Ice Climbing World Cup: A special edition with an Olympic aura

It looks like winter has finally hit the mountains and here too! The sport of Ice Climbing could potentially become Olympic in 2030 and did you know that Great Britain has a national ice climbing team 😉 https://thebmc.co.uk/en/gb-ice-climbing-team  

The Ice Climbing World Cup will be back in La Plagne from 29 January to 1 February 2025, for a particularly thrilling event since the sport is a candidate to become an additional discipline at the 2030 Winter Olympics in the French Alps. The future members of the Olympic Games Organising Committee who will be present at the finals of the lead event will be able to appreciate its spectacular dimension fully. Buoyed by this prospect, the French team led by the Ladevant brothers is more competitive and sharper than ever.  

Can ice climbing become a new Olympic discipline at the 2030 Games? The subject has been discussed for over 10 years and the motivation is still high: initially a demonstration sport at the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014 and the Lillehammer YOG in 2016, it is hoped that ice climbing can now move up a gear by becoming an additional discipline at the 2030 Winter Games. To this end, the Fédération Française des Clubs Alpins de Montagne (FFCAM) and local councillors met with the highest political authorities at the Savoie prefecture on 8 November to highlight the assets of ice climbing:  

– Firstly, the fact that it comes under the banner of mountaineering, a historic discipline that is listed as an intangible cultural heritage with UNESCO. A whole universe that is not yet represented at the Winter Olympics and which would take us towards a much broader version of a mountain-based Olympic Games, enriching and diversifying the palette of winter sports disciplines.

– Its adaptation to climate change: if it is one of the first sports to be affected, it is also one of the first to adapt by introducing a combined event with sections on ice and on wood panels (dry tooling).  

– The expertise of the FFCAM and Champagny-en-Vanoise, which have been organising World Cup events on the ice tower in Champagny-en-Vanoise since 2013. 

– The ice tower itself, an existing, high-performance structure that is one-of-a-kind in Europe, in a privileged setting at the entrance to the Vanoise National Park, in a village that has been labelled “Terre d’Alpinisme” (a mountaineering location) and close to the Olympic village of Bozel.

– Spectacular events and an established international circuit with over one hundred athletes from some twenty different countries.  

The members of the future Olympic Games Organising Committee will be invited to watch the final of the lead competition on Saturday, 1 February, at 5.30pm, to see the scale of the event for themselves and the legitimate role it plays as a winter sport.  

The competition in Champagny-en-Vanoise
After stages in Korea and Switzerland, the event in La Plagne comes halfway through the 5 dates of the 2025 World Cup calendar. 

There will be two competitions: Speed, which consists of a vertical sprint on an iced wall, and Lead, a timed technical ascent on a course that combines ice climbing and dry tooling. It is a format where the climbers demonstrate their ability to flex and find solutions. When everything hangs by a thread, the best climbers are the ones who know how to combine explosivity, endurance, agility, the ability to take risks and, above all, strategy to tackle the route. 

The French athletes focus on the lead event, where they excel. 23-year-old Louna Ladevant, who has held the title for several years, is clear about his goal: to take first and second place with his brother Tristan. There is no doubt that the ongoing discussion regarding the 2030 Olympic Games will only increase this determination tenfold!  

Programme
Wednesday 29/01 at 5.30pm: opening ceremony

Thursday 30/01, 9am – 5pm: lead qualifications

Friday 31/01:
9 – 11.30am: lead semi-final
4 – 6.30pm: speed qualifications
7 – 8pm: speed final

Saturday 1/02 at 5.30pm: final of the lead event, attended by the members of the Olympic Games Organising Committee