Research article looking at climber ability and route difficulties by Dean Scarff

Dean Scarff made me kindly aware about his extremely interesting arXiv article Estimation of Climbing Route Difficulty usingWhole-History Rating. In this paper Dean estimates rock climber ratings and route difficulties using the “Whole-History Rating” based on data of the rock climbing site www.thecrag.com. The “Whole-History Rating” is a player rating which is an adaption of the Bradley - Terry model. I have to admit, I knew neither of them but I have worked with Elo ratings before (looking at soccer). In the past, I also wrote a paper looking at (changing) inequality of the allocation of player talentacross soccer clubs in German based on estimated player ratings (together with Roman Sittl). This is why I am delighted to see such approaches now being applied to rock climbing.

What is really nice is firstly that the topic is in my view extremely interesting, not only for research but for the sport itself. Secondly, the code seems to be fully available on GitHub. Thirdly, the estimated route difficulties are visually contrasted to the true (Australian) grades, as shown in the following figure further below from the paper. It looks quite reasonable (the large variance is perhaps a little bit irritating but that might just be a few very extreme observations for each grade). Fourthly, what is extremely interesting is the fact that www.thecrag.com dataset also seems to covers “No go’s” or unsuccessful climbing ascents (in contrast to the 8a.nu data). This is something I personally collect for my own ascents but I never have seen someone else collecting it. This really allows to estimate the player and route ratings soundly. Finally, the methodological description is short but seems solid (but I have not thought everything through as I would if I had to peer-review the article).

Some feedback for improvement the paper from my side would be the following: Firstly, the paper is extremely short (which is common in computer science as far as I know) but a little bit more information here and there would be helpful in my view (e.g. about the Australian Ewbank grade system in comparison to the French or US grade system or about the underlying dataset). Secondly and more importantly, I would love to see in the end some more climbing-related interpretation – perhaps even contrasting the route rating and the successful / unsuccessful player ratings attempting that route for a well-known Australian route. I say that because it would demonstrate that such an algorithm is not just interesting for research per se but might, for example, be used as supporting evidence in a grading dispute etc. Thirdly, a minor point, do one really needs climber's ability to vary on a weekly level since on average climbers performance seems to be rather constant after a few years?

But I only say that because I think the article is great and I would like to see more! Thanks Dean. 

In general, if you have any interesting rock climbing related research for me, please make me aware of it!  

 

How much harder is onsighting vs redpointing?

Every rock climber knows that a successful onsight is much harder than an ascent with perfect beta after rounds of projecting. An onsight means climbing a route successfully at the first attempt without prior information or rehearsal on the route. During an onsight, we might not know where the crux lies or how long the route actually is. In contrast, being able to learn about a route, to mentally accommodate to the hard sections, the rest points and footholds, allows us to reach our maximum performance during a redpoint ascent.

Most of us also have a good sense of the routes we typically can climb in a first attempt with or without prior knowledge or in a second or subsequent attempt. But it is much harder to guess how much more difficult, let’s say an onsight ascent is, compared to a successful redpoint ascent. We might know that Adam Ondra did Silence (9c or 5.15d), currently the world’s hardest route, after weeks of practicing specifically for that route. Adam was also the first to flash a route of the grade 9a+ or 5.15a (a flash means a successful ascent of a route in the first go with prior information, for example from other climbers), and he did three 9a or 5.14d onsight. Alex Megos, however,was the first to onsight a 9a or 5.14d, he climbed up to 9b+ (redpoint). Up to today, no one onsighted a route harder than 9a. But is the difference between 9b+ redpoint and 9a onsight an meaningful estimate of how much harder an onsight is? A first attempt without beta might be easier among lower-graded routes compared to the elite level. Here, we want to investigate this question in a quantitative way.

As in previous posts, we will therefore access the data of the website 8a.nu which provides climbers with the opportunity to save their climbs and view personal scorecards. A scorecard is simply an overview about routes achieved, the respective style and the grade among others. In this post, we look at the maximum onsight and the maximum redpoint grade of 8a.nu users who made their scorecard public. We focus here on climbers who climbed redpoint at least 6a or 5.10a or higher. The available dataset covers entries up to September 2017. This leaves us with almost 18,000 climbers.

