) the other way around - 10 times in lead and 7 times in bouldering, and Katja Debevec (173 cm) 9 times in bouldering and 8 times in lead. In lead climbing there were six athletes ranked every single year: Salomé Romain (149 cm), Jessica Pilz (165 cm), Julia Chanourdie (164 cm), Molly Thompson-Smith (159 cm), Claudia Ghisolfi (162 cm), and Anne-Sophie Koller (160 cm). Only four climbers maintained the same consistency in bouldering: already mentioned Chloe Caulier (166 cm), Julija Kruder (175 cm), Fanny Gibert (165 cm), and Petra Klingler (162 cm).

The podium of countries training the best female competition climbers is the same as in the men's category with a different order.  The USA is dominating with 67 athletes making it into the ranking of at least one of the disciplines during the last 10 years. Japan is second with 58 athletes and France third with 48. Canada, Germany, South Korea, Russia, Austria, and Italy had around 30 climbers ranked during these years. Great Britain and Slovenia around 25, while China, Switzerland, Indonesia, Czech Republic, Norway, Australia, India, Poland, Iran, and Belgium had at least 10 athletes in the ranking. Not surprisingly, the list of countries is almost the same as for men with mainly North America, Europe, Australia, and South, East, and Southeast Asia producing the majority of the top female climbers.

As I mentioned at the beginning, there is one study that could extend the range of analyzed years all the way to early 90's. Phillip B. Watts et al. studied athletes participating in the 1991 or 1992 Lead Climbing World Cup and collected their anthropometric parameters (they don't indicate the exact competition, but judging from the acceptance date, it was one of those years). The average height of semi-finalists was 177.8 ± 6.5 cm for men and 165.4 ± 4.0 cm for women. These numbers are higher than the average heights that we observe in the modern lead competitions. Interestingly, if only the finalists are taken into account (what decreases the already small sample size by a factor of 3), the average increased even more for men and decreased to the values I observed in 2013-2023 data for women. Nevertheless, competition climbing was a very fresh sport back then and probably having keen parents who would introduce their children to climbing at an early age would yield a bigger advantage then having a natural predisposition.

 

Is it short or tall?

So now we know what is the average height of the best competition climbers. Well, actually the answer depends on the context, like the discipline, or the year. But let's say that we can generalize the results for the last ten years for both disciplines saying that for male climbers the average is somewhere between 174 and 175 cm and for female climbers between 163 and 164 cm. The real question that many people are obsessed with is whether it is tall or short? The answer, however, often depends on the height of the person who asks, the society they live in, and on what they think for whatever other reason. Perhaps a better question would be: are the best competition climbers shorter or taller than the general population? And also, does this result, around 174.5 cm for men and 163.5 cm for women, somehow reflect the optimal height for climbing?

To answer the first one we need to know the average height of humans worldwide. Don't ask Google for it, for me the first search result was a website with a leg extension clinic providing some numbers with no references to the source. Wikipedia contains average heights for many countries with references, whose quality varies between the countries, but there is no number for the whole world. The best data source I found was this publication stating that the average adult human height is 178.4 ± 7.59 cm for men and 164.7 ± 7.07 cm for women. This is a result for people born between 1980 and 1994 in Europe, North America, East Asia, and Australia, which is actually a very good data to compare with our results. The geographic-cultural regions covered in the study well overlap with those that produce most of the climbers present in the IFSC rankings and the range for year of birth represents the older generation of the current competition climbers. The study also provides statistics for older people, but there are almost (if not exactly) no athletes born before 1980 competing at the highest level during the last decade. Anyways, the average height for the two previous decades would be slightly bigger.

In the Jupyter notebook you can see that I perform three statistical tests for each distribution I obtain (for the World Ranking, for the top 50 athletes, for the World Cup rankings etc.). The first one is the D’Agostino and Pearson’s test for normality to see if the distribution could be Gaussian. Human height is often assumed to follow the normal distribution, although the log-normal distribution is also used to model it. The answer in every case is positive - the height of the best competition climbers could follow the Gaussian distribution, for both disciplines and both sexes.

