UKC

1. Shauna Coxey will win
2. There will be at least one Russian in the men's final
3. There will be more Japanese in the finals than any other nation.


Personally I hope Martin Stranik wins. He's such a good climber that's had such bad luck on the first two events he deserves to win.

In reply to stp:

1. Shauna will fail to fall off anything
2. Martin Stranik will dominate in the men's qualifying round but again get lost on the way to isolation for the semi's
3. All athletes get food poisoning and spend the days leading up to the event on the loo, thus realising new unheard levels of strength to weight ratios. As such all problems get flashed by all athletes and the winners are decided by whom can stand on the podium longest before running to the bathroom.
4. Rare footage of Dimitri smiling is leaked thus confirming his retirement. Him and Kilian both setup a B&B in Innsbruck.
5.Sean McColl is accidentally mistaken for a Bollywood superstar and is enrolled to appear dancing with a water buffalo to sitar music.

In reply to alx:


Being from Leicester, I've recently and for the first time become intimately familiar with calculating at what point, and with what results by other teams, a football team has already won the league even though there are games still to play.

So: at what point is Shauna so far ahead that nobody can catch up?

I can't even find the current rankings on the IFSC's spectacularly incompetent website.

In reply to stp:
Shauna seems to be on fire at the moment,wouldn't bet against her.
Second,one of the Japanese women either Noguchi or Monaka.
Third,La Neve.

In reply to Sherlock:

Good points, Shauna may be on form but Mel has been chasing her from the start, a slight hitch with failing to adapt to Mumbi's conditions could be all that is needed for her first gold.

Should be a good comp, I think India's pushing hard to try and build their climbing scene and good luck to them!

Alx

In reply to AlanLittle:

She's currently almost 100 points in front of her nearest rival Melissa Le Neve (300 vs 203). By contrast fewer points than that separate the top 15 men. However with fewer than half the comps yet gone technically anything could happen.

The thing is that currently Shauna is dominating her current closest rivals and always has done. The one exception is Aikyo who has beaten her numerous times in the past and of course won last year overall. So far Aikyo has had a pretty poor season apart from last week where she started to show some old form and wasn't so far behind Shauna. The other exceptional female competitors are either only a doing a few comps (like Mascarenas, Puchio and Garnbret) or simply aren't climbing anything like they have in the past so far (Anna St£hr).

The other possible rival is Miho. Last week she topped a problem no one else did. Maybe if she gets a boost of confidence from that she might start climbing even better. But I think that's a long shot. She's really strong, but so is Shauna and Shauna has way more experience. (Check out the recent Udo Neumann compilation of this years first comps - some very impressive climbing there).

I think Vail will be a good comp for the women because there are some pretty good US climbers and they'll all be fresh from training, not tired from doing the globetrotting, jet lagging, circuit that must take a bit of a toll. If Shauna could win there that'd be really cool.

Current women's ranking: http://www.ifsc-climbing.org/index.php/world-competition#!type=ranking&cat=...

In reply to stp:

Thanks. I tried exactly that link before and it came up with an empty page. Allez IFSC.

In reply to stp:

dear me!

Men's qualifying round is a massive flash contest, I think the semi's is going to be a bit odd

http://www.ifsc-climbing.org/index.php/world-competition#!comp=1633&cat...

In reply to alx:

Slightly unexpected result in the women's semi's, will this turn out to be Mel's chance at gold or will this be Akiyo's return to dominance?

Looks like the heat/humidity/travelling has taken its toll on the favoured leads.

In reply to alx:

Dimitri did smile once, when I gave him the finishing hold from P4 in the men's final at Arco (World Champs 2011), he seemed quite touched