can't sleep 'cause I'm THINKING about CLIMBING

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 competit...

This seems to be a controversial topic, probably because the answer is not as simple as in many other, especially well established, sports (and because climbers love excuses to why they didn't send). Virtually all of the athletes in, for instance, high jump are tall. In gymnastics you retire already during the puberty, if you grow over a certain height. Still, even in the long-established sports the outliers sometimes can perform surprisingly well - before the first victories of Usain Bolt everyone thought that being short and muscular (not that he isn't muscular, but other sprinters are often more muscular) is the optimal body type for the 100 m dash. And probably it is the optimal body type - one or a small number of outliers don't flip the rule, they weaken it. Nevertheless, in running disciplines, be it a sprint or a marathon, athletes tend to have quite similar  stature , seemingly less diverse than in climbing.   Bouldering World Cup podium, Meiringen 2021. Photo by P...