"the best male climbers are around 4 cm shorter on average than their non-climbing peers and female climbers around 1 cm shorter"

The second test is the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test comparing the empirical distribution from the rankings with a normal distribution of mean and standard deviation corresponding to those of the general population, i.e. 178.4 ± 7.59 cm for men and 164.7 ± 7.07 cm for women. This is to see whether the best climbers could have the same height distribution as the whole society (assuming that the whole society has a Gaussian height distribution). The answer in every case is negative. The reason is not only a smaller (in most cases) than in the general population average value, but also a smaller standard deviation. In other words, the best climbers are slightly shorter on average and represent a narrower range of heights.

The last test is the Student's t-test comparing just the average height for climbers with the general population (for this test the assumption is that the distribution is normal, hence the first test). So the question is, even though the height distribution of the best climbers is not as wide, could at least the average height be the same as in the general population? The answer in almost every case is negative. Only the average height of the top female climbers in the World Ranking 2023 and the average height of female climbers present at least once in the Bouldering World Cup Ranking from 2013 to 2023 could be assumed equal to the average height worldwide (with the significance level ⍺=0.05, probably without Emma Horan the answer would be negative also here). The averages for those rankings are still about 1 cm smaller than 164.7 cm, but in statistics nothing is exactly equal.

So going back to the initial question "are the best competition climbers shorter or taller than the general population?" the simple answer is: they are shorter. Only the top female boulderers could have the same average height as women worldwide. But the best male climbers are around 4 cm shorter on average than their non-climbing peers and female climbers, in general, around 1 cm shorter. The second question "is around 174.5 cm for men and 163.5 cm for women the optimal height for climbing?" is a bit more tricky. Clearly, you can be a successful comp climber having a different stature. Nevertheless, the standard deviation of height is smaller among the best climbers than it is in the general population. This fact together with a smaller average value indicates that a slightly smaller height is a predisposition for competition climbing in men's lead and bouldering and in women's lead climbing.

What about women's bouldering? It is plausible that the average height of the best female boulderers is the same as the average height of women worldwide. Does it mean that height doesn't matter at all in this discipline? No, because the standard deviation is again smaller and the whole distribution is different than the general one - it is only centered around the same value. Therefore, being close to the average height is a predisposition and being far away from it is a disadvantage. Actually, in all of the disciplines and categories being a tall or short outlier is a bad prognosis for athletic performance. Assuming that we can describe the height distribution by the Gaussian distribution, we can expect that 95% of the best competition climbers will be between 162.0 and 187.6 cm tall in the men's category, and between 152.7 and 173.9 cm tall in the women's category (it's a generalization based on the two-sigma interval for the World Ranking data of both disciplines).

 

 Final remarks

This was a bit more technical article, I imagine even too technical for some of you. There was no one number to answer the question from the title, instead I provided many numbers for different contexts. So I would like to conclude it with some simple (hence inevitable also simplified) take-home messages:

• The best male lead climbers are around 174 cm tall and the best boulderers around 175 cm tall.
• The best female lead climbers are around 163 cm tall and the best boulderers around 164 cm tall.
• The best male climbers are on average 4 cm shorter than their non-climbing peers and female climbers around 1 cm shorter.
• In both, men's and women's categories, the best boulderers are taller than the best lead climbers.
• The difference between bouldering and lead climbing has been shrinking during the last decade, especially since 2019.
• It is harder to maintain consistently good results in bouldering than in lead climbing.
  

The last and obvious conclusion would be that the best female climbers are shorter than the best male climbers. Everyone knows that, but I mention it because it could provide an interesting way of testing the importance of height in competition climbing - mixed-sex competitions. Of course, there are other important differences between men and women. Women are usually more flexible and flexibility is a huge factor in climbing performance, but most of the best male climbers are very flexible too (although I would expect a higher fraction of women being able to do a full split than the fraction of men with this ability). Men are stronger, but in climbing it's the strength-to-weight ratio that matters and athletes like Alex Puccio or Molly Thompson-Smith can do some crazy stuff on the fingerboard. Allison Vest might even have the all-time record for both sexes being able to pull 150% of her body weight on a 20 mm edge with one hand. There would be confounding factors for sure, but given that the difference in height between the two sexes is over 10 cm on average I would be really interested to see how much of a role it would play in mixed-sex competitions.