Monday, March 22, 2010


What is artificial wall climbing?

In adventure sports there is a new buzz word artificial wall climbing. There is a saying that mountains cannot come to towns and people have to go to mountains. Keeping this in mind, in Europe, people developed artificial walls. However, if we go through history we recollect that the great Maratha leader Shivaji Maharaja trained his men to climb for through most unexpected route, which is also wall climbing.

It is a unique adventure, which can be developed along with wall with different types of the holds.

Sports climbing, a daring and exhilarating addition to mountaineering has now attracted a cult following all over the world. Since rock faces are not always accessible due to factors like distances and weather condition, there was a long felt need in India for an artificial climbing surface which would simulate natural rock features and provide routes of varying degree of difficulty to improve climbing abilities in easily accessible and safe locations. The regional and national climbing competitions are now a regular feature in our country.

The fun loving small kids after having seen climbing on the wall and rappelling done in the climbing institute started saying to their friends that instead of celebrating a event in Mac Donald and pizza hut they prefer learn and spent an afternoon with their age group and do some artificial climbing and rappelling etc.. Children from Delhi started coming with their 10 to 15 friends. This climbing featured in the some of the newspapers, and TV programmers.

With the concentrated efforts of the international climbing federation sooner or later this sport is going to enter into the Olympics, people have already started holding world cup and Asian cup.

I am sure that in coming years this event with the concentrated efforts of interested and younger attracted people to this sport will take a wonderful shape in India. However, to compete in the international event, we require a set of professionals who can really do some outstanding feat in this particular sport. Children with age group of 10 to 14 will have to be groomed so that by the age of 25 or so they reach the peak and produce the world class results. As on now we should set up a standard, which are achieved in the world competitions. Once we reach those standards only than we should start participating in the world competitions. One should not go abroad for the sake of participation but one should go with an aim to achieve position in first 3 so that one brings glory for the nation.

Our club promote climbing and organize intensive training programmes and competitons time to time for the young talented climbers and their vigorous climbing practice, one day, will achieve success and place them on the winner’s podium at the Asian/international competitions.

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