‘I’m Fighting Gravity.’ Climber Sam Watson Might Be One of the Fastest Olympians in Paris

If American Sam Watson wins the inaugural Olympic gold medal in speed climbing—the new stand-alone event in which athletes scale a 15-m wall in around five sec., or less—he’ll have some pretty sweet bragging rights. “My claim to fame is that I'm the fastest Olympian, assuming I get the world record at the Olympic Games,” Watson says in a video interview from Salt Lake City, where in early July he was training for the Paris Games. 

Watson, 18, does point out that you can quibble with that assertion: 100–m sprinters, for example, are actually moving at a higher velocity than climbers during their race, which takes less than 10 sec. “They’re going horizontal and I’m going vertical,” Watson says. “I’m fighting gravity.” 

Still, Watson’s go-to dinner-party small talk is better than yours. “I will have the fastest recorded time ever run at the Olympics,” he says. “So I’ll take that.”

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The small kid from Southlake, Texas, who was so unathletic that he got cut from a fifth-grade track team, has already scaled that 15-m climbing wall faster, during competition, than anyone in history. At a World Cup event in China in April, Watson broke the speed-climbing world record twice in one day: he clocked 4.85 sec. during his first qualification round, beating the previous mark of 4.90 set by Veddriq Leonardo of Indonesia. In his second run, he lowered his own world record, running up the wall, like Spider-Man on steroids, in 4.79 seconds. These performances make Watson the man to beat in Paris. 

Though Watson was never adept at running or playing traditional stick and ball sports, he could always climb. At 2 years old, he scaled a pool fence after giving himself a boost with a chair. At 4, he wedged himself between two pillars in his family’s house and ascended the structures with his feet and hands. “It would scare my parents, because it was like 20 ft. high,” says Watson.

A rule at the local indoor-climbing gym near Watson’s home in the Dallas-Fort Worth area stated that you had to be 5 years old to climb , so he spent his 5th birthday there. In second grade, he held up a sign for a yearbook photo, indicating what he wanted to be when he grew up. “Rock Climber,” it read.

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During the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020, when Watson was 14, he began to focus on speed climbing. The Olympic event known as sport climbing, which made its debut in Tokyo, is split into three disciplines: speed, bouldering, and lead. In bouldering, athletes climb 4.5-m high walls without ropes, in a limited period of time and in the fewest attempts possible. In the lead event, athletes climb as high as they can on a wall over 15-m high in six minutes without having seen the route ahead of time. In Tokyo, athletes competed in a single sport-climbing event that combined all three disciplines. In Paris, there will be a stand-alone event for speed, plus a combined bouldering-lead contest. 

In speed climbing, the position of the holds on the climbing wall are standard. So there are no surprises on race day: racers practice the climbing path so much, they commit it to muscle memory. Watson says he executes about 30 limb movements during each 15-m climb.

A COVID-era growth spurt gave Watson more power: he sprouted from 5 ft., 2 in. to about 5-ft., 7 in. (He’s now 5 ft., 11 in. and 160 lbs.) He expected to qualify for Paris at the climbing world championships in August, in Bern, Switzerland. But he finished in 71st place. “I was just so focused on that being the best day ever,” says Watson. “Instead, it was the worst.” Watson started working with a new climbing coach after those worlds to prep for the Pan American Games, in Santiago, Chile, in November. He won gold at that event, punching his ticket to Paris.

The Olympic speed-climbing competition will feature 14 athletes in both the men’s and women’s events. During the qualification round, each climber gets two runs up the wall: the fastest time counts toward seeding. Then the elimination round consists of seven head-to-head races (the No. 1 seed vs. the No. 14 seed, 2 vs. 13, 3 vs. 14, etc.); the winners, plus the loser with the fastest time, advance to the quarterfinals. 

On day two of the competition, the eight quarterfinalists battle in a single-elimination, head-to-head racing tournament to determine the medalists. The tournament takes comfortably under an hour to complete.

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The men’s speed gold-medal final is on Aug. 8, at 6:55 a.m. E.T. at Le Bourget Climbing venue, just north of Paris. The women’s final is Aug. 7, at the same time. Set your alarms, and don’t be late. Blink, and you’ll miss it. 

“You're gonna to see probably one of the most unique sports in the Olympics,” says Watson, who, if he wins, may be able to crow about it in multiple languages – an insomniac for most of his life, he now does a Duolingo lesson before bed as part of his regimented sleeping routine and he’s picked up a fair amount of Bahasa Indonesian, German, French, and Spanish during his nearly 900-day streak.

“You’re going to like it,” says Watson of his event. “If you don’t, it’s like 40 minutes of your time. So I’m sorry. But it’s very short.”