My last youth world championship!

Fotos: Eddie Fowke, The Circuit Climbing Magazine (except the one of the national team)

World Youth Championship in Guangzhou – China

After a long and demanding season of Bouldering World Cups, European Youth Cups and other competitions it was finally time for the last one, and one of the most important ones too: My last World Youth Championship in Guangzhou, China. As climbing just got into the Olympics and I wanted to test myself in a similar overall rating, I decided to compete in all three disciplines lead, bouldering and speed!

LEAD

Well I haven´t ever really trained lead climbing or endurance before and my last lead competition was already four years ago. This is also why I had no expectations to this discipline and therfore it was even more satisfying that I dig not do that bad. In the first qualification route I was really nervous and fell just a couple on moves before most athletes fell, placing me 31^st . The second climb had a really hard sequence in the lower part, where almost everyone (including me) fell. With a 17^th place in the second route, I ranked 32^nd Place in Lead climbing, missing semifinals by about six places. After such an encouraging competition in lead climbing I’m really motivated to start lead climbing again.

SPEED

Speed climbing is definitely the discipline which I like least, but I tried my best to have fun. Even more than Lead Climbing this discipline is completely  dependent on specific training. As I was fully focusing on bouldering and doing the other disciplines just for fun, my lack of speed training was really showing. I felt really slow next to all those speed climbers, but nevertheless it was a great experience to compete in my first international speed comp.

BOULDERING

After already a week in the competition, it was finally time for my main discipline: Bouldering. Unfortunately I had a really bad starting position and had to wait 4 hours in the isolation zone. The qualification went really good for me as I was able to top four out of five boulders. This would have easily been enough for semifinals, but unfortunately for me the seconde male qualification round got cancelled due to bad weather. I really can’t understand why an outdoor competition of that importance can be not rain-protected…

Anyway now all athletes were qualified for semifinals and I tried to reset my mindset. The day of the semifinals I felt really strong in the isolation. I was able to send all the boulders that I could not do on the qualification day, and thus I was even more dejected when I could barely climb any boulders in the semifinal round. I guess the routesetters had to make the problems really hard as there were so many semifinalists, but I think it was a bit too hard. Some problems had just one, two or not a single ascent and it basically all came down on a really coordinative sidejump. Normally I am pretty good at that kind of jumps but that day it took me too many tries to figure it out. These wasted attempts costed me finals as I placed 16^th. Luckily Boulderwelt-Athlete Freddy Fell did a better job in her Semifinals. She was able to qualify herself for finals at her first ever World Youth Championship and finished 6^th place in the end. Congratulations !!

I really hoped for better circumstances and a better result at my last World Youth Championship but now it’s time to move on to the next Chapter. It was fun to compete in all three disciplines but next time I should really train for all disciplines, and not focus on just one. Somehow the competition still fulfilled its purpose: It made me really psyched for the next season and to train as hard as I can for my greatest goal: Tokyo 2020 !

Result Overview: