The flywheel keeps spinning as climbing goes mainstream
From Sport England’s Active Lives Survey, showing data from 2017/2018 (latest as of Jan 2020).
In the lead-up to the sport's Olympic debut this year in Tokyo, there are more competitions and gyms dedicated to climbing than ever before. The primitive impulse might partly explain the frenzy, since along with running and swimming, climbing has been a basic way the human animal has negotiated its environment for millennia. But the sport's core values—rugged individualism, self-actualization, performance efficiency, crowdsourced problem-solving—also position it as a uniquely attractive recreation for our tech-optimized, permalancing, late-capitalist moment……
….“People will come on their off day to work, or to hang out with their friends, because of the environment itself,” says Balboni. “It feels really good in there.”
From ‘Alex Honnold Takes Us into the Great Indoors’ in GQ magazine.
Climbing is one of those interesting sports that has come out of left-field and started to infiltrate the mainstream. If we imagine the stalwarts of football and golf (which is steadily getting impacted by triathlon as the new office-worker sport of choice), they all have mass followings and grew up alongside the creation of our modern economies. Football’s first Association started in 1863, around the time we were really kicking off the Second Industrial Revolution and economies were really starting to explode. Golf’s first Open Championship kicked off in 1860. Football was easily accessible to all (you just needed a ball and some flat surface!) and golf grabbed the elite, creating a yin and yang. Over the intervening hundred or so years, we had a progressive development of these sports as they expanded and evolved to become the behemoths they are today.
In between, climbing also started out around the same time, but started out in the mountains and stayed largely off the radar, except - for the most part- for crazy mainstream press for major mountaineering ascents. Surfing exploded in the 70s, but climbing just couldn’t get its act together, and it was only with the advent of the pool-swimming variations (i.e. sport climbing and bouldering), that it really allowed individuals to start considering the activity as their sport of choice.
I started climbing in the late 90s and this was my choice.
““I think a big part of the rise of gym climbing is the fact that it’s a really fun, community way to stay fit. It’s the same way that CrossFit has a certain tribalism to it, except that climbing is way more chill and way more fun.””
I’ve always been a lover of the outdoors, however, I also value sporting activity. Climbing combines sporting exertion with an incredible community that allows everyone and anyone to take part.
And of course, climbing gyms have exploded, quietly across the globe enabling individuals to take up the sport in a friendly, accessible environment.
The Association of British Climbing Walls (ABC) estimates 1.5 million people partook in climbing in 2018, which largely correlates with the numbers from Sport England above. That’s [update] 3.1% of the UK population by the way, and football comes in at 10%, golf slightly below that. And Triathlon which appears to get so much visibility comes in at 0.3%. Interestingly, running sits at 29% and cycling at 40%!
As always, individuals will point to Dawn Wall and Free Solo (I even did myself here, here, here and here) but it’s more than that. As I linked to below (and predicted with the imminent impact of the Olympics), climbing is going through some fundamental changes.
"Climbing has finally reached that critical point where the massive influx of new participants is not only eclipsing the old guard but is fundamentally changing what it means to be a climber.
We've crested what bestselling author and speaker Malcolm Gladwell would call a "tipping point," where rapid change is now unstoppable.
"We are being taken over by the gym generation," said Jason Haas, owner of Fixed Pin Publishing in Boulder. We, being the 30-something and older climbers who learned to climb outside."
From Chris Weidner: A vertical epidemic; Climbing faces identity crisis at its tipping point
There’s going to be the ‘hardcore’ who still love the outdoors, and that is their primary focus for going to the gym. But the majority is going to be those who climb indoors, and only intermittently step outside (if they do at all: how many pool swimmers do you know go out for sea swims?). What this means is there’s a train of new opportunities coming: coaches, better equipment, clothing, better gyms (airconditioned, humidity-controlled, etc.), food, media, branding, you name it.
The Business Opportunities
What I’ve realised as I write this post, is whether the ‘true’ climbers themselves will get those opportunities, or will it be people who come in with a business background. I think it’ll be the latter. Business-saavy is not something in strength of most climbers, and this will lead to their disadvantage. Businessmen may not be ‘climbers’, but they know how to create value.
Update: I’ve re-read and realised this sounds pessimistic. It was climbers were those who started many of the businesses from the well known clothing companies such as Patagonia (annual revenues of $207million), to the climbing shoe companies such as FiveTen (sold to Addidas for $25million in 2011), to many if not all the climbing gyms until the mid-2010s. And they’ll continue to have a huge amount of input in the various businesses going forward: what I believe is the truly smart ones will come up with the ideas, and then get the input of ‘business people’ in how to grow the business.
Realistically though, climbing is going mainstream and going big, in males and females (as the title of this post ignores, even if it acknowledges in the article that it’s getting much better). As it gets to the point where there is huge gyms with 1,000+ people in attendance daily, and every small village ends up with its own small climbing gym, what comes next?
“Climbing completely has changed my lifestyle,” says James. “It’s certainly something I’d recommend to anyone, to even just give a try, because it makes a hell of a lot of difference for some people.” With that, it’s clear his days of numerous pints stretched out over several hours in the pub are over. There’s always water to be drunk at the wall, after all.
