The quality of the routes is vital for a good competition. After all, adidas ROCKSTARS wants to demonstrate the skills of the international boulder elite. At the same time the route setters try to live up to the interests of spectators and the media. That asks for instinct feel. Boulders have to be set in a fair way with equal opportunities for all athletes. At the same time they should severely test the skills of the competitor: flexibility, strength, endurance, creativity, orientation. In an ideal case only one athlete masters the most difficult problem. But if the boulders are too tough, it could backfire. This is when many years of competition and route setting experience come into play – it also helps to deal with the pressure.
Archive for the ‘Rock Climbing & Mountain Climbing’ Category
In a thrilling final, which could hardly be outgunned in terms of drama, Alex Puccio from the USA and Sean McColl from Canada claimed the highly paid title adidas ROCKSTAR 2012 this weekend. Around 70 of the world’s best bouldering athletes from 20 different countries travelled to Stuttgart, Germany, to experience a top-class bouldering competition. On a giant stage with catwalk and live band the pro climbers felt like rock stars. And that’s exactly the objective of the event, which combines rock climbing with rock music to stage an intoxicating sports show
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Aug
Climber scales 200ft cliff despite having no legs (one of his false limbs falls off halfway up)
Heroic Hugh Herr enjoys nothing more than scaling a cliff – even though both his legs were amputated after a disastrous climbing expedition when he was a teenager.
As if conquering a 200ft rock face wasn’t hard enough, one of his prosthetic legs fell off during his latest climb – but he calmly waited for it to be roped back up to him before making it to the top.
Mr Herr runs a lab making bionic legs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and insists artificial limbs are an advantage  … Pictures and more
After last year’s successful event premiere in Austria’s Ötztal valley, adidas ROCKSTARS — an invitational contest for the world’s best bouldering athletes — is now hosted by Stuttgart, the capital of the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg. The second edition of the international climbing event takes place in the famous Porsche-Arena on the 10th and 11th of August, 2012