UKC

British tech

Now, I know I'm a nerd for even bothering with this, but as no one is reading this anyway, I might as well share my thoughts with myself... The thing is, I've got a hard time figuring out the British technical grade. In theory it's easy: The tech-grade of a route tells us the difficulty of the hardest single move on the route. There could, of course, be two or several moves of equal difficulty, but this will not show in the grade. I was curious as to whether this grade really ment a single move or if it practice was used as a way of describing the difficulty of the hardest sequence. English 7a should mean roughly the same as Font 8A, but does that mean a single 8A-move or the kind of moves you could expect on an 8A boulder problem. If the former, how can you find a 7a move on a route with a French grade of 8a+? Ever heard of an 8a+ sport route with a 8A crux?
Said and done, I decided to ask someone who should be in the know, Mick Ryan of UK Climbing.
To my surprise, Mick tells me "I doubt you would get a 7a English tech on a V11/8A - but possible maybe if the problem is very short ..... a longer V11/8A problem would have several English tech 6b moves, or maybe several English tech 6b moves and one English tech 6c.."
How can this be? I have to investigate further...

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