The headline says it all…
10-year-old Ashima Shiraishi has returned to Hueco Tanks where she’s really taken things to the next next next level by repeating the iconic Fred Nicole V13 Crown Of Aragorn, thus making her likely the youngest person in history (male or female) to climb a problem of that grade1.
Wow.
More on Ashima from the archives:
- Hard sends in the Red River Gorge
- Hard sends in Hueco Tanks
- Did she or didn’t she send Right Martini (V12)
- The Insiders short
- Someone sound the alarm at 8a.nu headquarters! ↩
And only the 3rd female to climb that grade?
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Damn that’s impressive. I can’t wait to see what she’s going to do in the future.
In related news, my desire to not be a 10 year old girl is really holding my climbing back.
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dab?
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C’mon now!
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Sorry, just trying to roll how you foambackers do.
Rad ascent!
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Keep practicing 🙂
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“Someone sound the alarm at 8a.nu headquarters!”
Jens has already sounded the alarm (“Grades will be much more confusing in the future!”) and while he may be derided as a hater, he may have a point.
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The entire point of Jens and his news section is to piss off climbers to drive traffic to the site. It’s brilliant, but loathsome.
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Of all his unpopular opinions I’m not sure that is the opinion that has gotten him that much flack. Grades have always been confusing and as you point out in your comment below they are only going to get much more confusing in the future. I find it odd though that Jens continually derides the importance of grades yet 99% of the items posted on the front page of 8a.nu are there precisely because of the grade attached to them.
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why downplay her achievements when you have nothing to your own name that comes remotely close as remarkable?
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who are you talking about?
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So now climbing opinion holding is a”meritocracy centered around finger strength” ?
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Given all of the talk lately of lowering grades when women have made an ascent I half expected to see a comment about knocking the V grade of the problem down a number or two.
I typically have a really difficult time understanding why a problem/climb should be downgraded if women, or in this case children, climb a problem. I have nothing but respect for the work and determination that they have put in in order to complete climbs that most of us can only dream of.
Grades are, and have always been confusing. When was this supposed period during which no disagreements or controversies took place about the difficulty of a climb?
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Never before in the sports of bouldering and sport climbing has there been such a huge number of well trained but significantly physically different participants such as women and children. This is beginning to make an impact on how we think about difficulty.
Imagine if there was a consensus V9 or V10 that took a climber such as Ashima much longer to figure out and ascend than Crown of Aragorn or Right Martini. Would there be a lot of press for that? We imagine that such a thing as absolute difficulty exists but without controls for weight, height, etc, such a notion is ultimately fictional.
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Good point. Let’s have a dyno contest between Ashima and a big guy like Jon Glassberg and see who wins.
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That would actually be hilarious if you did a dyno contest where instead of just taking max distance dyno-ed, you did a normalization for each person to adjust for height. So if a 4 foot person jumps 4 feet that would be 100%, compared with a 6 foot person jumping 5 feet . . . only 83%. Kinda like the drag strips where they allow you to setup a handicap for your car on the 1st run, allowing a minivan to race a ferrari or whatever later on.
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Would it be v13 if all other climbers who have sent it were her size (or if the problem’s moves and holds were suddenly increased nearly twofold)? no, it would be downrated. will it be harder for her to send as she grows and her hands and body get larger? most probably. is she head and shoulders above all other climbers her age? yes! climbing is an individual pursuit. nice work!
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While her hands are smaller and thus can hold smaller holds, her arm span is nowhere near an adult’s, and she often has to use ridiculously bad intermediate holds to make moves. One could just as easily say that any given v13 is HARDER for her because she is only three feet tall.
Don’t be one of those people that assumes climbing is easier when you’re younger/lighter/taller/shorter/etc… Climbing is hard for everyone, every problem is different, and grades are just averages. I don’t make excuses for myself, and I certainly don’t make excuses for other climbers, much less 10-year-old girls, much less as an anonymous schmuck on a climbing website.
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i didn’t assume anything and if you read the end of my post you’d know it. i’m a fan. hope you had fun flaming, you sound angry for an anonymous schmuck 🙂
regardless, and once again – nice work ashima.
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No, you said something stupid and got bashed for it like you should have.
