Chockstone Forum

      Sponsored By
      ROCK
   HARDWARE

Chockstone Photography

Australian Landscape Prints

Chockstone Forum - General Discussion

General Climbing Discussion

Topic Date User

oceania cup 10-Oct-2005 At 7:58:40 PM garbie

Message

What did you think of Oceania?

We at the gym were happy (now that the clean up is over). I thought the open finals routes, and the climbing, were up there with the best I've seen. Both the mens and womens fields were the strongest I've seen for years - who can remember 16 open women at a comp?

The results will be up on www.sportclimbingaustralia.org.au pretty soon. Sam (Berry) and James (Kassay) won again, but it wasn't a sure thing for either.

Thanks to the setters - Matt Adams, Al Pryce, Simon Stevens, Phil Staples, Kevin Seymour & Diego De Diana - good job.

As far as the effort that goes in - it is a lot, by a lot of people, mostly volunteering their time - cheers to all of you who helped out. Financially for the gym, its not great - entry fees raised about $4700, but route setting alone cost $6000, not counting all the setting needed to restock the walls with routes. Because its an international comp, it has to run under ICC rules, which means clean walls for every route, so there is a lot of setting after each day of competition. You'd need double the number of climbers to break even - even though most of the best comp climbers were there, 100 is not a huge field over so many categories.

Not many gyms will rush in to hold comps like this until there's a better financial deal.
But in the end, we see the comps as an investment - what's good for the sport is good for our business in the long run, and something we give back to the sport that supports us. And watching those finals on our new wall that we'd only just got ready in time made all the effort worthwhile.