Results

The 2009 Climbing World Youth Championship is nearly over, just speed climbing finals to go. Watching the live coverage, we saw quite a few of the New Zealanders climbing, including part of Josiah's second climb. We thought they all looked relaxed and focussed, climbing well. Emily and Sarah each topped their first climb! We haven't heard from Josiah how he found it all.

Difficulty and speed results for the New Zealand team are below. The difficulty category is their priority: they enter the speed competition just for fun and the extra experience.

Youth B Male (Under 16)

Difficulty: 73 competitors

Wiz 44th
Josiah 59th

Speed: 41 competitors

Josiah 34th
Wiz 36th

Youth B Female (Under 16)

Difficulty: 67 competitors

Emily 32nd
Irmak 48th
Charlotte 58th
Rowan 60th

Speed: 39 competitors

Emily 19th
Charlotte 31st
Irmak 32nd
Rowan fell

Youth A Male (Under 18)

Difficulty: 81 competitors

Mark 46th
Jesse 51st
Damon 60th

Speed: 47 competitors

Damon 30th
Mark 31st
Jesse 39th

Youth A Female (Under 18)

Difficulty: 69 competitors

Sarah 33rd
Amanda 49th
Olivia 52nd

Speed: 44 competitors

Olivia 39th
Amanda 43rd
Sarah fell

Junior Female (Under 20)

Difficulty: 45 competitors

Claire 38th

Speed: 27 competitors

Claire 20th

Competition starts!

The Climbing World Youth Championship starts today, Thursday! There is live coverage of the competition at Mineral Spirit beginning at 9am local time (CET/UTC + 2), 7pm in NZ. Climbing in all lead categories is due to begin at 10.30am (8.30pm in NZ).

There are 713 competitors in total, 75 in Josiah's category (Youth B Male - born 1994 or 1995). Josiah has texted us to say he is up first! But the IFSC has him starting 53rd in his category so not sure which is correct.

Videos

Below is video evidence that Josiah is alive and well in Switzerland (yay!). And eating sugar, enthusiastically, which surprised us: Josiah is usually highly mistrustful of sugar. This time, however, to earn a share of some leftover iceblocks, he was willing to ...




Day 7 of the Team Diary is also a video ...




For more videos from the team, visit Climbing NZ's You Tube page.

Team Diary

A Team Diary has been started at the Climbing NZ website and quotes of the day from the team are being posted to Climbing NZ's Facebook page.

The team is away

It was great to see the team off from Auckland Airport on Monday morning. All were bubbly and excited; the uniforms looked very smart. It's nice that there are some in the team who have been on long overseas trips before and can help the others with unfamiliar tasks like filling out departure cards. They were all looking after each other well.

James, the coach and supervisor, exuded calm and confidence, which was exactly what was needed (what I needed, anyway). He told the team that he is not their mother, or their father, and expects them to take care of their own belongings. Even in the short time before going through to the departure area, there was evidence that this was little more than a vain hope on James's part: James had to repeat his instructions about what to do with their two boarding passes, luggage labels and passports half a dozen times at least, and in the process sounded just like a parent!

Josiah was keen to be off and very happy.

We have had first contact: an email posted from Singapore Airport, where the team had a six hour stop:

I am in Singapore now. I enjoyed the flight here and watched mov[i]es on the plan[e].

The team is back in the air now en route to Zurich, Switzerland, where they will spend their first week, training at the impressive Kletterzentrum gyms.