Just watching the last round of the UIAA ice climbing world cup. Not much ice but well worth the view, especially if you haven't seen one before. Includes some amazing dynos.
I thought this would garner more interest here, given the technicality demonstrated in a very competitive sport, where bad luck can impact the best; and being free to view and with quite a few athletes training and competing alongside a day job. I'd not watched a competition at Saas Fee before and can see a significant difference in style with so many small rock holds.
Maybe it's because I have more nostalgia for such technical dry tool moves than most from dry tooling on our Uni brick climbing wall when it was due to close.
Haha yeah maybe, it is growing in popularity, the number of people at massonfest in October was testament to that, but it still is a bit niche (and perhaps all the better for it) either way from the comps point of view, it's exciting to watch as lime you said the margin of error is very slim and often top competitors can fall low down, no guarantees with it.
Thanks for linking, drytooling comps isnt something I would normally be into but that was very entertaining, I think that someone had been watching too much vertical limit with those dynos!
>The ice speed climbing was on a day or 2 before too. I didn't even know that was a thing. I didn't get in to that as much though.
I'd agree but I much preferred the ice speed comps to the indoor wall speed comps. My main concern was the current technique of the top men: I think side-hooking one edge of the ice blocks needs to be banned.
I thought that too when I was watched a couple of the climbs. Looked like it was cheating a bit. The wall looked like it was big cubes of ice stacked on top of each other and a lot of them were aiming for the corners and round the side, opposed to climbing the face, which made it look a bit easier. I suppose if it's not against the rules you'd do anything to gain a slight advantage.
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