How do the results look like? First, we take a look at the overall difference between the maximum (redpoint) performance and the maximum onsight performance. The following graph shows the distribution of maximum performance for each climber in our dataset by style. This kind of graph is called a violin graph. The wider the violin, the more climbers there are with a certain maximum redpoint or onsight performance. The average maximum performance by style is illustrated by the black point in the middle of the violin. The average maximum redpoint performance is slightly above 7b+ or 5.12c. This is partly due to the fact that we disregarded climbers who do not climb above 6a or 5.10b. Apart from that the average ability of active 8a.nu users is quite high. Climbers who do not climb very often don’t bother much about creating and maintaining a public scorecard. The corresponding maximum onsight performance is slightly above 7a or 5.11d. This indicates that the average onsight level is approximately three grades below the maximum performance.

Next, we want to investigate whether the results differ across the performance spectrum. For this purpose, we group all climbers together by their maximum (redpoint) performance on their scorecard. Now we look at the average maximum onsight performance within each group. 

How does this grouping work and how did we finally calculate the average onsight performance? Let us take those climbers who sent 9b+ or 5.15c as maximum (regardless of whether they are included in the 8a.nu data). These are Stefano Ghisolfi, Alexander Megos and Chris Sharma (Adam Ondra is not included in this list despite the fact that he did three 9b+ because of his 9c redpoint). Alexander Megos did an 9a onsight while Stefano Ghisolfi and Chris Sharma onsighted up to 8c at maximum, according to Wikipedia. The onsight average of this group is therefore slightly below 8c+.

The following graph shows how the redpoint-onsight performance gap across all grades. On the x-axis, we have plotted the maximum (redpoint) performance. The y-axis shows the maximum onsight performance. If climbers onsighted grades similar to their redpoint performance, we would see a straight 45 degree line (indicated in red). The onsight performance is as one would expect, lower than the maximum performance and this is why the blue points are below the red line. It is apparent that the difference is small for climbers with a relatively low maximum performance and it widens for higher able climbers. This indicates that an onsight becomes harder the harder you climb. The average onsight maximum is 2-3 grades lower for climbers who climb up to 7a or 5.11d redpoint but it increases to almost 4 grades for climbers with a maximum grade of 8a or 5.13b (and still widens further). Interestingly, the gap again seems to be a little lower for the few climbers who can climb 9b or 5.15b or higher.

We have not considered flash ascents in this post. The reason is that there is almost no difference between the maximum onsight and flash performance in the 8a.nu data. The highest flash grades are higher than the average onsight grades but the difference is very small (ca. ⅙ of the difference between one grade or between 7a and 7a+). Personally, we think this seems surprising since a good beta might indeed give you valuable information.

First Ascentionists Over Time (Female and Male)

I have always been interested in the history of rock climbing. Lately, I tried to collect data about male and female first ascentionists to visualize climbing progression over tine. However, it turned out difficult to find a lot of data (particularly for female climbers). An exception to the rule is this really nice site http://stara.emontana.cz/climbing-milestones-from-6a-to-9c/  from which I got a lot of information.

It would be great if someone could point me to further sources, and help me correcting the existing data! I find it particularly difficult to get information about, among others,

• first onsights and flashes (who was the first to onsight 8a or flash 8b+?)
• first successful female and male bouldering ascents
• early first female ascents (does anyone know who did the first female 7a?)
• 'first' second ascents (who did the second 8c in the world?)

For routes with disputed gradings, such as Chilam Balam first redpointed by Bernabè Fernandez in 2003, I took the majority grade by all repeaters (9a+/9b in that case).

Graphs below, data (including sources) is available here via Google Spreadsheet or via ClimbStat GitHub (here you can also find the R-code to create the individual graphs. They have been merged together externally to one GIF). Further below you can find an excerpt.