Will the problem feel the same for Ashima now as it will when she is 20? Absolutely not. Does ability to climb hard at a young age predict ability to climb hard later in life? Absolutely. We have many examples, Adam Ondra being the most well known and obvious. That is why this is so significant. It’s an indicator of the level of the next generation, already achieving things the previous generation couldn’t.
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I must have missed where she achieved something new? That is not the same thing as achieving something at a younger age.
It is a new generation of climber for sure, heavily coached and flown across the country at 10 years old. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it is new within the sport.
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you got downrated to oblivion because it’s obvious you added the final two lines to your comment so you wouldn’t sound like a complete hater.
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I would not say that any given V13 necessarily is or is not harder for Ashima or anyone else. However it is certainly the case that certain types of climbs are clearly easier for certain body types, hand sizes,etc. This is not excuse-making, just a factual observation, borne out of many decades of participation and observation in the sport.
I think that CN readers can readily imagine any number of problems at Hueco or elsewhere, of a relatively modest grade, that might thwart an 11-year old girl, even ones that are not particularly reachy. While Hueco has lots of problems that favor people who have small hands and like to crimp. It also has many problems that are the opposite, problems that rely on compression, slopers, and upper body power. I know that if I wanted to do V13 in Hueco, I would stay away from something like Diabolique or Flamingon.
I think the comparison with gymnastics is apt. Women’s and men’s gymnastics are aimed at very different body types and skill sets. Climbing is even more confusing as it tests the climber ability to hang onto poor holds, a test that tends to favor, all other things being equal, a lower body weight.
As one commenter noted, Nalle H has said Crown is benchmark V13, and the ascent is definitely impressive. However in climbing sometimes benchmarks have a funny way of moving around. This may be one of the those times.
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Thanks Peter for putting forth a rational analysis of this ascent. Seems like the same discussion had when she did Power of Silence (I believe thats the climb), using completely different beta than the V11 beta, and yet again its announced as the guidebook grade. Hopefully when shes a bit older we can hear a bit more from her.
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Beta doesn’t get grades; boulder problems get grades. Power of Silence is a V10. There’s two ways to earn your 10 points on it: do powerful moves between big holds, or do smaller moves between miserably tiny “holds.” Different climbers use different beta.
Hopefully, when you learn a bit more about climbing, we can hear a bit more from you.
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“Climbing is even more confusing as it tests the climber ability to hang onto poor holds, a test that tends to favor, all other things being equal, a lower body weight.”
This is true, Peter, but all other things are not equal here: with Ashima’s light weight comes much tinier muscles. To throw yourself around Crown of Aragorn with muscles that tiny requires incredible strength.
But your general point is well-taken, that different climbs will suit different climbers and that this causes problems for the notion of a measure of absolute difficulty.
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“Beta doesn’t get grades; boulder problems get grades.”
Well said!
(I couldn’t respond to your post with this quote for some reason, so I replied to your next one.)
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Really, so if a first ascent is done by someone with a particular beta and given lets say v12, but the second ascentionist comes along and finds a much better beta and says its easier, say v10, what should the grade be? And what if the first ascentionist tries the different beta and also says its easier, doesnt grade depend on beta rather than just the line up the rock?
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The grade would be V10. Even if you use the original, more difficult beta, the grade would be V10.
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Damn right. But I think that if Ashima found a different beta for her, that worked well for her size and abilities, she should determine the grade for herself. Goes by the same logic. If youre a small child and use completely different beta than someone of average size, then you should give it a different grade for yourself, same goes for really tall people who may use a different beta and should address that. Basically people should grade for themselves.
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Of course boulder problems get downgraded when easier beta is found. But the point is that many boulder problems have many different available “betas” (plural?) that all clock in at the same grade (like Barefoot on Sacred Ground) — some methods work better for some climbers, and other methods work better for other climbers. Anyone that’s actually been _on_ Power of Silence knows that the beta Ashima used holds the V10 grade, so a downgrade is not warranted.
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That’s good response I like that.
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She’s head and shoulders above most climbers _above_ her age and almost certainly a better climber at 10 than you’ll ever be.
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climbing goes the way of gymnastics… dominated by little girls
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Any idea when / if a video will be posted?? I can’t wait to see that! So awesome! She is an amazing little climber!
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I’d be surprised if we didn’t see some sort of video at some point
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There won’t be any grade worries, because Nalle said it’s the benchmark for V13.
