Colorado State University statistics professor Andee Kaplan published a paper in CHANCE Magazine analyzing how much the Tomoa Skip lowered speed climbing times at the competitive level.
As a rock climber of 14 years, Kaplan said her inspiration for the study began with the announcement that the sport would be included in the 2020 Olympics.
Rock climbing is divided into three disciplines: boulder, lead and speed. Rather than participating in a single discipline, World Climbing, formerly known as the International Federation of Sport Climbing, chose to have athletes compete in all three for a single sport climbing medal during the Tokyo Olympics. While the skills required to boulder and lead climb are fairly similar, speed climbing differs because climbers use the same wall for every competition.
“Athletes will perfect their particular way that they like to go up the speed wall, and they will work to execute it to perfection,” Kaplan said.
This means the sport revolves around choosing a route, known as a beta, and practicing it to be as fast as possible.
Kaplan explained that because many boulderers and lead climbers had to compete in speed climbing, many didn’t have a preferred beta ahead of the Olympics, which led climbers to experiment new ways to ascend the wall.
One of these climbers, a boulderer named Tomoa Narasaki, utilized techniques from his background in bouldering to climb the wall in a way that would change speed climbing forever.
“He’s a very powerful boulderer,” Kaplan said. “He came up with a new way to go up the speed wall, which skips a particular hold in a particular way. … The way it’s skipped is called a step-up dyno.”
A step-up dyno is a dynamic motion in which a climber places their foot on the hold their hand was previously on and jumps vertically to another hold.
“What that did was it allowed him to be more direct,” Kaplan said. “You know, the closest distance between two points is a straight line. He is making the line up the wall straighter.”
In the months that followed, many climbers adopted what was dubbed the Tomoa Skip, and at the same time, world records were broken several times in both men and women’s speed climbing. This made Kaplan wonder if the record-breaking times were a result of the Tomoa Skip or simply a coincidence.
“It literally looks like they’re running vertically. It’s incredible.”-Andee Kaplan, statistics associate professor
“I was like, ‘I wonder, is this actually the skip?’” Kaplan said. “‘Or did I just happen to start watching it at this very exciting time in which records are falling?’ and so I wanted to answer that question.”
Doing so proved challenging. While all of the times and competitions are available online, who performed the skip wasn’t tracked, meaning that data would have to be collected by watching all the competitions since the skip was introduced and manually recording who used the movement.
To accommodate this workload, Kaplan hired Caleb Chou, the paper’s co-author, to serve as an undergraduate researcher.
“He came in and just completely blew it out of the water,” Kaplan said.
While she expected the data collection take two to three months, Chou finished recording data within two weeks. Also an avid climber, Chou said the study gave him an opportunity to explore his interest while learning about statistics.
“It was just really interesting to me because I got to sort of dive into something that I’m really passionate about, which is climbing, in an academic way,” Chou said.
Once the data was recorded, Kaplan and Chou utilized a mixed-effects model to analyze climbers’ best competition times as they relate to the Tomoa Skip, which enabled them to include variables that weren’t entirely independent. They assigned a fixed effect to variables of Tomoa Skip usage, including gender, age and time progression, resulting in a more consistent relationship across the model.
Additionally, the model also assigned random effects to the individual climbers and events. This broadly accounted for the inherent difference in skill level between climbers, as well as the slight differences in wall and hold textures or weather in different events.
After controlling for variables, Kaplan and Chou found that, on average, the Tomoa Skip substantially lowered speed climbing times.
As stated in the study, “Using the Tomoa Skip is associated with an approximately 0.8549 times decrease in the average best climbing time. … For instance, if a climber has a best climbing time of seven seconds without using the Tomoa Skip, we estimate that their best time would drop to approximately 5.9842 seconds using the Tomoa Skip.”
Kaplan and Chou also analyzed how the Tomoa Skip affected variability in a climber’s time. There are two rounds in a speed-climbing competition, a qualifier and a final. Kaplan said that while a climber’s best time will be lower if they use the Tomoa Skip, if the climber can’t consistently perform the move without making a mistake, that climber could struggle to make it to the final round.
Chou explained that for the study, he and Kaplan went to a climbing gym to take pictures of Chou performing the skip for the paper, granting him first-hand experience with the move’s difficulty.
“It took me a few tries, that’s for sure,” Chou said. “It’s quite a dynamic and powerful move. … It took me upwards of five to 10 times to actually get it.”
Kaplan and Chou found that while there was some increase in variability when the skip was first introduced, as time went on, this disappeared.
“What we saw is, like, in the beginning when people first started using the Tomoa Skip, maybe there was some higher variability in climbers that used the skip versus those that don’t, but it looks like as people get more practice with it, that there really isn’t that much variability difference,” Kaplan said.
Since its introduction and adoption, the Tomoa Skip has enabled speed climbers to make it up the almost 50-foot climbing wall in fewer than five seconds.
“It literally looks like they’re running vertically,” Kaplan said. “It’s incredible.”
Reach Maxine Bilodeau at science@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.
