2024 Olympics: The rapid rise of New Zealand speed climbers Sarah Tetzlaff and Julian David

The wall never changes.

No matter what the competition is, New Zealand speed climber Sarah Tetzlaff’s venue is always the same: a standardized 15-meter-high wall with a 5-degree overhang.

The red pentagonal handrails that snake upwards are always in the same place and at the same angle, and the narrow footholds seem to accommodate only one big toe.

At Tetzlaff, the New Zealand Rock Climbing Association’s indoor training facility on Mount Maunganui, New Zealand’s leading speed climbing duo to debut in Paris next month – Put your hands into the chalk bag and sit on the touch pad at the foot of the wall.

Then she stretched her body out like a slingshot, ready to launch herself to the top of the wall, holding on to the first handrail above her head with both hands, her left foot on the first foothold, her right foot pressed against the touchpad.

Three loud beeps gave Tetzlaff a countdown, and then the buzzer sounded and she rushed up the wall, lightly jumping from one hold to the next. After a few seconds, she slammed the top pad to stop the count.

The world’s top male climbers can scale the wall in less than five seconds, while the women’s world record is just over six seconds, making speed climbing the fastest Olympic sport.

Doing this in training is one thing. But the competition format — where climbers go head-to-head in vertical sprints — adds to the high-energy, high-pressure nature of the sport.

Tetzlaff’s view is more Zen.

There were 20 familiar handrails and 11 footholds on the wall, and she found a sense of peace in them.

“I think because the wall is always the same you’re able to manage the pressure,” said Tetzlaff, who along with Julian David will become New Zealand’s first Olympic speed climbing representative.

“You can get into a really beautiful flow state that you don’t feel at any other time in your life, and it’s just a feeling you chase.”

So she chased that feeling again and again. The repetition, she said, is the addictive factor.

After each run, Tetzlaff consults with her coach, Rob Moore, who points an iPad at a wall.

They gathered around the screen, analyzing the game step by step, looking for areas for improvement. There was too little time on the wall to allow for any mistakes. This is a sport that focuses on details.

“I’m definitely a bit of a perfectionist. So it fits in really well with the way my brain works,” said Tetzlaff, who is pursuing a master’s degree in environmental science.

“These tiny movements and adjustments can make the difference between keeping you on the wall or falling off it.

“So, things like the angle of my knees, my hips, my wrists — even something as simple as a finger hitting the wrong spot — can make the difference between a good time or a mediocre time, like 0.2 seconds slower.”

As Tetzlaff prepares for his next climb, Moore explains that every climber’s approach (or what they call their “best approach”) is different. How an athlete approaches a rock face depends on their physiology.

“Even if the wall is exactly the same, they’ll use different holds and have different approaches to getting through sections, depending on their height, jumping ability or strength, so one of the most important things is to try to find out what each athlete can do on the wall.”

Climbers develop new methods over time, he said. For example, a year ago, Julian David won the world junior championships using a different technique than he would use at the Olympics a week later.

The walls of a city never change. But there are many ways to the top.

Selling dreams

Moore loves to make statements.

His entire look — a striking mix of a mohawk and mullet, paired with orange glasses — is one of self-expression.

When the International Sport Climbing Federation announced it would establish a separate speed climbing event for the Paris Olympics, Moore announced his resignation as head coach of the New Zealand Sport Climbing Association.

Sport climbing makes its Olympic debut at Tokyo 2021, with climbers competing in a unique format that combines three disciplines (bouldering, lead climbing, and speed climbing) into one medal event.

The competition format is controversial in the sport. Bouldering and rock climbing are aerobic sports that focus on problem solving and require very different skills than those required for explosive five-second vertical climbs. As one athlete described it, “It’s like asking Novak Djokovic to play ping-pong in the opening set.”

But this innovative format successfully combines the fundamental elements of the sport to create a highly spectator-worthy event for billions of viewers around the world.

After the discipline’s successful debut, the International Olympic Committee gave climbing an extra medal at the Paris Games, allowing the world governing body to separate bouldering and leading events from speed climbing.

Moore sees this as a golden (or silver, or bronze) opportunity.

“As soon as this happened I thought ‘we’ve got a speed climbing wall here, we’ve got all the infrastructure and equipment we need to run a really good program,’ ” he said.

“So I resigned as head coach at New Zealand Climbing and said ‘I want to run this project – I’ve got it written and I know how to make it work’.”

As climbing transitions from a purely adventure sport to one that is condensed, regulated, and scored for elite competition, the challenge facing the sport’s leaders is to develop structures that support high-performance programs.