Therefore it stands.
Thankyou and goodnight 🙂
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The logical fallacies infesting most of these arguments is mindboggling.
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Better Eat Your Wheaties got downgraded right after Bobbi sent it, why not downgrade Crown of Aragorn now? Afterall, if if a woman sends V9 and it immediately gets called “V8”, might as well downgrade V13 if a 10-year old girl sends it
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Wow indeed! No comments on the grade.
But I must admit that I have some mixed feelings about this. What scares me, is exactly what David Sahalie commented: “climbing goes the way of gymnastics… dominated by little girls”.
Please Ashima, prove David wrong and climb some 9a boulders when you’re 18!
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He’s already wrong. There is exactly one world class boulderer who is a little girl. Every single other one is not.
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One of the BEST things about climbing is how hard it is to quantify. And this is despite the obsession with numbers of every kind. Difficulty, age, number of tries, podium spot at a plastic comp. You can hang a number on all of that to try to measure yourself against others.
Fact is, you can use a combo of any of those numbers to arrive at a bunch of different conclusions. Everyone has their own talents and interests, and the motivations are different. Dig deeper and look at the really important numbers… like the size of the trust fund of the climber from Boulder, or how many feet from the road that 5.14 is, or how few people you will see if you’re climbing something worthwhile.
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You all that are haters, piss off! Great work Ashima you rock!
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I agree with you all I am also a little embarrassed that I can be burnt off by a 10 year old girl.
Nice work.
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I had a feeling she might do The Crown from footage of her climbing Better Eat Your Wheaties in the Reel Rock Extras. I like climbing because of the variety of people it brings together, even if sometimes they come together to argue on the value of the accomplishments of pros, especially outliers (children, giants, etc.). I love when people say that something was easier to climb because of some innate advantage. Myself being 6’6″, I get this a lot, and I’ve learned to give up on grades and people that use them to compare one another. The grade should not change because attempting to include climbers that are very far from average (5’9″ish?) would require a crazy system which would be less useful than what we got.
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I’m curious to see the footage. The crux reach to the crimp is big even for normal sized folks. And regardless of handsize the hold you’re moving towards is far short of jug and the roof is the same angle for everyone. The second reach (seen in the pic) is shorter in comparison with better feet and it still looks big for her. I think its fair to say that crimps and overhanging terrain are her style and this problem suited her but since when has that ever affected the grade of anything. This is really one of the more impressive ascents I’ve heard of in recent memory. Ashima is so far ahead of every other junior climber its immeasurable. Robin Ebersfield-Raboutou’s kids and team are sick and many of them already send way hard problems but none of them are even remotely close to this especially at 10 years old. Like others have said I hope she can avoid feeling the pressure and continue to climb for fun. If she does there’s no telling what she’ll be doing in 5-10 years!
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DUDES: It’s not absolute strength or absolute weight that matter in climbing. It’s strength-weight ratio. If you’d quit bitching about how much more you weigh than Ashima, and just get stronger, you could achieve the same badass strength-weight ratio that she’s achieved and send Crown of Aragorn. Think it’s hard to get that strong relative to your body weight? Well, Ashima had to get just as strong relative to her body weight.
Put another way, Ashima has a way better strength-weight ratio than anyone in here trying to say the problem is easier for her. But I bet her strength-weight ratio is about the same as other elite climbers who send Crown of Aragorn. There’s no two ways about it: to send Crown of Aragorn, you need elite V13 level strength-weight. The number of 10 year olds that can climb this thing is vanishingly small, just as the number of adults that can climb it is vanishingly small, and for the same reason: it’s really friggin hard to get that strong relative to your weight.
I guess the fact that her fingers are smaller buys her some mechanical advantage on small holds, but as others have pointed out, this is surely washed out by having to move herself much greater relative distances given her small stature.
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Just to make the point really clear: if we wanted to hold fixed Ashima’s weight, but change her strength to weight ratio to be the same as the average slack-jawed V7 punter, we would have to dramatically weaken her strength — to the point that she wouldn’t be able to send Crown of Aragorn (because she’d no longer be able to hang on the miserable intermediates I imagine she had to lock off to her waist).
