BD / Joe Kinder / ???

Harumpfster Boondoggle wrote:

I think you greatly underestimate where futuristic course setting is going to take competition climbing.

I think you're right, Tut. The Ninja Warrior world and rock climbing will move closer together.

Señor Arroz wrote:

I think you're right, Tut. The Ninja Warrior world and rock climbing will move closer together.

^^^^This.

More like purely gymnastic moves and more dynamic like modern course setting for bouldering but taken even farther.

Also, the camera angles you are starting to see (through holes for camera men through the climbing wall) will make it easier to capture whats going on and make it easier to understand to the layman.

The Summer Games suffer from a lack of excitement like the Winter Games have....Climbing (maybe not so much as we know it today) will add a lot of zing in time to the event.

Nate Tastic wrote: Outside onto real rock?

Already has been  done. Arco in the late 80's.

Señor Arroz wrote:

I'm with you about most climbers not finding it meaningful. But the route is standardized across all speed climbing comps for the same reason that all Olympic hurdles are set the same height and distance apart, etc. The people who are into speed climbing are REALLY into it. My gym has one of the few speed walls in California and people travel from all over to train on it.

I understand that but it doesn't fit in with the rest of rock climbing.... I have no problem with them putting it in if they want but don't make sport / bouldering scores combine with speed when the vast majority of people who would be in the Olympics would not even touch it without the Olympics. 

If you had to pass a sport, bouldering, and speed comp to get into the Olympics would we even have a single person competing? Speed people are going to get killed in boulder / sport where someone has to figure out how to climb a 5.13+ route on the fly.

ViperScale . wrote:

I understand that but it doesn't fit in with the rest of rock climbing.... I have no problem with them putting it in if they want but don't make sport / bouldering scores combine with speed when the vast majority of people who would be in the Olympics would not even touch it without the Olympics. 

If you had to pass a sport, bouldering, and speed comp to get into the Olympics would we even have a single person competing? Speed people are going to get killed in boulder / sport where someone has to figure out how to climb a 5.13+ route on the fly.

I think you're going to be hugely surprised when the Olympics roll around. Do you actually think that people won't be training, intensively, in all 3 disciplines for the next 4 years?

ViperScale . wrote:

I understand that but it doesn't fit in with the rest of rock climbing.... I have no problem with them putting it in if they want but don't make sport / bouldering scores combine with speed when the vast majority of people who would be in the Olympics would not even touch it without the Olympics. 

If you had to pass a sport, bouldering, and speed comp to get into the Olympics would we even have a single person competing? Speed people are going to get killed in boulder / sport where someone has to figure out how to climb a 5.13+ route on the fly.

I'm not disagreeing with you that a combined medal requiring good scores in all 3 disciplines isn't ideal. But think about something like the decathlon. It's a combined medal across 10 disciplines. The person who wins it is rarely the best at any one of those events. But it means a lot.

I think if climbing is included in future Olympics past this one we'll see medals for each discipline too. But for now, it is what it is. I doubt anyone who is invited is going to boycott because of the format. 

Marc801 C wrote:

I think you're going to be hugely surprised when the Olympics roll around. Do you actually think that people won't be training, intensively, in all 3 disciplines for the next 4 years?

I know they will be at least I know of one world champion personally that has been working in speed even though he is absolutely the worst at speed. He is one of the guys who likes to hang out right before the crux for a few mins on 5.14+ climbs.

how long will it be before the Olympic minds misinterpret "psicobloc" and push for some kind of full contact climbing battle.

J Squared wrote: how long will it be before the Olympic minds misinterpret "psicobloc" and push for some kind of full contact climbing battle.

We can only hope!

Here's an interesting article on speed climbing and speed walls.

