Enough Rope to Hang a Gold Medallist From

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Every four years the IOC provides an opportunity to broaden the scope of sports that get to call themselves “Olympic”. This year it was breaking (a more economical, hip way of saying “break dancing”). In 2020 we got skateboarding, surfing and my personal favourite newbie sport, the two disciplines of sport climbing (what the layperson would call indoor rock climbing and speed wall climbing). Olympics traditionalismos are inclined to throw their heads back in outrage or disgust at the temerity of adding such “sports” to the Olympics catalogue…but sport like everything else in life is in the eye of the beholder. If we look back at the early days of the modern Olympics however, these aficionado puritans of the 21st century Olympiads equally might shriek in horror or at the very least scoff at what passed for Olympic sports more than 100 years ago. 

From the irredeemably vile and utterly reprehensible, live pigeon shooting at Paris 1900, to the “plunge for distance”, which entailed jumping from the water’s edge and seeing how far you can travel underwater before surfacing (something you’d commonly see enacted at any suburban aquatic centre). Ditto for obstacle swimming, elevated to the Olympic pantheon (briefly) in 1900✮, which was precisely what it says it was…and perhaps an early try-out for the 1970s helter-skelter antics of TV’s It’s a Knockout! 

But it’s another former Olympic event, the noble art of rope climbing—an ancestor of sorts of wall climbing which first got the gig in 2020—that got my curiosity. Featuring in four of the early quadrennial games (1896, 1904, 1924, 1932) as part of the gymnastics program, the rope climbing gold medals were won by a Greek, a Czech and twice by Americans. The rope§ dangled from a frame shaped like an oversized soccer goal posts and looking unnervingly like a device constructed for the purpose of hanging condemned prisoners. The factors determining the result initially were both speed of the climb and the style…in the later Olympic events it was judged only on time, the fastest to reach the top of the rope won the gold. Wonder why it didn’t survive as an Olympic event? Perhaps if all the competitors had to jostle and elbow their way up the same rope at the same time would’ve made it more interesting as a spectator sport.

✮ 1900 was a red letter year for loopy Olympic sports 

§ 14-metres high in 1896, but reduced to 8-metres in later Olympics