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You’re right on the strength-to-weight ratio bit being the ultimate decider. I think what is fascinating and often overlooked is what really comes together to create strength-to-weight. The physics are super cool! Here are a few factors:
bone length: shorter bones allow better leverage. think of two 5’10” climbers with different finger sizes
muscle attachment points: while similar across people, slight variations, even in the millimeter range can mean differences in ability to create leverage
muscle fiber physiology: each person has a different ratio of different muscle fiber types (fast twitch, slow twitch, intermediate). while you can train to compensate for the most part, at the level of an extreme athletes some people are definitely predisposed for say power over endurance, or vice-versa
So, when you have a child who has not gone through puberty, especially a girl who is going to have less testosterone to begin with, they have a HUGE disadvantage in the ability to put on muscle mass and they have a huge obvious disadvantage in the reach department. This is compensated for some extent by greater leverage against holds (easier both to crimp down and to lock off) if you kept the muscle masses the same. However, the difficulty in building muscle can in some ways be a good thing . . . while muscle normally carries itself, having such tiny legs, etc. is definitely a benefit.
So, my point: There are so many variables that come into play that simply saying “strength-to-weight-ratio” can be a bit misleading. As people have roughly pointed out, as Ashima grows her physics will change . . . she will have a larger reach but her muscles will have to work harder to move a joint through the same range of motion. Her body weight will increase but she will also be able to build muscle mass easier.
If you want, it’s easy to see where the physics apply in a comparison of the extreme climbing style differences of say, Woods and Graham. Woods has a smaller body which predisposes him to climbing with power and control, while Graham’s longer limbs force him to compensate with a much more flaily style (for lack of a better descriptor), BUT he has more reach to begin with.
Interesting stuff!
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All important points that I was riding rough-shod over. I do suspect, though, that no matter how you slice the pie, Ashima turns out to be an elite level climber — and that this Crown of Aragorn send is a pretty big send. Don’t you think? Adam Ondra didn’t do V13 when he was 10.
I agree that the physics is really interesting… I always thought it would be really cool if you had a computer program with some sophisticated physics in it that you could punch in a rough 3D model of a boulder problem. Then you could have it calculate the force required to move an approximation of a human body (of a given size) up the problem. No one else ever seems to think that idea is interesting, though, so maybe it’s just me.
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It would be cool, but perhaps just not realistic at this point. Need some PhD student to take it as there research.
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Someone is actually working on that very program right now for their masters….
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If you could design a perfect climber, they would have little fingers, be short, and be light weight. The limiting factor is weight. Most 20 yeard olds climb harder then most 12 year olds because their technique is better. A 120 pound female can have a much strength as she can but carrying 120 pounds is a disadvantage regardless of strength compared to an 11 year old that has just as good technique but weights 70 pounds. The strength to weight is just much better, plus you should add in small fingers which make little holds mechanically better and great technique, and the right crimpy problem, v13 at 11.
As the sport grows in popularity, young kids will start at an earlier age and develop enough technique to send very hard. But, for females, there have been many “child prodigy’s”that have climbed hard and then tailed off once they hit puberty and gain weight. The exception is females that loose weight post puberty, their are recent examples of that also.
Guys get more testosterone past puberty so they can climb harder post puberty. Think about the majority of good climbers, they are small and light as heavier people have too much weight to pull up hill, again a few exceptions.
This is a success story and congrats to her, get used to it as there will be many more.
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This is absolutely right. Climbers do not have to move a pre-set weight like powerlifters but exert effort relative to their own weight and technical ability. Most of the crucial strength in climbing is in the relatively small forearm flexors which control attachment to holds. Bigger muscles generate strength but only at an ever-increasing cost in terms of weight. So if you start at a very low overall weight, you do not want the added weight of bigger muscles except where they count the most. The advantages of low weight offset less reach across the majority of climbing situations in natural settings. In competition climbing the nature of the holds and reaches are arbitrary so the lack of reach can be an issue that setters must resolve but all things being equal, having a lower body mass is better
As you get bigger, you are forced to play a very difficult balancing act between gaining the strength you need to move your mass and making that mass too high as a result of gaining said muscle mass. With the limited potential for increased muscle size in the forearms, meaning a genuine ceiling on finger strength, and the very high potential for increased size elsewhere in the body, meaning additional non-functional weight, climbers must do their best to build the former and minimize the latter.