​http://www.climbingbusinessjournal.com/speed-walls-the-fastest-trend/​​​

Getting back to the issue at hand -

Joe Kinder has been made an example of, but Georgie Abel, a climber and writer, theorized in an article on Medium that this is just one crack in an entire system that afflicts climbing culture. “What becomes important is not that a 38-year-old man created a fake Instagram in order to bully at least two young women, but the fact that he felt supported in doing so,” she wrote. “Climbing culture is the thing that gave him that support.” Culturally sanctioned misogyny isn’t limited to climbing or even the outdoor industry, of course. It seeps through all aspects of our culture. But when an incident like this stirs up so much conversation, we in the outdoor community should see it as an opportunity to lead the way in uprooting it. 

Read more at Outside Magazine

Christian wrote: So every individual quirk of character (like Juniper Joe's mildly sadistic sense of humor) must be shoehorned into a systemic social justice narrative?

It gets pretty tiresome sometimes.

Should there be "quid pro quo" approach ? 

- you bolt 5.12c, you can bully on social media
- you bolt 5.13c, you can drop kick a puppy
- you bolt 5.15c, you can climb in neon green short shorts

Christian wrote: So every individual quirk of character (like Juniper Joe's mildly sadistic sense of humor) must be shoehorned into a systemic social justice narrative?

It gets pretty tiresome sometimes.

That really seems to be your interpretation. I don't see Joe Kinder's bullying in a systemic narrative. I see it in an age-old story of people hiding their own insecurities by picking on others. And the most chickenshit form of that is anonymous bullying. He seems to have learned and taken responsibility. See, the system works!

That’s article also goes on to say a bunch of things portraying male climbers as horrible humans promoting racisms, sexism, and bigotry...when in my experience, and probably most people’s, the climbing community is one of the most open minded and open armed there is.

Yeah, the problem is that they’re making some big inferences about the community as a whole based on one incident.  As has been said on here before, the plural of anecdote is not “data.”  So far, the only data we’ve seen was one flawed study by Flash Foxy of an isolated community.  Joe has been smacked down, so I don’t see how this incident shows that the climbing community is enabling this behavior.  Christian’s proverb is sound IMO.

Ryan Swanson wrote:

If by "learned and taken responsibility", you mean "tried to save face in this era of hypersensitive political correctness so he can pick up sponsors again"...

You make a valid point. I was trying to be positive about the fact that he at least acknowledged his failure.

Christian wrote:

I was commenting on the relentless "when all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail" nature of Georgie Abel's writing, not making a moral judgment about Joe's or Sasha's character.

I get it now. When you said, "always" I misenterpreted that to mean "always" by more than just the author. Because if the biggest hazard we face as men is some overly-wrought writing in an obscure internet publication then we're doing awesome. 

Christian wrote:

Got it: I'm a white male, ergo my life has been a cakewalk. Thanks for the information.

Dude, nobody is saying that. I'm a white male, too. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY is saying that just because someone is a white male their life is a cakewalk (total aside, if you've ever been in a cakewalk they're cutthroat). The only people actually mouthing those words (as rhetoric) are dicks like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity who've raised white male victimhood up to a billion dollar industry. And even they don't believe that people think all white people have it easy.

What people are saying is that nobody ever seems to complain about being on the net gain side of structural racism or sexism. You and I are never going to whine about the 18% pay gap, for example, or that we don't get profiled by the NYPD. But getting profiled and harrassed by cops is a very REAL thing for my black friends. And gender wage gaps are very real for our women friends and family. Consider for just a second that what happened to Sasha is happening to a lot of women in different forms.  I'd be a fool to dismiss it as a non-issue just because it doesn't come down on me.

I wrote up a longer piece on this here: http://thebigwild.net/2018/05/14/1499/

But, if TL;DR...we as a community have invested in our own mythmaking that posits some halcyon past wherein climbing was "pure..."  So we react against DiGiulian perhaps because of a conception of rock climbing free from promotion.  
I didn't get into the obvious sexism that haunts the reaction to the controversy because the entry would have extended for pages and pages...

Give it a read if you like...

Señor Arroz wrote:

Dude, nobody is saying that. I'm a white male, too.

I, too, am *sob* white, and *shudder*...male.

Lord, please give me the strength to post my ideas online where I can pretend I am holding an interesting conversation.