Postby Heinrich » Fri Jun 26, 2009 11:30 am
Why do we get excited about him? Because the routes he sends in a week alone, are enough to get him in the top 10 world ranking. And this is no isolated week - he's done that a couple of times already. David Lama and Charlotte Durif are up there as well, but they have nowhere near the climbing output of this guy. No one has. FA's are one thing and he will get to those eventually, once he's climbed every single hard line he can - in fact, he said in an interview he's style of climbing is to climb everything on the grade in which he gets it in a few goes and progresses like that. In this kind of climbing style, FA's aren't that importand, but volume is. He climbed for two years, when he topped 10 500 8a.nu points. He has done more hard routes than anyone I know of, including onsighting 8c+, which completely smashes your allegations of so called "beta-raping". To add to all of this, he repeats lines that stayed unrepeated for years.
But let's quickly look at his FA's for the past 12 months, to see how lazy this snot-nosed, non-celeb, non-celebrateable bastard is:
9a x 2, 8c+ x 7, 8c x 7, 8b+ x 5, 8b x 2, 8a+ x 1, 8a x 1
(I'll stop here, anything below 8a is warm-up material for this alleged non-event of a teenage rat.)
Now for his all-time FA score-chart - again, just down to 8a:
9a x 2, 8c+ x 11, 8c x 12, 8b+ x 10, 8b x 9, 8a+ x 6, 8a x 3.
Total sends since 2001 (registered on 8a.nu):
9a+ x 4, 9a x 16, 8c+ x 55, 8c x 76 (we have only two guys in SA that ever redpointed an 8c), 8b+ x 62, 8b x 131, 8a+ x 154, 8a x 163.
I won't go into the stats for percentages of onsights and so on - go have a look at Ondra's chart.
If this is not standard-setting, i don't know in what virtual reality you live or what pipe-dreams you may have for the idealised uber-climber. So far as any kind of climbing standard goes, Ondra is as close to the uber-climber as we will see in a very, very long time.
Jehlers, get over this negative criticism and realise that he accomplishes more in a week's climbing, than what 99.999999999999% of hard climbers will ever reach in a lifetime of commitment. He's the Lance Armstrong of climbing, and if we can't get excited about Adam, well then this is a very sad and sorry community indeed. Chris Sharma is a climbing celeb, Ondra is a climbing phenomenon. And by the way, you can't climb 9a+ or 9b without being a climbing celeb.
