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.
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