In reply to AlanLittle:
Sorry, but maybe I can explain my less than enthusiastic (non-)response. I had read the news piece, and watched the video, but in a certain sense it felt decidedly so-whattish, even though from a sports history perspective it is clearly significant.
For a weekend warrior like me progress at the ultra hard end of sports climbing is extremely hard to relate to or even to recognize in a video. What makes this 9b+ different from the 8c or 9a routes next door? Steeper and worse holds, presumably, but how would I know? The closest I ever came to get a feel for climbing at that level was standing under Action Directe, marvelling at THAT pocket.
The article mentions some crimp Ghisolfi needed five million tries to stick, but from the Megos video (which I actually watched carefully while waiting for my computer to calculate some thing or other) it was impossible to tell which move that might have been.
In a way these high end "sends" are like someone cutting the Marathon world record by 15 seconds. Extremely hard and very significant for long distance runners, but underwhelming in a sense that it is so far beyond my capabilities, and the difference therefore so gradual that I cannot relate to it any more.
Ondra's first 9c was no different in that respect.
Weirdly, I can relate much more to watching top end plastic pulling, where the trickiness of the individual, contrived moves is obvious, even though I much prefer to climb outside myself.
CB