Six seconds for Olympic glory: speed climbing wows Paris

Blink and you'll miss it, speed climbing has a claim to be the most exhilarating sport at the Paris Games. The 100m sprint? Pedestrian in comparison, taking almost twice as long.

In many ways, speed climbing is similar to the Olympic blue riband event, just vertical.

Competitors scramble up a 15-metre-high (49-foot) wall at a five-degree incline, straining every sinew to be first to tap a red button at the top.

At the knock-out stages, which took place Wednesday, two climbers race up identical courses side-by-side with 20 handholds and 11 footholds to help them to the top.

US sprinter Noah Lyles famously showed in the men's 100m final that Olympic glory can come down to thousandths of a second.

Speed climbing is no different, China's Deng Lijuan scraping though her quarter-final in 6:369sec, six thousandths of a second ahead of her rival.

With so little separating the climbers, one tiny slip means the end of your Olympic journey.

The bronze medal match saw Indonesia's Rajiah Sallsabillah lose her footing for a fraction of a second and with it the chance of a medal.

'Sky's the limit'

Aleksandra Miroslaw from Poland is the undisputed queen of speed. Like Swedish pole vaulter Armand Duplantis, she keeps breaking her own world record, performing this feat eight times over her career.

The 30-year-old destroyed her old world record yet again in qualifying for the Olympic quarter-finals, setting a new time of 6:06sec.

Top seed and red hot favourite Miroslaw cruised through the quarter-final and semi-final relatively untroubled but faced a stiff challenge from Deng in the final.

Gold was won by a fingertip. Deng started marginally quicker but Miroslaw scrambled after her and stretched first for the buzzer, taking it in 6:10sec, the Chinese athlete coming home in 6:18sec.

Overwhelmed with emotion, Miroslaw sank to her knees sobbing before racing into the crowd to embrace her family, as a sizeable Polish crowd waved flags and shouted her name.

"I never thought about the time. I only had one thing in my mind: just run. I didn't even look at the other side, I didn't even know it was close," Miroslaw told reporters.

Could she break the six-second barrier? "I really don't know how fast I can go. The sky's the limit," she said.

- 'Gen-Z sport' -

First introduced at the Tokyo Olympics in a bid to attract a younger audience, sport climbing proved an instant hit and will feature again in Los Angeles in 2028.

"It's a Gen-Z sport," said Fabrizio Rossini, spokesman for the International Federation of Sport Climbing.

"You can fit the whole action into what would be the highlights for another sport, so it's perfect" for the younger generation's shorter attention span.

In Tokyo, the event consisted of three elements, speed, boulder, and lead, the latter two being more methodical and difficult climbs, with athletes battling to get as high up the wall as they can.

For the Paris Games, organisers decided to separate out the speed element, undoubtedly the most spectacular of the climbing disciplines.

This meant Wednesday's medals were the first in Olympic history, with Miroslaw the first-ever Olympic speed climbing champion.

The 6,000-capacity crowd at the sun-baked Le Bourget stadium north of Paris cheered wildly, stamping their feet after every climb, as Coldplay and Taylor Swift hits pumped out.

"The final, it was fantastic. It was absolutely amazing," enthused Brandon Blaser, 49, a real estate developer from Salt Lake City in the United States.

"Just those six seconds is the culmination of everything they've worked for. It was really, really fun to watch," he told AFP.