In the words of Professor Farnsworth,

We’re free! By that we mean speed climbing is going to get its very own Olympic medals, and then bouldering and sport climbing will be a combined event. Much like the old combined, we still need to add up disparate events, but now its adding apples to oranges, instead of summing apples, oranges, and bicycles.

The brightest side I see to this, is that the new combination method seems much more fair compared to the old method (that we ranted about here). Two reasons for that:

1. In the old method, if you were in second place during the bouldering round, regardless if it was by a single attempt, or by 4 tops, they got a score of 1, and you got a score of 2.
2. In the above, lets say you were behind by a single attempt to top. In the lead round, your opponent fell mid-route, taking 3rd, you fell at the last move, but some lead specialist clipped the chains. Clearly, your margin over them in lead is much larger than their margin over you in bouldering, but their ranking-score is 3 (1*3), and yours 4 (2*2), and they’re still ahead.

In the new paradigm, competitors receive a score out of 100 for the boulders (with 100 being a flash of all 4 boulders) and a score out of 100 for the route, and your final place is the sum of the points you received. USAClimbing and the IFSC do this slightly differently, which we can discuss later, and bafflingly neither scores the combined the same way they do the individual events.

1. For lead, this makes some sense. Single route, getting higher is better, for an individual event there’s no need to complicate the scoring. For the combined, there’s an interesting way in which the 100 points are divided amongst the holds.
2. For bouldering, “Boulder Event” boulders are set with one zone (IFSC) or one-or-two zone (USAC), while “Combined Event” boulders are set with two zones. Deriving ranking based on this mixed bag of routesetting is equally mixed (or are they?!). I see no reason to score the Boulder events differently from the Combined events, and if we actually get more World Cup viewers coming from the Olympic coverage, its just going to confuse them.
   • IFSC Boulder Event – Tops, Zones, Attempts to Top, Attempts to Zone
   • USAC Boulder Event – Tops, Zones, Low Zones (if they exist), Attempts to Top, Attempts to Zone, Attempts to Low Zone (if they exist)
   • Combined Event – 25 points if you top, 6 if you reach Zone, 3 if you reach low zone, minus 0.1 for however many attempts it took to get your high point.*

Now into the nuance shall we?

Lead

Lead, as mentioned before, is easy. There is one route. Higher is better. The rest is theory. In this case, how do we fairly reward athletes who get to different heights? Routes have different numbers of holds, and tend to be set “progressively” – we all assume that the last move is much harder than the first move, either outright or because of the pump. For that reason, not all holds are of equal value. The final 10 holds are worth 4 points each, the next 10 worth 3 points each, the next 10 worth 2, and the 10 before that worth 1 point. All of this means that making more moves up high pays extra dividends in differentiating yourself, and if the route has more than 40 holds, you can make it a ways off the floor and still score zero. If you make forward progress, what once rewarded a ‘+’ now rewards you an extra 0.1 – as before, its a tiebreak at best. Kinda.

Boulder

Scoring bouldering is hard. If summing bouldering and lead is apples and oranges, summing the results of 4 boulders is like adding Granny Smiths to Red Delicious to Fujis. With the Combined format scoring, unless you take more than 10 falls, it actually scores mostly identical to the individual event. In a Boulder event, 1 Top 1 Zone beats 0 Tops 4 Zones. Same in combined: 25 points beats 24 points. THE WORLD MAKES SENSE. If you took 10 attempts to top and they flashed to those 4 zones, you’d be tied. Not perfect, but still, that’s what we’d call a “corner case” – technically possible but very unlikely.

A few caveats and observations however. First, the most recent US Team Trials scored the boulder round with a Zone score of 10 and Low Zone of 5. This, in my opinion, is garbage. Why? Because I’m a boulderer, you either top the boulder or you didn’t, and with the 25/10/5 scoring, 1T1Z is 25 points, and is trumped by 0T4Z at 40 points. In fact, I re-ran the scores and a number of the athlete positions in the overall flip-flopped if you scored the way the rulebook says you should. Second, the rule for deducting 0.1 point is applied blindly if its attempt to top or attempt to zone, but unless you’re the weird case above where 10 falls makes things “interesting”, it takes at least 30 falls for them to outweigh getting an extra Zone over a rival. We can have some debate over whether 2 ‘Low-Zones’ (2 * 3 points) should be worth the same as 1 ‘Zone’ (6 points). The easy method would be ditch the Low Zone altogether, but I welcome it – its nice to see boulders where there are more than 2 meaningful holds. Time will tell.

Combined

Apples plus Oranges equals Fruit. I think, overall, the scoring system as laid out has actual potential to be decent. High praise from someone who has nitpicked a number of scoring methods. The lead method recognizes the progressive nature of routes, the boulder method still holds that a top is the most important thing, all is right with the world. Instead of ripping stuff, let’s look at some amusing cost trades on our way out. We’re going to call the last 10 holds of the route, the 4 pointers, “A holds” (pronounce this slowly and deliberately, thank you), the next 10 down, the Steph Curry Special 3-pointers “B-holds”, etc etc.

Points	Hold Combinations (Min and Max)
25+ points	5 A-Holds + 2 B-Holds 8 C-Holds + 10 D-Holds
25 points	1 Boulder Top 4 A-Holds + 3 B_Holds 8 C-Holds + 9 D-Holds
7+ points	Last B-Hold and First A-Hold 7 D-Holds
6 points	2 B-Holds 6 D-Holds 1 Boulder Zone
4+ points	1 A-Hold 4 D-Holds
3 points	1 B-Hold 3 D-Holds 1 Low Zone
+/-1 point	1 D-Hold 10 Boulder Falls
+/-0.1 point	+0.1 Using a Lead Hold -0.1 Single Boulder Fall

Is sending a boulder someone else didn’t even establish on an equal trade for 7 moves high on the route? Is it an equal trade for 17 of the lowest scoring holds on the route? Is the difference between topping the route and coming up one hold short really only worth slightly more than a single missed Low Zone? Break out the popcorn after every event where the calls are close, its sure to be a good time to argue.

Final Thoughts

Divorcing the combined rank from the individual event rank was the right thing to do. Your performance counts for what it is, not what it was compared to others. Getting rid of the multiplicative scoring gets rid of the over-valuing of the first few positions. Jettisoning speed climbing to a separate medal both shuts up the haters and lets the easiest-to-understand event stand on its own. The route scoring rewards the stand-outs more, the boulder scoring values tops above all else. It’s all good. The athlete’s concerns satisfied, the only people I have continued sympathy for are the routesetters – a recent Combined event had a stopper move on the finals route and the combined ranking ended up 1-for-1 with the boulder ranking. Can’t win em all, but we’re a lot closer to a fair system by which to add up all the fruits.

Justin Meserve, is always going to be an engineer at heart and be “about the numbers.”