After a Horrific Belaying Accident, Sara Al Qunaibet Moves Through Recovery

The world watched her fall.

In July 2024, Sara Al Qunaibet tied in for her warm-up route at a popular gym in Switzerland. The 24-year-old Saudi competition climber was on an official training trip with her five teammates, all of whom were preparing for the upcoming World Cup in Seoul.

On the slightly overhanging route, Al Qunaibet climbed smoothly through 50 feet, clipping 11 draws. Then she leaned back for a practice fall—but the rope never tightened. Instead, she hit the ground at approximately 38 miles per hour.

Seven months later, when she posted a video of her accident on Instagram, it went viral. Even with faces blurred, it racked up eight million views and 5,000 comments in two months.

The Internet responded with a mix of sympathy and fury. On YouTube, the climbing channel HardIsEasy broke down exactly what the belayer was doing wrong: no hands on the brake strand. Barely two fingers around the rope. Not even looking at his climber. And obviously distracted, chatting with someone else.

“What’s even more disappointing is that no one took responsibility or acknowledged the mistake,” wrote Al Qunaibet. Most of the comments attacked the belayer for obvious negligence. Others blamed the second coach for distracting the belayer. “At least six people who could have [stepped in] didn’t,” wrote Will Gadd after reposting Al Qunaibet’s video in full.

When I first saw Al Qunaibet’s video, I was more shaken than I’ve been watching any Weekend Whipper. The comp climber did everything right; she had no reason to fear a belay from her coach, the person that should have been most qualified to catch her.

But another question pulled from the back of my mind. What happened to Al Qunaibet after the paramedics came? And what was her story?

“It Was My Sport”

Before the accident, Al Qunaibet wasn’t simply a competition climber; she was a breakout star on Saudi Arabia’s brand-new national team.

She grew up in Riyadh, the centrally located capital of Saudi Arabia. As a kid, she “tried many sports, but I felt like none of them was my sport,” she tells Climbing. In 2018, during her penultimate year of university, she walked into a small climbing gym outside her school and immediately felt at home on the wall.

Within the same few months, the Saudi Climbing and Hiking Federation (SCHF) was established, chaired by Prince Bandar bin Khalid bin Fahd Al Saud, the grandson of the late King Fahd. Al Saud is an avid rock climber and mountaineer. In 2012, he was the first Saudi to complete the Seven Summits, and for years he’s been pushing for the development of Saudi rock climbing, both indoors and outdoors. When the SCHF started hosting competitions in 2019, Al Qunaibet signed up, although she remembers her first competition experience as less than promising. “There were only six girls and I didn’t even qualify for the [top four spots in the] final,” she says. “That was funny.”

But she stuck with it. In 2020, Al Qunaibet entered her second national competition, earning the last podium spot. “It was a really good feeling to take third,” she says.

By 2022, Al Qunaibet had found her rhythm, winning gold in the National Lead Cup, gold in the National Boulder Cup, and bronze in the Saudi Games. In 2023, she won gold again in the National Lead Cup, silver in the National Boulder Cup, and gold in the Saudi Games. The SCHF selected her for their first national team roster.

In 2023, Al Qunaibet made her IFSC debut at the Asian Cup, which was hosted in Riyadh (her IFSC results are displayed under the name Sara Alqunaybit). Although the Saudi team, as the newest to join the IFSC, didn’t have any athlete qualify for the finals, Al Qunaibet relished the chance to compete on the international circuit. “The best part of joining more competitions was meeting the other athletes and going out afterwards,” she says. “There was something that bonded us.”

In between competitions, Al Qunaibet enjoyed traveling with friends to climb in Thailand, Jordan, and Spain. In Saudi Arabia, her favorite crag was Tanomah, a popular climbing area in the southwest of the country. She says that the granite routes regularly draw climbers from all over: “A lot of international climbers gather there, so I can see a lot of different faces. It’s one of the most beautiful places in Saudi.”

Outdoors, she figured out her favorite types of climbing. “I was way more into slab than other styles,” she says, adding that she enjoyed how specific the moves were. During one trip to Thailand, she even spotted 5.14 slab climber Anna Hazelnutt. Al Qunaibet calls her “the Queen,” but at the time, was too shy to say hello.

Despite her love for outdoor climbing, Al Qunaibet kept her focus on indoor competitions, where she was excelling. On February 15, 2024, she entered the National Lead Cup again—and for a third year in a row, won first place. When she stood on the podium on the 17th, sporting a gold medal, she held her arms around her two friends, beaming. On that day, she was the best female competition climber in the country.

In January 2024, one month prior to Al Qunaibet’s win, the Saudi national team started training under two new coaches from France. (On Al Qunaibet’s request, Climbing has redacted both of their names.) The coaches were by no means inexperienced; both had recently been national coaches for teams in Europe.

The Saudi team completed a training camp in Innsbruck, Austria in April. Their next one, in July, was based in France, but on the second day, the team crossed into Switzerland to visit a popular Geneva gym (Al Qunaibet requested that we redact the name of the gym). The gym was world-class, with over 48,000 square feet of climbing and walls up to 50 feet high.

