The past two weeks I have been living in Innsbruck, Austria with my good friend Jakob Shubert. Innsbruck has one of the best training walls in the world, with many routes in the 8b-8c range to train on. The style is really resistance based, with the cruxes almost always being at the top of the routes. This is probably the single hardest style for me since in my gym the cruxes are always at the bottom, so needless to say it has been very good training.
After training for a week, I drove down to Bern, Switzerland, to compete in the first lead worldcup of the fall season. I had heard that the wall was pretty bad and the routesetting would not be so good, so I didnt expect much. The rumors, however, turned out to be true. My qualifiers consisted of 15 easy moves to one incredibly hard move off a bad undercling, where about 16 people fell. Some didnt even move off the undercling, some got positive movememt towards the next hold, and a few touched the next hold. Only like 6 people passed the move, and 4 of those were because they found a secret heelhook on the arete that no one else thought was allowed. All in all, a horrible qualifiers route. Only te people that touched the next hold after the undercling advanced to semis, and most of those were because they just desperately jumped to touch it. Many people like me, Jakob, Michael Fuselier, (both of which are consistant world cup finalists), etc. actually tried to do the move and only got positive movememt.. not enough for semis. Oh well. The only person to do the route was none other then Ramon Julian and to no suprise he casually passed this "impossible" move with no extra heelhook. Props Ramon, your my hero as always.
Anyways, the rest of the comp was pretty lame as well with 15 girls falling at the same spot in the semi finals and 7 of the 8 male fialists falling in the same three moves on the route. There was even one Austrian who managed to get an honorable zero points in the semi finals by falling on the first move of the route with not even positive movement towards the first hold. So pretty much this comp can be summed up with the words, WTF??
PS Props to Sean Mccoll, Canadian superstar, for making the finals. Being in top boulder shape was no disadvantage for this comp, and Sean made a truely spectacular performance, coming in 7th place. We love you Sean!!!
After the comp all us bitter non-semifinalists decided to gang up and made the facebook group The Shit Climber Gang, with Jakob being the leader. The Shit Climber Gang will also be making an appearance in Imst this upcoming weekend for the next worldcup, so stay tuned for some more punter results.
