In reply to ribtech:
I think a lot of people are using the wrong statistics to estimate percentage of 8a climbers here;
"percentage of 8a routes at the local wall" - Indoor walls have a higher ratio of hard routes to hard climbers than moderate routes to moderate climbers. Firstly because hard climbers (who go indoors) visit the wall more often and secondly because even if the number of hard climbers is very small, a selection of routes at hard grades are needed to occupy these hard climbers (if only one token route is present, anyone climbing hard will go elsewhere).
"percentage of 8a ticks on UKC" - If one climber records their entire holiday of routes, the logbook population might have one 8a and twenty easier routes. Multiply this effect by thousands of climbers and it's obvious that you can't estimate a percentage of 8a climbers from this.
A much better (though far from perfect) method would be to ask a UKC mod to post a bar graph showing maximum sport grade claimed in the profiles of all users (including a zero grade for users without a max sport grade recorded). You might want to exclude those without a profile. In the end you would still get an overrepresentation of harder climbers though I think because casual climbers at the lower end of the difficulty scale will be less likely to be UKC members than those who are more dedicated to the sport.
"percentage of 8a climbers I know/see/heard of" - Any claim based on this is going to be wildly inaccurate. Nobody has anything even approaching a big enough or balanced enough sample size.
I think a good way to get a vaguely accurate percentage would be to ask someone like the BMC or do some googling to find a percentage of people in the UK who climb. An approximate stat for that must be floating around. Then get some empirical figures for numbers of 8a climbers in various city/areas. I think the best way to go about this would be to create a thread asking people who climb 8a to post with:
- Where they live.
- how many other 8a climbers they know of in their city/surrounds.
For repeat posts of people in the same area, take the higher number and ignore the lower. Tot these up, estimate the percentage of population covered by all the replies (many areas will not get replies of course) and correct so the total is relative to the UK-wide population. You might want to double or triple this to take account of the fact that not all hard climbers in an area will be known to all other hard climbers in the area but I think at that sort of level there is unlikely to be more than three distinct groups of hard climbers in an area who are not aware of each other (hard climbers do generally climb with or at least know other hard climbers in their area).
Combine the two numbers, do the sum and Bobs your uncle!
All we need is someone keen to go and make another thread
(and I'll eat my laptop with BBQ sauce if it's more than 1%.)