The best male boulderer in the world is going out with the best female boulderer in the world. So what’s it like when two rocks collide – and what on Earth is a boulderer?
A young couple trundle through Innsbruck’s pedestrian zone on their bikes, their sporty figures and tanned faces marking them out as, perhaps, fitness instructors or sport science students. He has just turned 27, has a dark shock of hair and a narrow face.
She is 22, has long, plaited hair, a bag slung over her shoulder and a beaming smile. Both lean their bikes against the veranda of a venerable café. It’s the sort of scene that occurs thousands of times every day in certain cities in certain parts of the world: a living cliché of boho living. The picture would be complete with an order of two very specific coffees, but both opt for water.
Kilian Fischhuber and Anna Stöhr – both studying sport and English, as it turns out – are world leaders in bouldering, a type of rope-free climbing where height is unimportant and complexity is everything. It is a sport that attracts thousands of spectators to events in Italy and Austria and Russia and China and America. It’s a very urban form of climbing: it brings the mountain to the people, and it brings the people to the edge of their seats.
If regular mountain climbing is like a rock concert that goes on for hours where the little mistakes don’t matter too much, then bouldering is more like open-mic jazz improvisation: always new, unique, unpredictable. Fischhuber likes the comparison, in theory, “even if I don’t like jazz”. Indie and alternative are more his scene, and he stretches to drum ’n’ bass, whereas Anna, at a push, will swap the last of the three for reggae.
Fischhuber’s CV currently has four overall bouldering World Cup wins and he’s finished in the top three for the last seven years. He is a three-time winner of the prestigious Rock Master event in Arco, Italy; all that eludes him is a World or European Championship title. Stöhr has already been crowned World Champion and has also won the overall World Cup and the Rock Master.
Where their records of achievement aren’t exactly alike, their climbing styles are: both are quick, powerful and efficient. Whereas most boulderers tend to hang on the wall (either natural boulders or, increasingly, the man-made kind fabricated solely for climbing) while they balance their weight, adjust their hold, pause and shake down their hands and arms in an improvisational and interrupted attempt to ascend, Fischhuber and Stöhr storm up the wall like Spider-Man and Spider-Woman.
The two-time World Rally champion Walter Röhrl of Germany had a theory about this approach: “I just take the bends quickly because then they’re done.”
For the full story pick up the September Red Bulletin Magazine.
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