Year	Ascensionist	Route	Grade (YDS)	Grade (French)	Sex	Confirmed?
1979	Lynn Hill	Ophir Broke	5.12d	7c	female	Yes
1985	Catherine Destivelle	Fleur de Rocaille	5.12d/5.13a	7c+/8a	female	Yes
1986	Luisa Iovane	Comeback	5.13b	8a	female	Yes
1988	Catherine Destivelle	Chouca	5.13c	8a+	female	Yes
1988	Isabelle Patissier	Sortileges	5.13d	8b	female	Yes
1990	Lynn Hill	Masse Critique	5.14a	8b+	female	Yes
1998	Josune Bereziartu	Honky Tonky	5.14b	8c	female	Yes
2000	Josune Bereziartu	Honky Tonk Mix	5.14c	8c+	female	Yes
2002	Josune Bereziartu	Bain de Sang	5.14d	9a	female	Yes
2005	Josune Bereziartu	Bimbaluna	5.14d/5.15a	9a/9a+	female	Yes
2017	Margo Hayes	La Rambla Extension	5.15a	9a+	female	Yes
2017	Angela Eiter	La planta de shiva	5.15b	9b	female	Yes
1961	John Gill	Thimble	5.12a	7a+	male	Yes
1967	Greg Lowe	Macabre Roof	5.12c	7b+	male	Yes
1970	John Gosling	English Hanging Gardens	5.12b	7b	male	Yes
1975	Steve Wunsch	Psycho Roof	5.12d	7c	male	Yes
1977	Ray Jardine	The Phoenix	5.13a	7c+	male	Yes
1979	Tony Yaniro	Grand Illusion	5.13b	8a	male	Yes
1983	Jerry Moffatt	The Face	5.13c	8a+	male	Yes
1984	Wolfgang Güllich	Kanal im Rücken	5.13d	8b	male	Yes
1985	Wolfgang Güllich	Punks in the Gym	5.14a	8b+	male	Yes
1986	Antoine Le  Menestrel	La Ravage	5.14a/5.14b	8b+/8c	male	Yes
1987	Wolfgang Güllich	Wallstreet	5.14b	8c	male	Yes
1990	Ben Moon	Hubble	5.14c	8c+	male	Yes
1991	Wolfgang Güllich	Action Directe	5.14d	9a	male	Yes
1995	Fred Rouhling	Akira	5.15b	9b	male	No
1996	Alex Huber	Open Air	5.15a	9a+	male	Yes
2003	Bernabè Fernandez	Chilam Balam	5.15a/5.15b	9a+/9b	male	Yes
2012	Adam Ondra	Change	5.15c	9b+	male	No
2017	Adam Ondra	Silence	5.15d	9c	male	No

What is the share of climbers who can send 8a or 9a?

In our previous post, we have looked at the distribution of grades across almost 3 million rock climbing ascents in the 8a.nu data. Today, we will take a very similar approach and look at the highest climbing grade mastered by more than 30,000 rock climbers (both male and female).

The average peak grade is closely below 7b, and 8a is the mode grade (the most frequent individual maximum grade). In contrast to the distribution of all ascents, we do not see a clustering around 7a for the individual top performance. There are a similar number of 7a to 7c climbers. There are however much more climbers with an 8a limit than we would expect for a smooth distribution. Keeping this in mind, let us gauge how much more difficult is 9a compared to 8a and 7a: In the 8a.nu database, there are more than 4 times as many climbers who have achieved 7a compared to 8a, but there are almost 50 times as many climbers who sent 8a than 9a. Moreover, this is most likely a severe underestimation of the difficulty since I assume that elite climbers are over-represented at 8a.nu compared to other climbers (and top-level ascents which help you to receive publicity and sponsors are recorded more often).

Here, you can also see the distribution of the maximum grade achieved separately for male and female climbers only (85% of all registered climbers in the database are male). Let us start with female climbers:

For female climbers, the average top grade is close to 6c+ and 7a is the most frequently recorded top grade. Male climber's average grade is close to 7a+ and 8a is for them the mode grade. Interestingly, there are much more females who report 6a, 6b or 6c as peak grade compared to 6a+, 6b+ or 6c+ but we do not find this pattern for men.

What is the average difficulty of a climbing route?

In this post, we will take a look at rock climbing ascents recorded in the 8a.nu data (or to be more precise their grades). This post is about approximately 2.7 m ascents, often multiple ascents by one climber (we will look in a future post at the maximum climbing performance of climbers).

The following graph shows the French grade distribution of all ascents:

What is immediate obvious is that the distribution is not symmetric. First, there are few ascents below the French grade of 6a. We second find a remarkable uniform number of records between 6c and 6c+. The most number of entries is for 7a (or 5.11d) routes. Most 8a.nu user climber probably rather well and are reluctant to enter ascents below 7a in the database.

Here the same plot truncated below 7a and with percentages of ascents (7a and higher).

Interestingly, there are more French 8a routes recorded than 7c+, and a noticeable drop from 8a to 8a+. A possible explanation is that the French 8a grade could constitute a reference. Climbers might put more effort and try more 8a routes than either 7c+ or 8a+ (and perhaps are first ascenders more willing to grade a route 8a). This would also explain the large share of 7a routes compared to 7a+ (and perhaps 6c+). But perhaps there are other explanations I am not aware of? It is also worth mentioning that there is no spike at 9a, perhaps because of greater scrutiny?