In the past months Adam Ondra has been working through some projects at his home crags in the Czech Republic with his efforts yielding not one but two potential V15s. Not finished, over the weekend he did the FA of Terranova at Holštejn suggesting the lofty grade of V16 for the line.
In registering the ascent on his 8a.nu scorecard Ondra calls the problem “not the most inspiring line” and indicates that the it is a traverse along the bottom of a sport climbing crag. About the 12 move line he also says, “definitely not the way bouldering should look like”.
Since a proposed grade of V16 is sure to raise some eyebrows Ondra explained some of his reasoning in this report on UKClimbing:
I know that if I feel that this climb is harder that the rest of the 8C’s I have done, it does not necessarily mean that it is 8C+, but I feel it would be stupid to keep calling something soft 8C, mid 8C and hard 8C. In my opinion, Terranova breached the barrier of hard 8C, that is how I feel it compared to other climbs I tried or did.
Check out the full UKClimbing update for more of Ondra’s thoughts on the grade and the problem itself.
In the end the suggested grade may not really matter since it seems unlikely that this or any of his other problems in the Czech Republic will see much effort in the way of repeats owing to their location and the somewhat local1 nature of the lines. Time will tell I suppose.
- Traverses, no top outs, etc. ↩
Another quite from the UKClimbing report:
“I felt awkward to give such high grade and I still do, because it seems that nowadays, the trend is saying that everything that is super hard must be 8C, as if 8C+ could not exist.”This is something that has been bothering me. Over-grading is so stigmatized at this point that people are afraid to be honest about how hard they think something is. They would rather knowingly under-grade a problem than have anyone call it ‘soft.’ This type of thing is just as harmful to the grading scale as over-grading, if they goal is to normalize grading at the top of the scale all around the world.”
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To be clear, the second half of that paragraph is my opinion, not a quote from Ondra. My bad.
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That was my bad
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Ondra made many of his hardest problems in Petrohrad. Its not world famous, but seems like a nice boulder area to me.
http://www.czechclimbing.com/clanek.php?key=9429&nazev=petrohradske_padani_2011_international_bouldering_competition
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The goal or trying to be consistent with grading is a good one, happy with the quote he gave.
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