Al Qunaibet, who doesn’t usually film her warm-up, set up her phone camera on a whim and asked her coach for a belay.

The Aftermath

After getting dropped, Al Qunaibet’s first reaction was rage.

“No one called the police. They should have come and written a report about the accident,” she insists. “I wasn’t confused. Everyone was trying to calm me down, saying maybe the grigri had malfunctioned, but I knew he made a mistake. I knew he held the grigri in the wrong way.” She had heard the coach speaking in French while she was climbing, and knew that he had been distracted.

After a short ambulance ride to a nearby Geneva hospital, Hôpitaux Universitaires de Genève, Al Qunaibet got her diagnosis: Fractures in both feet and two broken vertebrae in her back.

“The first two weeks, I didn’t know what was going to happen,” she says. “How am I going to spend the rest of my life?”

The doctors performed surgery on both her left foot and her back, leaving metal rods inserted into both to help stabilize the broken bones. According to Al Qunaibet, the Saudi embassy in Switzerland stepped in and covered all costs.

Her teammates continued the training camp with the same two coaches. Five days after the accident, the SCHF fired the coach who had dropped her. “I was furious,” she says. “He just dropped me and then he kept training the team for five days.” However, according to Al Qunaibet, an investigation did not begin until six months later, in 2025. In addition, the SCHF kept the second coach—who had witnessed the improper belaying—for the rest of the year.

An employee for the Geneva gym told Climbing that the facility, like most climbing gyms in Europe, does not require any belay tests for its visitors.

After surgery, Al Qunaibet returned home to Riyadh in a wheelchair. Another athlete from the national team took her spot at the World Cup in Korea that October.

“I felt like I was nothing,” she says. “I was replaced so quickly, without any acknowledgement of what happened. As a national team athlete, I felt zero respect. Like ‘Okay, you’re broken now. Bye-bye.’”

Searching for a New Normal

When I speak to Al Qunaibet over video chat, she’s sitting upright in bed, with her friend’s newborn kitten, Yoka, on her lap.

It’s been nine months since the accident. Her Instagram profile is full of X-rays, old climbing videos from Thailand and Austria with nostalgic captions, and a highlight album of rehab exercises titled “Coming Back.”

At the moment, three of her former teammates from the July 2024 training camp are preparing to head to the World Cup in Keqaio, China.

“I don’t think I’ll be in a harder situation than this, even emotionally,” she says. “Everything was just gone in a split second. I didn’t want to talk about it at first. I even deleted my social media for quite some time.”

When she got home, Al Qunaibet spent two and a half months in a wheelchair. Having never been sick or experienced any health issues before, she struggled to adjust to her new limitations. “If I wanted to just turn off the lights, I needed help,” she says. “I have a lot of respect for those who need to be in a wheelchair for the rest of their lives.”

In October, she started to learn how to walk again. “Once I started walking, I started being independent,” she says. “I started driving again, too. That was really nice.” She’s become laser-focused on recovery, going to the gym three times per week for physical therapy exercises.

For now, however, climbing remains out of reach. Al Quanibet says she’s not yet cleared to wear climbing shoes, which are too tight for her feet, or take any impact in either foot, including on top rope. “I’ve been hangboarding,” she says, then corrects herself: “I was hangboarding, but it’s really hard to keep up the motivation, even if I have all the equipment. I see everyone else climbing, and I’m just hangboarding. It’s quite hard to see my hand getting way softer than it’s supposed to be.”

The crux of her recovery is waiting to see if she’ll need to get more surgeries in her back and left foot. Her doctors say it’s too soon to tell. The movement in her back and left ankle, she says, is noticeably limited and often painful. Online, she’s been closely following Kyra Condie, who had 10 vertebrae in her spine fused in 2010 and later competed in the 2020 Olympics. After her accident, Al Qunaibet watched Condie’s story highlights and listened to her podcast. “Her back is even more complicated than mine,” she says, calling Condie “so inspiring.”

Later in 2024, Al Qunaibet’s teammates spotted the coach who dropped her at another IFSC event. In February 2025, she made the decision to post her accident video. Going viral, she explains, “was good because so many people noticed who [the coaches] were. I don’t want anyone else to go through this.” She hopes, at minimum, for the IFSC to ban both coaches from future competitions.

On a personal level, Al Qunaibet says she just wants to climb hard again. However, in the meantime, she’s been switching gears to a different, low-impact, physio-approved activity: swimming. During a past trip to Mallorca, she didn’t know how to swim, so she had refrained from deep water soloing. “I was planning to do it, but it’s just really scary when you know you can’t swim, so I just went there and watched,” she says.

Next time, it’ll be different. Al Qunaibet is already making a list of places around the world she wants to visit once her body heals. “I really miss climbing,” she says. “I think it will take time to take falls, but it’ll happen eventually. But yeah, deep water solo? That’s the plan.”

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