The Pro Climbing League Gambled on a New Comp Format. Did It Work?

Q: Are World Cup climbing comps boring?

A: Yes. Yes they are. I mean, I like watching competitions, but you couldn’t pay me to sit through a Boulder World Cup qualifying round, watching an endless parade of climbers (sometimes more than 100 per gender) each take a four-minute turn on the same five qualification boulders. If it’s a World Championship, I’ll tune in for the semifinal—but even then, I find myself mildly appalled by the way comps are formatted. There are too many boulders. There are too many climbers. The scoring—which rewards reaching tops and zones, but not the holds between them—is unintuitive and requires a spectator to do math.

But the boring nature of climbing comps is not just a bummer for fans; it’s an existential problem for the professional athletes whose livelihoods are directly tied to whether comps are—or are not—watched.

So I was intrigued when, earlier this year, two former World Cup commentators, Charlie Boscoe and Danaan Markey, announced that they were founding an innovative new competition series—the Pro Climbing League (PCL)—as an audience-friendly alternative to the World Cups. In addition to designing a new format, in which athletes would battle side by side, on identical boulders, in an elimination bracket, they had secured a top-tier sponsor, Red Bull, and gotten buy-in from some of the biggest names in indoor climbing. Competitors would include two-time Olympic Gold medalist Janja Garnbret, 2024 Olympic Gold medalist Toby Roberts, eight other Olympians, and a handful of World Cup podium regulars, such as the USA’s Annie Sanders and Britain’s Max Milne.

Impressed and slightly awed, I called up Boscoe, who told me that he and Markey founded the PCL because they felt that the global climbing industry “wasn’t really delivering for people.”

“Climbers really don’t make their market value,” he said. “They don’t make enough considering how good they are and the size of the climbing industry. I just didn’t feel that the athletes were getting rewarded. I didn’t think that people watching climbing, and climbers themselves, were being inspired by what they were seeing. And I just felt that there was space for a competition that rewarded athletes and entertained and engaged climbers.”

Though the PCL was offering significant prize money (the winners of the inaugural London event would take home £10,000, roughly three times higher than the baseline payout for World Cups in 2025), Boscoe ultimately hoped that the comp’s real attraction for athletes would be a platform where they could showcase their skills. “In sports like tennis and golf,” he said, “the prize money is beer money for [the athletes]. They use the profile that their sport has given them to make a living.”

When designing that platform, Boscoe and Markey opted to emphasize the most dramatic part of a comp: the moment where one climber earns victory over another. Instead of staring at a scoreboard for results, the audience would watch athletes win and lose in real time. If an athlete topped the boulder before their opponent, she would move onto the next round. For added drama, it was sudden death: Lose once, and you’re out.

Simplicity, Boscoe said, was key. “One of the big inspirations for me was Formula 1. The person who wins a Formula 1 race gets to the finish line first. The tactics around it get incredibly advanced, but you don’t need to understand those tactics to understand the sport at its most fundamental level. We wanted that same thing in climbing, because [what we had] was just confusing people.”

Direct competition is not new in the climbing space. Red Bull’s  Creepers, Psicobloc, and Dual Ascent competitions all pit climbers against each other on identical routes, soloing above a pool in Psicobloc and Creepers, and racing up a six-pitch Swiss dam in Dual Ascent. But in each of these cases, the structure has always challenged speed, not difficulty, and therefore failed to spotlight the technical performances at the core of our sport.

The PCL, however, intended to test athletes on hard climbs, just as the World Climbing League does in Bouldering and Lead World Cups. Speed, Boscoe told me, would really only be used to distinguish between ties.

These innovations seemed promising, but I worried that the format put too much reliance on the routesetting, which is notoriously challenging at the professional level. World Cups involve multiple boulders per round precisely because this gives the setters a bit more margin: If they calibrate the difficulties inaccurately on boulders one and four, the competition can still be decided on boulders two and three.

In the semifinal and final rounds of the PCL, by contrast, it would all come down to one boulder. If the routesetters made that problem too hard or easy, I wondered, would the side-by-side, sudden-death format simply turn each boulder into a cheap race for a high point? And if that transpired during the competition, would the PCL prove itself the sort of platform that world-class athletes want to be associated with?

