The Fast and the Furious: Tracking the Effect of the Tomoa Skip on Speed Climbing

Sport climbing is an athletic discipline comprised of three sub-disciplines -- lead climbing, bouldering, and speed climbing. These three sub-disciplines have distinct goals, resulting in specialization of athletes into one of the three events. The year 2020 marked the first inclusion of sport climbing in the Olympic Games. While this decision was met with excitement from the climbing community, it was not without controversy. The International Olympic Committee had allocated one set of medals for the entire sport, necessitating the combination of sub-disciplines into one competition. As a result, athletes who specialized in lead and bouldering were forced to train and compete in speed for the first time in their careers. One such athlete was Tomoa Narasaki, a World Champion boulderer, who introduced a new method of approaching the speed event. This approach, deemed the Tomoa Skip (TS), was subsequently adopted by many of the top speed climbers. Concurrently, speed records fell rapidly (from 5.48s in 2017 to 4.90s in 2023). Speed climbing involves ascending a 15m wall containing the same pattern of obstacles. Thus, records can be compared across time. In this paper we investigate the effect of the TS on speed climbing by answering two questions: (1) Did the TS result in a decrease in speed times? and (2) Do climbers who utilize the TS show less consistency? The success of the TS highlights the potential of collaboration between different disciplines of sport, showing athletes of diverse backgrounds may contribute to the evolution of competition.