Champion climber Shauna Coxsey: 'It's not about strong arms - it's about strong fingers'

Shauna Coxsey
Bouldering will be included in the next Olympics in as part of sport climbing Credit: Heathcliff O'Malley

To see Shauna Coxsey on a climbing wall is to witness the extraordinary. We are inside one of the units of an industrial park in Fulham, in a facility called the Climbing Hangar, where the walls are covered in coloured plastic blobs of varying sizes and people come along to try their hand at a new sport called bouldering.

Except Coxsey isn’t climbing up the wall. She is dancing across it, sashaying up the vertical and gliding under the overhang with balletic ease. Her hips swinging, her legs reaching improbable angles, she is a flurry of graceful, smooth, rhythmic movement. Which is rather a contrast to me, trying to climb alongside her, in a staccato mish-mash of knees and elbows and panicked looks at the floor, currently a long, long way down below.

“The brilliant thing about our sport is that in places like this, the very beginner climbs on the same wall as an international, everyone in the same space together,” she says. “I always tell people if you can climb the stairs you can find a way to get to the top of the wall. Really, anyone can do it.”

Though not like she does. As she speaks, she pivots her body through 180 degrees, wraps her toes around a tiny plastic protuberance and hangs upside down from the wall like a bat. 

Last week Coxsey was confirmed as the world bouldering champion. Around for the past 15 years, bouldering is the sport of climbing indoors. In a typical World Cup event, contestants are obliged to complete four different climbs in as few attempts as possible. Not many manage to do them first time, needing several goes to plot a way round their complexity. Unless they are Shauna Coxsey, that is. She retained the title she first won last year with one event of the seven-match World Cup still remaining. Britain’s one and only professional boulderer (if that is the right term) she is the best there is, regularly completing all four climbs in just four attempts, the bouldering equivalent of snooker’s 147 or Nadia Comaneci’s perfect ten.

Shauna Coxsey
Coxsey instructs our own Jim White

“I absolutely love what I do,” she says. “My job is such fun. Basically I spend my time in an adult playground.”

That Coxsey became a champion rock climber is one of the more unexpected byways of sport. She was brought up in Runcorn, a place not generally associated with the great outdoors, in a family that had no history of going anywhere near a rock face. But when she was a little girl she saw a woman climbing on television and asked her father if she could do the same. She was just four when she first went along to an indoor climbing facility in Warrington.

“My dad was the most supportive person, he gave up his weekends for me. He became a climber and we’d climb together,” she recalls. “I’d be first person in the door of the climbing centre and the last out. I just absolutely loved it, wanted to get better, became obsessed.” She won her first competition at seven, was national champion in her teens and at 19 decided to spend her gap year seeing if she could make it as a professional. So successful was she, at 24 she has yet to enrol at university.

Instead of studying for a sports science degree, these days she is performing on the international circuit. It is not an easy option. She spends six hours a day training, either on walls, in the gym or hanging by her fingertips from notches on the wall at her home in Sheffield, strengthening her tendons.

Shauna Coxsey
Bouldering will be in the next Olympics Credit: Heathcliff O'Malley

“People say, oh you must have strong arms to rock climb,” she says. “Actually there’s no point having strong arms if you’ve got weak fingers. Everything is about your fingers. I’ll hang from the wall at home with 50kilos clipped to my belt. That’s what you’ve got to do to win in this sport.” And win she does. Fuelled by a pre-competition can of Red Bull, she often competes in front of crowds of up to 10,000, with hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts tuning into the live streaming.

“It’s the most dramatic sport for spectators,” she insists. “There’s something really natural about it, there’s an urge in all of us to climb. And watching people perform on a wall captures you, sometimes it seems impossible how they get across. It can create such tense dramatic moments. For me, it’s magical watching someone else competing.”

The sport’s heartland is in the Alps; France, Austria, Switzerland all excel. But the Japanese are quickly establishing themselves as serial contenders: half the finalists in the last men’s bouldering World Cup were Japanese. In Britain, however, Coxsey is a pioneer in a sport in its infancy.

 Shauna Coxsey
Credit:  Heathcliff O'Malley

“I couldn’t do it without my sponsors – Red Bull, Adidas and Climbing Hangar,” she says. “But its growing here so fast. There’s 20 indoor centres in London alone. What I love about it is there aren’t any rules. There’s no right way to do it. Just go and do what you want. You don’t need anything, equipment wise, beyond a pair of shoes and some chalk. And you can hire them. Which is what makes it so accessible. I want everyone to try it.” And the thing she imagines will put her sport on the map is when it is featured in the next Olympics. Though the inclusion in Tokyo is not without its complications.

“What’s been selected for 2020 is sport climbing, which is three disciplines combined: bouldering, lead climbing and speed climbing,” she says. “I specialise in bouldering, so it’s asking us to take on two new sports, then compete in a cross discipline medley. I’ve not yet made a decision about whether I’ll go for it. But I am a person who likes challenges.”

Meanwhile, her latest challenge may be her toughest: coaxing me up the wall. With a couple of judicious tips about keeping the arms straight, however, she manages the seeming impossible and I get to the top without any plunges down on to the padded floor of the hangar.

“See, I told you,” she says, as she hangs by the very end of her right forefinger from a plastic grip. “You’ll be doing this before you know it.”

Which is very encouraging. But it is probably best to leave that sort of thing to her.

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