Dismissing basic physics and calling commenter “haters” does not change the facts surrounding this ascent. I imagine serious climbing coaches around the world, as well as serious climbers in general are considering the implications of Ashima’s achievement which are significant. The first one is an underscoring of how immature the sport is, when prodigies can still emerge at such a young age at such a high level. Clearly there is a huge gap between perceived levels of difficulty and actual limits of human achievement in climbing. Second it has clearly refocused attention on the issue of body size and type in regard to certain kinds of climbs and the problem of grading them across body all body types. Third, it raises the issue of what is appropriate in regard to serious training of very young climbers as parents and coaches look at their own charges now that the bar has been set so high.
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Your going to have to build a model of Crown of Aragorn that is scaled so that you are the size of Ashima. Then you can see how it feels for ya!
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That’s not how gravity works.
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Here is a link on the PHYSICS of scaling.
http://www.dinosaurtheory.com/big_dinosaur.html
what your saying makes ZERO sense. This is because as you scale things up weight goes up as length^3 but strength goes up with cross-sectional area in other words length^2. It’s the reason why ants can cary fifty times their weight and elephants can’t jump and have massively thick bones.
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The kid is really, really good at climbing rocks. This isn’t an aberration for her. She’s been working up through the grades for several years, as you can see in Narc’s links. Well done!
10 year olds, dude. 10 year olds. I’ve gotta get to the gym.
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I think the emotions brought out in climbers over a child’s ascent of a hard route are fascinating. As a 6’4″ climber I have had to understand, from the beginning, that climbing grades and difficulty are always completely abstract. It is interesting to see the rationalization that people have to go through to preserve the “objectivity” of grades in their own mind.
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It’s pretty good, isn’t it? As a 170lb guy who regularly gets burned off by 135lb guys, it’s interesting to see the tantrum they throw after getting burned off by a 90lb girl. We need a new rating system!!
Strength to weight be damned!! I want a 2 grade handicap over what those 135lb guys are claiming. 🙂
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I also see this as a painful but overall positive development for climbing in the long run. It’s gonna deflate a lot of egos, but the reality is that climbing is a highly morphological and genetically-influenced sport. Hard work can go a long way, but you’ll all find that the Ashimas of the world will crush the Bachars in the end, despite the hard work of the latter. Hopefully there will be a trend away from comparing outselves to others, and more focus on our personal goals. Then we can be happy when anyone reaches a new personal best without worrying about how it reflects on us.
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If you define success using the happiness and personal growth one derives from climbing, I think it becomes clear which climbers are “crushing”. Our culture is so obsessed with domination and hierarchy. The most important things are often devalued and ignored.
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Ashima is a kid who enjoys climbing, whether it be on V2s or V12s.
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I heard she did Barefoot on Sacred Ground as well, Keep it up Ashima!
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ummmm I don’t think I’m the only person on here who wants to biotch-slap all these “climbers??” spraying about this climb needing to be downgraded… you’re all either trolls or idiots
*she’s female
*she’s a child
*she’s smaller (hands fit on smaller holds)
*she’s lighter
*she totally got to use easier beta!!… (that one makes me laugh. hard. Could you pull on this with her “easier beta” haha.)
Seriously!? those are the reasons you want to downgrade a ridiculously awesome accomplishment!??
Take a history lesson dicks:
Let’s start, oh I don’t know, with the first EVER free ascent of The Nose by Miss Lynn Hill. The most difficult pitch now has a consensus rating of 5.14a/b… she originally gave it a 5.13b…. should we give her less credit because it was easier for her than for other people?? hell no, she’s just better for that particular climb. But you don’t see people arguing about downgrading that, or more importantly- downgrading HER abilities, because she “has smaller fingers” and it’s “easier” for her….
Her first ascent was a feat not repeated until 10 years later. After that, it was also repeated once more by a then-married team of Rodden (a small woman! *gasp*) and her husband (epic Dawn-Wall-er) Caldwell. Both professional climbers, but most importantly, both most-likely climbed it with completely “different beta” ….but in response to that, I REALLLLLY DOUBT that Caldwell bitched:
“well you know, for me, it was totally a 5.14d because I have half a finger… and it was like, not even 5.13a for her because she’s so small and light. Soooo I’m the way better-er climber than her, because it was harder for me and she got to use easier beta”
Give me a break, boys, and go play with yourselves. Leave the climbing to us “girls”.
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