American Sam Watson managed to set a new record on Tuesday when he scaled a 15-meter climbing wall in Paris in just 4.75 seconds. Whether he ends up with gold won't be known until Thursday, when the men's speed-climbing quarterfinals, semifinals, and finals will take place. It's one of the Olympics' newest sports, and the Wall Street Journal makes the case that it's also one of the grossest. That's thanks to the injuries that can easily occur while trying to bound up a 49-foot wall in just seconds.
The Journal puts it colorfully: "Scaling walls faster than Spider-Man can wreak terror on an athletes' extremities, which means most of them reach the finish looking like their hands have gone to battle with a cheese grater." As speed-climbing coaches explain, Super Glue is a friend. Miscalculate where your finger needs to land by a millimeter or two at speed and the finger can split open, explains one Team USA coach, who says athletes "pull out the Super Glue and put your fingers back together."
One added challenge is the highly repetitive nature of the climb. As the Journal explains, the route is identical in all global competitions, so athletes try to make the exact same moves repeatedly during the four hours they train each day. Speed climber Piper Kelly, who estimates she's climbed that same route nearly 30,000 times, arrived at the Games with a "pulley rupture," a complete tear to her finger ligaments. The IndyStar reports Kelly was eliminated after finishing ninth in her heat on Monday, with a time of 7.39 seconds. (More 2024 Paris Olympics stories.)
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