Slovenia’s Janja Garnbret cemented her reputation as the world’s greatest sport climbing athlete by battling her way to a back-to-back Olympic title with a victory in the boulder and lead event at the Paris Games on Saturday.
Her win gave Slovenia its second gold medal in Paris and the 25-year-old a place in history as the first Olympic champion in the boulder and lead event.
American Brooke Raboutou took the silver and Austria’s Jessica Pilz won the bronze.
Climbing made its second Olympics appearance but this was the first Games to split the boulder and lead discipline from the speed event as is the norm for the sport.
In an atmosphere starkly different from the audience-less Tokyo Games three years ago, Garnbret, already a legend in her field, drew raucous cheers from the sold-out Le Bourget crowd as she strode confidently onto the stage for her first climb.
Her early performance met the high expectations as she topped the first of the four boulders in just half-a-minute, leaving 3-1/2 minutes on the clock and an easy smile on her face.
In boulder, athletes rack up points by negotiating four boulder “problems” on a 4.5-metre-high wall, while in lead, they aim to climb a 15-metre wall as high as possible in a single attempt. The scores are added up to decide the rankings.
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However, after appearing to pick up a finger injury along the way, Garnbret had trouble on the final boulder, leaving her with an unusually small gap, of just 0.4 points, to second-placed Raboutou going into the lead stage.
That left the race for the top prize extremely close, requiring Garnbret to fight hard to rack up the points on the lead route.
In the end, she managed the feat, bringing the rapturous crowd to their feet and Garnbret crumbling to the floor in tears of joy.
Garnbret earned a total 168.5 points, followed by Raboutou’s 156.0 and Pilz’s 147.4.
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