In reply to Mick Ryan - Editor - UKC:
I still remember Neil Pearson's editorial in OTE when Ellie Chevieux onsighted Massey Fergusson. It started with "Oh my god, someone has onsighted 8b+..."
Oh my god, someone has just onsighted 8c+! What on earth is going on here? Bear in mind that just climbing 8c+ after weeks of effort took one of our best climbers (Dave MacLeod) years of training to acheive. For those of us who sport climb it is probably a lifetime goal. Patxi has just strolled up one, in the same way we might pop up a HVS at Stanage. Bear in mind, that this route is probably three or four grades harder than
anything on gritstone, or pembroke, say. Oh. my. god.
In the last two weeks Patxi has just been gob-smackingly awesome. He's climbed absolutely everything, and now this! It totally raises the bar and makes a mockery of whichever fool it was suggested that Chris Sharma might be the world's best sport climber.
Etxauri is not one of your soft-touch spanish crags either. Grades in the Basque region are as stiff as those in the UK, and Etxauri is right on the outskirts of Pamplona, so it's the local crag for some of the strongest and nicest folk you'll ever meet.
Occasionally, you get threads on UKC asking what "waddage" means. This news article should be automatically appended to those threads....