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

Progressing like Adam Ondra or Stefano Ghisolfi

Last time, we have looked how averge climbers progress over time. Today, we want to look at individual performance trajectories of elite climbers such as Adam Ondra, Stefano Ghisolfi or Ramón Julian Puigblanque.

To derive the progression over time (or over experience), we use a statistical technique which is called multilevel modelling. This method can be viewed as a generalization of linear regression for (among others) datasets in which we follow individuals over time. A good introduction source is the book "Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models" by Andrew Gelman and Jennifer Hill (multilevel models are also called hierarchical models). You can find some further information about this technique at the end of the blog post.

The following graph shows the derived performance curves for some elite climbers. Adam Ondra (in red) started very young. His first ascents are recorded being just 8 years old. He continuously improved since then and in 2017, the last year recorded in our sample, he did the world's first 9c or 5.15d (Silence in Flatanger). Ramón Julian Puigblanque started much later in 1996 at the age of 14 or 15. We do not observe his first years but in late 2000, he already climbed his first 8c+ (El disbarat in Montserrat). His experience profiles looks inversely U-shaped which is not uncommon for, among others, many age-performance curves.

Next, we will look at three outstanding climbers who all started around the same age of being 11-12 years old. Jorge Diaz-Rullo, who did in 2019 (so far) three 9b (5.15b) and four 9a+ (5.15a), showed an extraordinary steep improvement until 2017. It will be certainly interesting to see his list of climbing achievements in a few years. Stefano Ghisolfi is almost a late bloomer among this group. His rise to excellence has notwithstanding been also incredible steep (who became the fourth climber in history to climb 5.15c or 9b+). Sèbastian Bouin recorded no ascents below 8c (5.14b). This makes it difficult to derive a progression curves and his profile is therefore more or less flat between 2011 and 2017. Piotr Schab started much younger (being around 7 years old) and progressed therefore at a lower pace. So far he however still seems to improve further.

Further profiles for Sachi Amma (starting age 12), Daniel Woods (6), Mathieu Bouyoud (13), David Graham (16), Domen Škofic (5), Jernej Kruder (7), Joe Kinder (16) and Daniel Jung (14) can be found below. We have included here only climbers who have registered via 8a.nu. This is why, for example, Chris Sharma or Alexander Megos, are not considered. Furthermore, some other well-known climbers are not included because they started well before 8a.nu was created (such as Patxi Usobiaga, 1990) or others did not add their account until 2017 (Jonathan Siegrist).

You might wonder that these curves do not follow exactly the (top three) true highest ascents. This is not surprising for two reasons. Firstly, the curves are derived through a polynomial of the order of three, meaning that all profiles are smoothed over time (or over experience). Secondly, for the elite climbers the curves may seem sometimes slightly biased downwards. This is actually a desired feature of multilevel models which also allows to model climbers who we observe only for few years. 'Extreme' observations are slightly shrinked to the overall average.

 
Some further information regarding multilevel models: Linear regression calculates one intercept and one set of slope parameters for the entire sample. In multilevel models, each individual has his or her own set of parameters. These are, however, not calculated completely separately as it would be the case if one would use one linear regression model for each climber in the whole dataset. Multilevel methods have the advantage that we allow to model also climbers who we observe only for a few years realistically. This is done by adding some extra (distributional) assumptions.

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.