With its concert-quality lights, its flashing screens, and the jaw-dropping size of the crowd, the PCL’s sold-out debut felt more like a UFC fight than any comp I’d ever seen. It took place not in a champed chalky climbing gym but on three adjustable climbing walls in the Magazine, a spiffy concert venue in London, which was packed full of some 2,500 spectators, all standing, with the front row pressed against the barriers. Former British Olympian Shauna Coxsey was one of the announcers. Mikaela Kiersch, one of the strongest outdoor climbers in the United States, wandered around in the isolation area, interviewing the athletes.

Throughout the competition, each pair of competitors had four-plus minutes to top their half of the duplicate boulder. (The “plus” means that climbers could pull onto the wall with one second left on the clock and, in the climbing equivalent of a sudden death overtime, climb until they fell.) Between the rounds, there were 10-15 minute breaks during which the route setters raced to strip and reset the walls. During these breaks, Kiersch asked the climbers how they liked the format. Most of the athletes affirmed their enthusiasm in polite, media-trained quips; but after being knocked out in the first round, German Olympian Yannick Flohe admitted that the combination of speed and sudden death was a bit too stressful for his taste.

Yet that which is stressful for competitors is often exciting for spectators. And by the time we reached the semifinals, the crowd was roaring, urged on by performers like Max Milne, who actively gestured for the crowd to cheer before making his final attempts. Because when the boulders were hard—requiring the climbers to give multiple attempts and run through their full four-minute time allocation—the head-to-head format was far more entertaining than a traditional World Cup. Facing each other in the men’s semifinal, for instance, USA’s Colin Duffy and Japan’s Tomoa Narasaki spent four frantic, gripping minutes battling higher and higher on technical gastons and sidepulls. Going into their Hail Mary attempts with just seconds left on the clock, Narasaki and Duffy had both reached the seventh hold (of 11), but Narasaki was ahead because he’d gotten there first. Then, Duffy broke through to hold 10, clinching his spot in the final.

4,930 miles away, I terrified my dog by shouting “Let’s go!” at the screen.

A similarly dramatic scenario played out in finals, except Duffy found himself in Narasaki’s position: He was winning when, with one second remaining, Britain’s Max Milne asked the crowd for its support, pulled onto the boulder, broke the beta with a miraculous hand-jam sequence, and—bleeding from the tops of both hands—bested Duffy’s highpoint by one hold, earning his £10,000 payout.

It was a spectacular finish—and yet my concerns about the format were not unjustified.

Because if the men’s rounds demonstrated how exciting the head-to-head format can be, the women’s comp showed that, when the setters make the problems too easy, the battle does, in fact, devolve into an anticlimactic test of speed. When the British Olympian Erin McNeice faced Janja Garnbret in the women’s semi-final, for instance, both women, climbing as fast as possible, cruised the boulder problem. But Garnbret is by nature a faster climber and reached the finish hold in just 22 seconds—with McNeice trailing one hold behind her.

“Let’s hope finals is hard enough to really test them,” Shauna Coxsey said. But she’d helped forerun the problems, and she sounded worried.

Sure enough, in the loser’s final, McNeice lost another speed bout to USA’s Annie Sanders, who took third place. Then, in finals, Garnbret uncharacteristically slipped off a technical double dyno. Her opponent, the French Olympian Oriane Bertone, stuck the move and finished flashing the boulder while Garnbret, knowing she didn’t have time to catch up, watched from the mats.

“I’m gonna say it,” Shauna Coxsey said on air, “I’m a little gutted that that wasn’t harder, that that didn’t push the athletes, that that didn’t test them. They want to fight out there on boulders that are hard for them.”

I felt similarly. But I think it’s less an indictment of the PCL’s new format than a reminder that competitions are only as good as their routesetting, and that routesetting is hard; Janja Garnbret, after all, has won numerous World Cups by flashing every boulder problem. But to me, since I’m not a routesetter, the solution seems rather simple: set harder boulders. As the men’s final between Duffy and Milne demonstrated, it’s less exciting to watch one climber send a boulder than to watch two climbers fighting to best each other’s high points, even if neither ultimately gets to the final hold. And since the PCL intends to put on three comps in 2027, then six in 2028, its setters have plenty of time to take this lesson to heart.

After clinching her victory over our sport’s all-time great, Bertone expressed a similar disappointment—and a similar set of hopes. “In the final round with Janja,” she said, “I maybe wanted to fight a bit more, because you’ve all seen what we’ve seen. But yeah, you know, next time, hopefully, we’ll have some very, very hard boulders [pumping her fist], so we can make something very interesting happen.”

Garnbret, of course, was quite gracious.

“I wish the final boulder was harder,” she agreed, “but it was my fault that I wasn’t faster.”

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