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General Climbing Discussion

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Climbing in the Olympic Games 5-Apr-2006 At 7:29:27 PM adventure

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Hi guys,

It is a major goal of the UIAA to make climbing an Olympic sport!

The major stumbling block at the moment is that the IOC requires that the peak global body for a sport only have 1 national peak body as members per country (i.e. Australia could only have 1 peak body as a member of the UIAA - in this case the SCA). At the moment the UIAA's constitution allows for several member bodies per country and their are a few countries that have more than 1 member body.

The reason for this has been that the UIAA represents more than just competition climbing - they also represent mountaineering and ice climbing and some others I think). So some country will have a mountaineering body and a competition climbing body and both of these are members of the UIAA. The UIAA is urgently discussing consitutional changes to overcome this, but don't want to become a competition climbing only organisation and marginalise mountaineers (for instance). Options on the table include creating a new body just to look after competition climbing, creating 1 umbrella body overseeing 3 sub-bodies, etc. The important thing is that voting rights are seen to be fairly distributed whilst still allowing the "power" (not really the right word) to be able to organise effectively to achieve the goal of becoming an olympic sport.

On another note, if climbing became an olympic sport and ice climbing a winter olympics sport, then the UIAA would be the only sporting body to have a sport in both summer and winter olympics.

If you want to know more then Graham Hyland who heads the SCA competition committee is the guy to ask (he's actually on the UIAA Sport Development Committee as well). He can be contacted at comp AT sportclimbingaustralia.org.au.

If you want to see climbing as an olympic sport then a way you can do that is by joining the SCA as a voting member and helping out. This will strengthen the SCA both in terms of numbers, but also the scope of what we can achieve with more people taking an active involvement. That in turn will strengthen the UIAA's case to the IOC.

(Sorry if that sounds like an ad - it wasn't my primary intention ; ) ).

Nick

(I'm also on the SCA Board...)