Moore said he learned a lot from his early attempts to establish a formal pathway.

“Climbing is like Skateboarding, surfing and similar sportscomes from a pretty laid-back culture, so it’s hard to build a high-performance program where athletes are really committed to the competition aspect because there’s a lot of fun in the hobby aspect of it as well,” he said.

“So part of the challenge for me is finding athletes who are like, ‘Okay, I like the hobby aspect of it, but I really want to see if I can get better at the competitive aspect’.”

Moore already has a student in Tetzlaff who is dedicated to the sport.

After unexpectedly qualifying for the 2018 Youth Olympics, the Wellington native moved to Mount Maunganui the day after her final NCEA exams to throw herself into training for the Youth Olympics.

David was a secondary school student in Tauranga at the time and was annoying his teachers by climbing onto the roof of his school at lunchtime. One teacher suggested he should try rock climbing at the All India Games.

Just a few years later, he began to make a splash on the international stage.

“(Tetzlaff and David) were instrumental in helping me sell this vision and getting other people to come on board and be a part of this dream,” Moore said.

“When we can prove that the plan works and that we’re heading in the right direction, it gives our plan more credibility.”

It also helped that Moore had a natural sales ability—so good, in fact, that sometimes he didn’t even realize he was making sales.

While developing the plan, Moore sought feedback from Mike Flynn, a consultant at High Performance Sport New Zealand (HPSNZ), who ended up accidentally securing funding for the program.

“I wanted him to take a close look at it and see if it was feasible and, based on what he knew, whether it would be a successful project. As it happened, I sent the plan out about three weeks before the funding cycle was about to close,” Moore recalls.

“He responded to me and said ‘OK, we have three weeks to make this happen, let’s do it’. He just assumed I knew the funding application was going to close in three weeks. He never told me that.”

Flynn put Moore in touch with several “scientists” at HP New Zealand to help them put together a funding application.

“I had no idea what was going on and could only answer the questions they asked me,” Moore recalled.

“I’ve had to interrupt them in Zoom conversations and say ‘wait a minute, I don’t know what’s going on right now’.”

The New Zealand Climbing Association raised $40,000 for speed climbing, a small sum compared with the millions of dollars invested each year in top sports such as rowing, cycling, canoeing and athletics, but significant for Moore’s fledgling project.

That means Moore gets an indoor facility where athletes can continue to train even when wind and rain batter the entire Olympic-sized outdoor wall.

But Moore said the biggest advantage of a relationship with a government funding agency is access to sports scientists who take on the challenge of helping develop strength and conditioning training for specific sports.

“It makes climbers feel like they are part of this world.”

They have left their mark.In the HPSNZ gym in Cambridge, a whiteboard hangs on the wall with a list of various strength and power exercises.

The list includes rugby stars, netball players and Olympians past and present.

Over the past 14 years, Former sprint cyclist Eddie Dawkins He holds the record for the best standing long jump. Last year, his name was erased and Julian David’s name was written over his.

Rapid Rise

Six years ago, Moore was interviewing a counterpart from Japan at an event in Austria and asked him how he had built such a successful program.

At the time, the Japanese dominated the sport climbing world, especially bouldering, and Moore wanted to know what they did to achieve massive, sustainable success, lessons he could apply back home.

It was a full-circle moment for the New Zealand coach when she was contacted earlier this year by a visiting coach from Japan who wanted some insight into the team’s sudden rise.

“On the world stage, our trajectory is moving up very, very quickly,” he said.

It all started with David’s breakthrough victory at the 2023 World Youth Championships, a result that convinced the 19-year-old, whose father is French, to switch to France, where there are a large number of fans in the sport.

Later that year, both David and Tetzlaff won the Oceania Championships, qualifying New Zealand for the Olympic Games in both men’s and women’s speed climbing.

The New Zealand duo have broken national and Oceania records several times in the run-up to the Olympics, including twice in one day at the World Cup in Chamonix, France last week.

There, Tetzlaff set a new record of 8.40 seconds, while David set a personal best of 5.26 seconds.

“We always joke that if we had started this project a year earlier, we would have broken the world record,” Moore said.

“We all have a long-term vision for how the program will work, and we’re still in the early stages of the program – just over two years old – so we’re really excited to see the progress we’ve made.”

David believes the rapid rise of New Zealand speed climbers is entirely down to Moore’s energy and enthusiasm.

“It’s incredible. It’s like he had this idea, you know, before I was born. He had this passion, this dream. And he actually made it happen, didn’t he?”