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High-octane new Olympics sport speed climbing inflicts horrific injuries on athletes' bodies - including leaving their hands looking like CHEESE GRATERS
One of the most intense sports in the world has made its first-ever debut as a solo event at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Speed climbing sees two climbers compete at once, with one athlete on the left side of the wall (Lane A) and the other on the right (Lane B). Once the buzzer sounds, they rocket up the 49-foot wall as fast as humanly possible.
Poland's Aleksandra Miroslaw took the gold in women's speed climbing Wednesday, scaling to the top in a stunning 6.1 seconds as hundreds of adoring fans cheered and held up Polish flags.
But with the new attention this sport is getting, coaches and athletes who have been doing it for years are warning about the 'gruesome' damage professional speed climbers do to their extremities, their hands often looking as though they went through a cheese grater.
Albert Ok, a longtime speed climbing coach, said it often gets so bad that he needs to 'prescribe' superglue to his pupils to keep their finger nails from getting ripped clean off.
Gold medalist Aleksandra Miroslaw of Team Poland poses on the podium during the Medal Ceremony after the Women's Speed on Wednesday
Aleksandra Miroslaw of Poland (left) and Deng Lijuan of China (right) race against each other. Miroslaw took the gold, beating Lijuan by 0.08 seconds
'You're just destroying your fingers and your knees all the time,' Ok told The Wall Street Journal. 'It's pretty gruesome.'
As per the rules of the sport, there is a standardized route across all global competitions, which means the ledges stay in the same spots on the wall.
That means there's an inherent element of muscle memory in speed climbing, and any minor mistake can punish a climbers knees, sprain their toes or cut their fingers open.
And when these horrific injuries happen - and they happen frequently - they are exacerbated because climbers are expected to push through and complete the trek up the wall.
'Normally the finger splits,' said Team USA strength and conditioning coach Matt Maddison.
'All you have to do is miss the finger hole by a millimeter or two. Then, you might just undo all your work and pull out the Super Glue and put your fingers back together.'
Because of the constant wear and tear climbers willingly subject their digits to, Ok recommends his athletes take lidocaine to numb the pain.
Miroslaw (left) competes against Aleksandra Kalucka. also from Team Poland, in the women's semifinals
The medalists in women's speed climbing pose together on the podium. Miroslaw (center) won the gold, Deng (left) took the silver, and Kalucka earned the bronze
Speed climbing technically made its debut in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but was combined with bouldering and lead climbing into an all-encompassing event called Sport Climbing.
Key differences in bouldering and lead climbing mean they don't do nearly as much damage to their competitors.
Bouldering is more about endurance than speed and involves scaling 'challenging routes' that aren't known to the climber beforehand.
With no belay rope, climbers scale multiple 15-foot walls. It's more of a puzzle, and there's no time element. Athletes simply get a certain number of tries before they are disqualified.
Lead climbing is similar to bouldering, with the main differences being there is a six-minute time limit to scale the unique route on the wall and that climbers have a belay rope.
Speed climbers do not have the luxury of taking their time to figure out how they'll make it up the wall like boulderers or lead climbers do, nor do they have the time to nurse a sudden injury.
To gain the muscle memory they need to be successful, dedicated speed climbers often train in the gym for four hours a day, using the same beat-up and worn out body parts over and over.
Climbers' hands also become very calloused over years of doing the sport
Sam Watson, a pupil of Albert Ok, broke the men's world record in speed climbing, posting a time of 4.75 seconds
Piper Kelly, a 24-year-old speed climber with Team USA, has been practicing on the same route for around 10 years and qualified for the Paris Olympics.
She placed twelfth overall.
Recently, she took a look at her training logs to see how many times she's actually put her fingers and toes on the identical ledges.
'I would estimate it's close to 30,000 times,' Kelly told the Journal.
Just because the ledges stay in the same place, doesn't mean each climber takes the exact same path up the wall though.
Climbers develop their own 'betas' - the technical term for the specific route they take - and it's determined by their aptitude for moving vertically up the wall.
The fastest way to the top is the most linear, but also the most challenging.
There is no escaping bloodied fingers and knees because it quite literally takes climbers years to fine tune their exact path, leading to many moments where they slam into the wall at an incredibly high velocity.
One of Albert Ok's pupils, Sam Watson, is the rare exception to this rule.
Watson, another Team USA speed climber, set the men's world record time of 4.75 seconds on Tuesday.
His coach boasted about Watson's superhuman accuracy, which allows him to avoid the cuts and wounds that are so common for everyone else in the sport.
'Other people are not so fortunate,' Ok said.