Switzerland

11 August

On the next flight I attempted to sleep. Then I did some more stuff on the computer and had breakfast.

When we got to Zürich Jesse's luggage didn't come so it had to be sent to us. We met Emma and Rob at the airport, and we ate breakfast again. We then caught a train to Oerlikon.

When we got to our apartments we sorted out who shared a room with who, me and Rob in our apartment, and after that we went to the supermarket. We then ate lunch at a small bit of grass, and we then played games afterwards. After that we went back to our apartments and made dinner.


12 August

We went to Gaswerk, where you're not allowed loose chalk or bare feet, and on the way there we caught two trains and then did a lot of walking. I touched a poisenous plant with my hand on the walk and it really hurt. Gaswerk is so humongous it makes HangDog look like a home boulder wall. We then did some pumpy leading and bouldering and I got a B5 on the outdoor boulder wall. One of the boulder rooms had a 45° angle boulder mat so you could do really high and long problems and everyone thought my yells were funny.

My journal starts

I had a good time on the trip, competing, training and doing other stuff. My journal of the trip will be posted here in instalments over the next few days ...


10 August

At the Airport my bag weighed just under 18 kg and nearly everyone was early to arrive at our meeting spot. When James arrived we got given a box with our uniforms in it and we had to sort out who got what: a pair of TOTA shorts, a singlet, a t-shirt and a long sleeve top each. We put stickers on our passports so we knew whose was whose, but Wiz's passport was red though. I played hacky with some of the others while we waited to board our flight.

On the plane I watched a few movies, monitored our progress, played games and watched TV programmes, all on the computer in front of me.

Singapore Airport is humongous! We went to a butterfly place where they had lots of big, colourful butterflies and I saw a small lizard. We went on the free Internet and I sent an email home. We then played bungy tug of war hoop shooting on a bouncy castle. Me and Charlotte put on harnesses which were attached by a bungy through a hole in a blow-up wall, and we had to run in opposite directions and get beach balls in a hoop. It was lots of fun, and we got given medals and a $10 voucher for anywhere in the airport. After spending the voucher we played knucklebones until our next flight.

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.